Well, I switched on my computer this morning and saw a little row of suns appearing in the weather forecast bar, and not the clouds that have greeted me over recent weeks. I will be very interested to see if this has been a record breaking year for rain, it has certainly been miserable. Last year we ate our lunch outside most days – even if we were wearing fleeces, but this year it has been impossible (not to say a little uncomfortable with builders walking in and out).
The weather picked up yesterday so we went out for a walk. It doesn’t get dark now until 6.30ish so we can go out at 5 and still come back in sunshine. We were getting our asparagus eyes in as it will only be a couple of weeks before we’re in full asparagus flow. In fact, I did find an asparagus spear on Sunday, but I think that was just one that was a little early.
The builders spent two days putting up the scaffolding and all the front of the house is netted up. They said they had a good day yesterday, but as they are starting from the top we have no idea! I bet they are glad that the weather has changed (albeit that the sunshine gives way to colder nights. Last night was 10c colder than the night before).
Project Austerity is going exceptionally well. Not going shopping definitely helps! We’ve been filling our water bottles up at the pillar rather than buying bottled water and this makes quite a substantial – and surprising – saving. We set ourselves a weekly budget of 50 euros (including gas and petrol, excluding electric) and we worked out that bottled water was costing about 4 euros a week so filling our bottles up resulted in a saving of about 8%, which is quite significant. We’ve been drinking bottled water since we realised how brown our tap water is. The plumber has replaced some of our pipes so it should be better now.
An electrician has wired up the new wiring which means we have light in the new bathrooms now. He is also upgrading our electric supply soon. Manuel sorted that out as he was getting fed up with the electric going off every time we put the kettle on!