Rosie’s turned into a bit of a handful over the last few days. Probably due to the fact that Ian and I were congratulating ourselves on having an exceptionally well behaved puppy, a comment that was bound to bring chaos raining down on our heads. I think other factors are the builders are here and working long days, which means she is shut in the living room, and Wilbur’s still wearing a lampshade and recovering from his op, which means that they don’t get to play so much.
She’s been bursting with energy, and now her legs are longer, this has made her very bouncy. It takes two good walks a day to keep her energy down, but as the weather is still glorious, this isn’t too much of a hardship. This week she has delightfully been carrying a dried up frog, tissue paper, a bit of a sheep’s leg and a plastic bottle.
Hopefully Wilbur’s lampshade will be off this week and he can take part in extreme play again. We took Wilbur out for another walk yesterday and he is very good – except he does walk like a cross between Groucho Marks and Marilyn Monroe. We’re trying to train him to come to us, however he’s inclined to miss. But he doesn’t run when he’s off the lead, more mooches, so at least if he comes vaguely in our direction we can get him.
We left them on their own again yesterday, while we went shopping and then had a picnic (see Ian’s picture here – Ermita – we went to the Ermita the other side of Llerena). Wilbs and Rosie seemed OK again, and Wilbur didn’t seem distressed. I think he feels quite comfortable here now, and while the building work hasn’t been great for him or Pirata as things keep moving (Pirata still walks around the wall to come to the house, even though it’s not there now), he seems to be happy to take it all in his stride.
The inner wall of the courtyard came down this week – what a job! Manuel originally planned bringing a machine in to do it, however when we saw him measuring the gate into the courtyard and frowning, we realized that it was probably going to be a manual job. Mountains of stone came out from that middle wall. Manuel’s putting in a septic tank type thing to collect rain water. New building regs means that houses need to be responsible for the drainage of their own rainwater. As our barns used to drain onto the road and into the neighbour’s yards, if that now comes into our patio, our drain is unlikely to be able to cope when we have very heavy rain. So this is a good solution.
This is an ‘our site’ week, which is the week each month we spend working on our sites or our own projects. This week is a planning week. We now have 10 websites. While FreeNeedle is by far our biggest and busiest (over 4 million people visited in the last 12 months!), the others are now starting to bring in the odd centimos here and there, so the aim for this week is to try and draw up a plan to make sure we look after FreeNeedle and also develop the other sites. We’re at a stage now where we can’t really just bumble along with our sites and we need to start thinking about them as a business.
Here are some more pics, remember if you click on the pic you will see a full size version, to go back to the blog, press the back key.
The wall to the little barn has come down and they’ve started to take down the wall in the centre of the courtyard.
This is the rubble just from the work they had done above. At least double this amount came from the rest of the wall when it was cleared.
This is how the courtyard looks at the moment. The well will stay, I think that Manuel is proposing steps where the bricks are. The lower part will slope away from the house to help reduce any possible flooding and the new drain will be there somewhere. A raised flower bed will be where petal is. The orange tree will stay, but the lemon tree may go. We’ve chosen terracota tiles for the patio, which will look lovely with the white walls.
One reason why we wanted to get a big dog as a puppy was so that it got on with the other animals. We’ve been really pleased that when Rosie is not bouncing round like Tigger, she happily snuggles up with any mix of dogs or cats. Here she is snuggling Tibs.
Rosie helping Ian type.