Porridge delivery!

When Reggie started whining in his crate for the second time this morning (after already having been up for his morning toilet trip with Helen and had his breakfast), I got up to find Helen outside on the turbo trainer in the rain - the weather folk had it right and today was damp as predicted.

After helping Helen bring her equipment inside, I shovelled down a bowl of cereal and disappeared off to work in the apartment shortly after 8am - before Mom had even risen. The reason for my prompt start today was that we have offered to put up an old friend of mine, Steve, for the night as he's driving from England to Rome. When he suggested dropping in to say hello it seemed too good an opportunity to miss as I haven't seen him in ages.

But before Steve could rest his weary head in the apartment, I had a bit of work to do - at the start of the day today the bed was standing up on its end, the mattress was in another room and the bedroom was full of tools, wood, plasterboard, boxes of screws and sawdust... I had work to do!

The plasterboarding of the walls didn't take very long at all - perhaps half an hour (but you wouldn't expect anything less than from a former plasterer I guess) - then I had to cut the wood to size for the shelf tops, it's a little hard to explain, but the photograph will paint a thousand words:

I got as far as I could then swept up before dropping the bed back into place and going back upstairs to make a huge batch of our spicy Moroccan chickpea soup, some of which was for lunch today, and the rest of which was for the freezer in anticipation of having extra mouths to feed when we have another set of HelpX helpers with us next week.

While I messed around weighing out the cooked chickpeas, Mom went to work on a pile of onions and a bulb of garlic and it wasn't long before the room was filled with the smells of garlic, onions, cinnamon and other delicious spices.

After lunch, Helen went back to the office and Mom and I went downstairs to clean up and make ready for our guest.

As the rain started to slow and the sky slowly brightened, we shut the door to the apartment and went back upstairs to wait for Steve to arrive. I knew he was late leaving Birmingham last night and that his original ETA was midday today, but that was before he'd done any driving.

At 3.30pm, the long awaited phone call came from Mr Marles, he was only 14 miles away!

Within half an hour we had spotted his van driving up the main road out of the village below us, and a few short minutes later a very weary Steve clambered out of the van. He had set off from Birmingham at 8pm last night and had only stopped for fuel and coffee along the way - that's quite some driving! He brought with him a mammoth 11.5kg of porridge oats, for which Helen and I are very, very grateful (we can suspend the rationing of porridge for the time being!).

That's what 11.5kg of porridge oats looks like!

After I'd made Steve another coffee and had a quick catch up, I showed him down to the apartment so that he could crash out for a few hours while Helen, Mom and I went into town to walk the dog.

After a good stretch of everyone's legs along the river banks we drove back up the valley with darkness quickly descending so that we could out the geese to bed and feed our four-legged friends before sorting out dinner plans for the evening - plans that all hinge on Steve. If it was me down there having missed a night's sleep driving I'd have a 'do not disturb' sign on the door by now and would have no plans to resurface until tomorrow morning, but that's me!