DHL hell

Well it’s been another short break from the blogging. We’ve been away in Italy to collect the olive harvest with our great friends L and S helping us pick the fruit.  I can’t believe yet another year has rolled by. Was this our fourth or fifth harvest? Either way we had a lovely week there and did really well with the crop. Thanks to L and S we collected all the fruit in just over two days – 92+ kilos in total, more than 200 lbs. Not our best harvest but bloody good considering I’ve not had chance to prune the trees that well in the last 12 months. I’ve got some serious supplies to get out to my olive tree adoptors now. If you’re following the postings get in touch folks!

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Cool pool

Well it’s been a few weeks since the last posting and the reason is that we’ve been incredibly busy making several flying visits to our place in Italy. We’ve been having some landscaping and building work done with us doing the labouring when possible. In the shot above you can probably make it the new retaining wall at pool-level which neatens things up enormously plus a new path way that we’ve almost finished  down to the pool with a logged retaining wall to hold that severe slope at bay. It’s also a big help in managing to keep the slope trimmed and tending to the olive trees. I’ve lost count of the number of times my ladder has slid down the hill with me atop it during olive-picking.

return of the pool guy

Regular readers will know about our swimming pool. In the 12 June posting I wrote about what a state it was in after being left uncared for over a year, whilst we were back in the UK. We had virtually emptied it and cleaned it before the torrential rains came and filled up the deep end again, rather depressingly. We also noticed that the lining had come away from the pool sides in several places and hadn’t returned with the weight of rain water on it. For over two weeks we’ve been trying to get in touch with Andrea , who installed the pool for the previous owners, and yesterday he turned up.

the pool

One of the things that really attracted us to this house was the lovely swimming pool and the first year we were here at least one of us would have used it every day the weather was good. And they mostly were. It was great when family and friends came to stay and it was just so good to jump into at the end of a hot day working in the garden. Although it isn’t heated we were still using the pool up until C went back to the UK to undertake a work opportunity at Harrods in late October. We had it covered in November (by our good looking pool guy Andrea – see posting 7 May 2007) and shortly after that I returned back to the UK with R for her knee operation. But virtually everyday since it had been originally cleaned by Andrea back in April, I’d enjoyed spending an hour or so each morning doing basic pool cleaning and maintenance, all that is apart from fishing out the usually drowned wildlife from the filters. The mice, lizards and beetles had stopped bothering me early on but the hedgehogs and bullfrogs were always pretty shocking to behold upon lifting that filter cover each morning. It was the sense of not knowing what you were going to find in there that was unsettling plus the thought that dead or not I still had to fish out a 2lb bullfrog from the filter and dispose of it.