Grim weather

Thursday evening was where I left you and what a beautiful end to the day. It was still a bit cloudy but the golden sunset was just stunning.

Sunset

Friday morning was the usual routine of coffee and collecting the men. They got stuck straight into their respective jobs and made great progress as always.

Cracking on

More plastering

With changing my hours at work, Friday is now the new shopping day and I quickly had another brew, let the puppies out for a toilet break and headed into town. I prefer Thursday morning shopping as it is less busy, but I got through the pain with the help of a fresh croissant.

It always takes me a longer time than I anticipate when i do the shopping and I can never work out why. Maybe I get distracted or maybe I spend far too much time looking at the offer aisle. Anyway, it was almost 11.30 before I arrived back at the school and I had a phone call from our friend when I arrived back to see if he could borrow our ladder in order for him to gain access to his new building. Of course. They arrived soon after to collect it and also a drill and off they went to sort it all out. It is nice to be able to help.

Rambo was showing a big interest in what was going on in the kitchen. I hope he hasn't been lining up his seat at the breakfast bar or he will be sorely disappointed!

Rambo

After the exertions of the shopping trip and coupled with the fact that it was raining and grim outside, I spent the day playing with the puppies in the living room. I think they are feeling a little more neglected since I have been here alone and they are getting a bit bored. We lit the fire and had a right old time. Dinner was a much craved steak and chips. This is probably the only thing I miss. The steaks are not generally very good here; it does not seem to be something they eat a lot of. So when Lidl have these in, I do like to grab a couple. It tasted better than it looked!

Steak and chips

Saturday, again, was very cold and it was raining consistently throughout the day. I pottered around mainly and Himself will be most annoyed because I didn't take any photos whatsoever. What I did do was  to make a start tidying up a little bit in advance of our guests arriving. The more I do now, the less of a rush I will have next weekend. We had to empty a suitcase for him to take to Islay and so I transferred the clothes that had been, quite frankly, dumped out into the guest room, into another suitcase. Again, the fire was lit and the rain continued. It is so very difficult here when the rain comes at the weekend as most of the chores that I want and need to do are outside. However, I did manage to get on with a little surprise task which I cannot show photos of anyway, so all was not lost. In the afternoon I baked a ginger cake and for some reason, this one is the best I have made yet. I am not quite sure, but perhaps the fact that I did not use the electric mixer has helped it. It is a much lighter and fluffier cake this time.

Sunday arrived and I was geared up to have a busy day. I did not want to sit around for a third day. Despite the forecast of rain, it held off very well indeed. Although this was not inspiring me when I first got up!

A grim start

 With all of the rain there is one benefit:  I have been saved from the twice daily watering round, so it is not all bad. The little seedlings on the balcony have started to show a little more growth now also, which is great. They will be later crops, but I am hoping for a long and late summer.

Late pepper plants

Whilst out having my coffee on the balcony I was feeling very cold and went to look at the thermometer. I got a shock. Look! Minus five. I had forgotten it had got broken whilst the work was going on around the balcony. I definitely do not want to go back to those temperatures any time soon.

Broken

The first task of the day was to have a look, trim and hope for a bit of a recovery on the banana plant we had bought. It really has not been looking great over the last few weeks and the end of the main leaf keeps going brown and drying up. I cut the dead ends off and the dead leaf and generally trimmed it all back as far as I thought I could without cutting into fleshy stems. It does look better now than it did and I have increased the amount of water I have been giving it also. Seems to have done some good as there is a new leaf coming up. This will be a learning curve for us. An expensive lesson if it all goes wrong.

Sad banana plant

New growth

The puppies had been having great fun following me around all morning so far and I cannot remember where I went to or what I was doing to have left them alone in the living room. I could hear Thelma playing with one of her toys though and she seemed to be having a fine old time. It wasn't her toy. It was our inflatable mallet we got given on the night of the fireworks last year. Teeth marks mean no more air. Naughty puppy!

Trail of destruction

It was still quite early in the morning and even before breakfast I decided to get outside. I have had a small tidying session around the front, but there is still so much to clear away after so much work went on.  We will get there eventually.  The puppies were straight on with their favourite game at the moment; lizard hunting.

Lizard hunting

As I have said, things are really starting to hit a growth spurt. Sadly for me, the weeds and long grass are excelling at this and the whole garden looks a little bit like a jungle at the moment. Obviously if it remained dry for any length of time I could probably have kept on top of this, but here it is.

Jungle 

Whilst planting out some seeds a couple of weeks ago I had moved some pots over onto the table tennis table as I thought they were not going to come. This one has, at long last.  One of the blue plants I had planted months ago. Perhaps the weather just has not been suitable until now?

Finally growing

In one of the beds we had planted a few carrots that had managed to sprout a few weeks ago. Now there was one plant that looked like it had carrot leaves which we had left and felt very dubious about. It was significantly bigger than the rest and over the last few weeks has grown at an alarming rate. My reckoning was that if it was a carrot, it would be HUGE by now given the size of the upper growth. Here it is. And it is not a parsnip, just a dirty big weed, as I suspected.

Not a parsnip

With the grass being very long around the raised beds, it was becoming more and more difficult to navigate and to keep on top things inside the beds. I took the garden shears out and chopped it all away to allow some access. I would have used the strimmer, but it was all still very damp and that would not have worked very well at all. Plus, it was good exercise.

Path cleared

 As I was collecting the cut grass into piles for the wheelbarrow I got beckoned by next door to go over. They had guests. The guests were the ladies we see every year and who come to take a tour of the building. I think one of them was the librarian here when it was in operation. They love seeing the progress we are making. Off I trotted to have a coffee and a piece of lovely bread.

Growing puppy

Gosti

One of the ladies is the daughter and granddaughter of the two either side of my neighbour in the photo. She goes to university in Sofia and spends the summers here working. She speaks very good English indeed and was able to translate anything I did not understand, which was a lot!  Perhaps we can practice our language skills on each other in the summer. That would be nice.

When I left and arrived back home I was very tempted to call it a day in the garden.  It was still cold and a bit miserable weather-wise, but I gave myself one last task for the day. The second jungle. It is important for me to be able to get into the vegetable garden when the rain finally stops and so I set to work on clearing the first section of walkways.

Another jungle

Trimmed

So there you have it. I was relatively tired when I finished but obviously lizard hunting is much more exhausting!

All to much

It is now Monday morning as I type this last bit. I was lazy last night and had other things to do and phone calls to wait for and so I decided to postpone my post. I don't think I will do that again as I have struggled to remember everything that happened! Anyway, onwards - another busy day ahead here.

Lek den.
A x