Thankfully, there were no mosquitoes to disrupt our sleep last night, and we only had to share the bed with one of the cats last night, as Florence decided to stay downstairs. As a result, we both had a more or less decent night's sleep! Ha! At last!!
Having had a fairly late night, and still making up for lost sleep earlier in the week, I struggled to get up early in the morning, and it wasn't until just after 9am that I padded downstairs in my gym kit to go and throw some kettlebells around. I almost didn't bother, given how late is was, but decided I ought to show willing after only having got back into my routine a couple of days ago.
By the time I went to put my kit away, Stuart was up and preparing to drink coffee on the patio so, after a quick shower and change, I joined him and we had breakfast in the sunshine looking across the valley. We still have to keep pinching ourselves and reminding each other that we're eating breakfast al fresco - and wearing shorts, t-shirts and sandals - in October. Several different people who live locally had told us on many occasions that autumn is a lovely time of year here, but we hadn't really been prepared for quite how lovely the last few weeks have been. It might rain solidly now for the rest of the month (I hope not, as we have important visitors coming a week tomorrow, and more after them!), but even if it did, we'd have already had a lovely autumn.
We were undecided as to what to do with the day - I think we're both still finding that we haven't quite got back into the groove of things over here since coming back from the States, and the long night's sleep had left us feeling a bit dopey and indecisive (more so than usual). Since we couldn't think of what we'd really like to do if we were to take the whole day off, we decided we should use the time to run some useful errands - starting with going to buy some roofing for the goose house, some guttering and a water butt.
We started by trying to find out the Italian words for 'guttering' (grondaia) and 'water butt'. Well, this is one of the many situations in which Google Translate falls down. THANK GOODNESS we didn't go into a shop and ask for 'culo acqua' - which translates quite literally as 'water bum/bottom/backside/derrière/buttocks...' you get the picture (or rather, we did when we Googled it). Turns out that what we were actually after was more like 'contenitore raccolta acqua piovana' (container for collecting rain water)...
Anyway, armed with the correct terminology, we set off in the car - we first tried some local builders' yards, but they were closed. so there was nothing else for it than to head to Obi. We were surprised to find sections of corrugated bitumen roofing sheets (exactly what we needed) before we even entered the shop (on display outside the shop), which was a good start. However, that was pretty much where our Obi luck ran out - we scoured the shop for water butts but found nothing, and couldn't even find any guttering. Stuart even stopped to ask a shop assistant, showing him a photograph of a water butt on his phone to aid his description, but the assistant just smiled and shook his head. So, in the end, we left Obi with three sheets of corrugated bitumen roofing, a box of roofing nails, some wire and a motion-sensor LED security light.
I suggested we could try Brico for water butts/guttering, but the nearest Brico to Obi (in Montecatini Terme) was closed for lunch, and with the other branch in Altopascio, we decided to head home and go out again after lunch in order to combine a trip to Mercatone Uno with a trip to Brico in Altopascio.
Back at home, we ate lunch on the patio with the umbrella down. The sun was shining hot and bright, but today was the first day that the temperature, while very warm, was comfortable enough (just) to sit out without putting the umbrella up. There was a lovely gentle breeze, which took the edge off the intensity of the heat - all in all a beautiful day.
After lunch we got ready to head to Mercatone Uno. You may recall that, way back in June, we were let down by Mercatone Uno when they failed to supply the kitchen we had ordered in time for us to fit it before our first set of apartment guests arrived. Instead of refunding the deposit we had paid for the kitchen, they gave us a voucher for the same amount to spend in the shop - with an expiry date of 15th October. Said voucher has languished in Stuart's bag ever since then, and only every now and then have we remembered that we really need to use it! With the deadline looming, today seemed like a good day.
There were two items we knew we wanted to spend the voucher on: some bathmats for the apartment and an office chair for Stuart. However, with these in the trolley we were still €100 short of the total value of the voucher. We added a shower curtain and a full size blanket for the apartment (in case it gets cold in there in the autumn/winter months) to the trolley, as well as two packets of cat treats. In the UK, these are known as 'Dreamies' and our cats LOVE them. We hadn't seen them anywhere in Italy before, but we spotted them in Mercatone under their Italian name 'Catisfaction' (quite how that is any more Italian than 'Dreamies' we're not sure).
So, off we trundled with our trolley load and our voucher to the tills. The lady rang everything through... including a special €20 discount (today was discount day).. which meant that we were still €10 short of our voucher value! We quickly decided to top up our purchases with a handful more bags of 'Catisfaction', so I sprinted back to the pet food aisle and literally emptied it of cat treats, leaving us with just €2.90 to pay in cash. What a bizarre shopping trolley that must have seemed to the other people in the queue.
Our next stop was Brico. Once again, we scoured the shop for water butts, but to no avail. We did find some guttering, but decided that it wasn't worth buying any until we worked out whether or not we can find a water butt. We were about to leave the shop when we spotted a display of portable gas heaters at the front. This was something else that had been on our shopping list - we had been planning to visit a shop in Pescia that sells gas appliances, but the prices of the heaters in Brico were cheaper than those we'd seen in the local shop. So, after an age trying to work out which one we wanted (we couldn't for the lives of us work out why the ticket information for each of them was talking about infrared as well as gas), we took the plunge and left the shop with another item ticked off our to-do list!
By the time we'd left Brico it was about 4.30pm, so we headed straight home in order to try and fit in a small amount of work before darkness fell.
On arriving back at the house, our first job was to put a second coat of wood stain on the goose house. Once that was done, we turned our attention to the roof. We laid the corrugated bitumen - which, by the way, is green although it's not the 'GREEN roof' à la Kevin McCloud/Grand Designs that we had been contemplating (we realised that such a roofing choice would be both costly and high maintenance - and with geese, vegetables and olives to tend, terraces to strim, wood to cut and cats to care for, we decided that the last thing we needed was, well, a needy roof). Stuart then stood on a pair of ladders with me anchoring them at the bottom and nailed the roof down, meaning that the goose house is now complete!
With that done, we retired to the patio for a celebratory glass of beer until it was too chilly to stay outside any longer. We came back indoors to wash up (roll on the day when we can fit a dishwasher into our kitchen and have our own water source/heat source to be able to afford to run it!), update the blog and start cooking dinner. Stuart is in charge of dinner tonight - and is happily preparing a mushroom risotto while supping a bottle of cider that Louise and Dan brought from the UK for us. He had forgotten that the ciders were stashed in the bottom of the fridge - the look of sheer delight on his face when he re-discovered them was quite a picture. Little things!
 |
| October also seems to be a favourite time of year for butterflies - we spotted no end of them in the garden today. |
 |
| This one narrowly escaped the paws of our cats... |
No comments:
Post a Comment