emiGrants: Fire wood, truffles and postimpressionists

Thursday, 3 October 2013

Fire wood, truffles and postimpressionists

Just a tad eclectic the topics coming up if you look at the title of this post. As at the beginning of the week we were still in the village we were occupied with tidying up the garden and getting next year's fuel in. On Sunday afternoon Pali and Csaba finally turned up with an enormous chainsaw to cut down the dead trees. In fact we started with one that was not dead, just terribly in the way and trying to damage the barn roof. Amazing how fast they could chop down a fairly big tree between the two of them. On the other side, near Nelly's fence there was a very dead plum tree, which came down, followed by an equally dead elder. Great shame, but this summer's drought had finished quite a few trees off in the village, ours amongst them. Pali also promised to bring a truck load of firewood sometime the following week. As we have heard that before, we were hoping that it might turn up sometime before the winter does. So, imagine our shock when the following afternoon I get a phonecall from my sister instructing me to open the back gate as my wood is arriving.

It got dumped in the middle of the garden awaiting being chopped up by chainsaw and stacked in the barn. Needless to say we left for town before Csaba finished it on the Wednesday, so we are only hoping that he did finish and stack it properly, as he is not always 100% reliable when one is not there to supervise him.

On Monday I decided to use up all the bars of 70% dark chocolates that I had with the cream we bought on Friday to make truffles. Sorry, no piccies, as I forgot to photograph them, but finally we had something like 30 very nice little bonbons, some with walnuts, some with almonds and some just rolled in Dutch cocoa. It takes a great deal of self restraint from me not to sit down and eat the lot, but I only had one (and a small one at that!), gave some to Nelly, Roy had a few and the rest is in a box in the fridge in the village so that I will not fall into any temptation the rest of the week in town.

And then the main event of the week came this morning which was fantastic. I went to the National Gallery to see an exhibition of impressionist and postimpressionist painters. Although there were some neoimpressionists as well. I didn't buy the catalogue this time, but found plenty of the 110 or so paintings that were exhibited, on the net, so enjoy the illustrations below!