Twelfth week of quarantine

Busy week again with a fair amount of worry, but good things too. Still back last week, on the day that I posted here last, I had an interesting occurrance. I slept 5 whole hours in the afternoon, so deep that Roy didn't have the heart to wake me, so I couldn't really have tea, waking up around 9pm. I thought about it, and I accepted that this was simply a release of stress and an attempt by my body to catch up on sleep. I felt good afterwards and have been able to sleep in the afternoon most days since.

The back garden from the top

Roy had a slight setback a few days ago, when in our great enthusiasm to start physio sessions, or more like a little bit of exercise, based on a physio video that was sent by a really lovely young woman, who was recommended to us. Obviously he moved in a way, which seemed OK at the time, but hurt later. This sapped his self-confidence for a while, which made him a bit sad and not move as much as he has previously showed willing to move.

Sitting out on Mike's bench

Hopefully, this is now in the past and having talked on the net with the young lady, she now recommended some lighter and strengthening movements, which we will try tomorrow. Recovery is in your head, just as much as it is in your muscles, ligaments and tendons. If you feel you can do something, you are likely to succeed, but nobody is superhuman, and doubts will arise, especially when things go a bit backwards.

One of the first roses of the season

Talking of going backwards, he can nowadays reverse onto the settee and swing his bad leg up onto it, which is great. He has also been absolutely brilliant at helping me with cooking. He does a lot of the preparation, peeling, chopping and helps with the washing up as well. He can stand for a good few minutes now, and without the walking frame to lean on. I think his strength is definitely returning and so is his confidence in himself. It is such a delight when I have sessions with this man, who would never talk about ailments in the past, which were of course totally naff, and now we swap stories of where it hurts and why. I love him dearly!! :) :) :) <3 p="">

Sniffing his palinka

The quote from Feri arrived very promptly, long before Monday, and while the price was about 10% over what we expected, we decided to go ahead. They are currently finishing another job, but will turn up as soon as that is over, or so I was promised. We'll see how reliable they are and what is the quality of the workmanship. We need a lot of maintenance and repainting, repairing etc., to be done on our buildings currently, so I hope they come up good, so we will have a team we can rely on.

Loving his full bodied red

The other day I took the car on a little run, so the battery gets a bit of work to do and can recharge itself a bit. Unfortunately, I have now got a new light on the dashboard that does not want to go out and there is no way of getting rid of it. I think it indicates something wrong with the slide control. I rang the garage where we bought it, and one of the mechanics suggested to disconnect and reconnect the battery, that might fix it. I have not gone back to Tomi for that and now have realised how good that was. Apparently there is a COVID-19 outbreak in the next village and the source of it is Tomi's brother, so I think I will give him a wide berth for a while.

Bandi strimming

During the last week I have caught up with all the mowing, except the strimming. At the very top of the garden, there was a bit where I didn't go with the tractor, so I took the petrol mower up there and finished it off. It now looked perfect, except for the edges. And then today a miracle happened. Roy had been hoping that he could catch the guy that does the mowing on the public area below us, to see if he would do a bit of private work on top of it and strim our edges plus the tops of the cellars. He sent me out and I made friends with a lovely old guy, who was chatty and friendly and came and did our strimming in no time at all. He also gave me his telephone number, so I will call him every time we have some strimming to do and he will do it for under £10.

Lovely old church in Viseu, Portugal

Then on Friday I had a nice challenge on FB from Debra, my new American friend, to post a holiday/travel photo per day for 9 days. I took up the challenge and since then have posted photos from Niagara, the Hebrides, Viseu in Portugal, the Himalaya, Paris and Slovenia. I always enjoy looking again for photos or stories from my travels. This gives me that pleasure.

Cooking lunch

Alan's 6th lecture was also very interesting. We are getting to the well known bits of the French Revolution, but I have enjoyed the preliminaries as much as I know I will enjoy the bloody bits. I hope they will produce a full video of all the lectures together, as this I think will be an invaluable help for anyone studying the history of the French Revolution.

Kristóf

Friday night had a special treat, in that the Palace of the Arts was streaming a Kristóf Baráti concert from about 3 years ago, which I missed then, so it was a lot of fun watching him and listening to music I haven't heard in a long while.

The first rose of this summer

The e-mail came from Ros with the EHIC cards scanned and attached. I immediately sent it on to the hospital, but in good old Hungarian fashion, I have heard nothing. No acknowledgement, or response was forthcoming, as usual. I will wait a bit, and then I will have to get in touch by phone, assuming they will not be permanently engaged or not answering at all. The deadline is 12th, so if I don't hear by Friday, I will have to write a letter and send it with registered post. Bureaucracy is the bane of my life, especially around here.

Guess who's doing the weeding?

Monday was a Bank Holiday here, and thankfully the weather cheered up a bit. Roy was cheering up along with the sunshine, so we did a bit of walking about with the frame in the corridor and one day he even made an attempt at weeding under the vines behind the Bunkhouse. I love it when he is active, he is usually feeling useful and is happy.

Under the grape vine

Then finally today arrived with one brilliant and two slightly worrying developments. The brilliant event was finding the guy to do our strimming, which I have mentioned above. The other two were slightly more annoying and/or worrying. Firstly, Roy asked me to look for a special walking stick for him, which he has seen before, but didn't know if we could order one online. He had one made of some metal, probably either aluminimum or steel, in mind with a little tripod of three legs at the bottom and a nice, adjustable height and handle on top.

The tripod stick

I didn't take too long a time to find one and set about buying it. Many people do not trust paying by credit card over here, because the websites they use are not safe enough. I thought, I would risk it, but I am not sure if I am not going to regret it soon. Once it took my credit card details and considered the question for a while, it finally rerouted me back to the original website. There was no confirmation, either then and there or by e-mail later and no further details from the retailer either. When I wanted to check on my credit card's website, that one crashed right in front of my nose and I started panicking.

Glorious pale yellow rose

I tried to calm down, then tried again to get on my credit card's website on Roy's little laptop. And lo and behold, there it was. The actual item, with the cost was already up on the website as an item I bought. That was quick, I thought. No acknowledgement, no confirmation page or e-mail, but the money has already gone from my account. That's sharp practice, if you ask me.  About an hour later, I got an e-mail, but not from the company that sold me the stick or the bank, but from the delivery company. Apparently it should be with us tomorrow. If that's true, this whole thing while it feels unsafe, it's wizard quick.

Blue rose

The other annoying thing was that while trying to squeeze the car into its place in front of the garage, I managed to hit the wall. It looked awful, but now I reckon it would mostly polish out. One of the worst things nowadays in my life, is how the stress insidiously pervades your whole being, even when you are totally calm and are not aware of it, so you end up doing daft things like that. Roy was an absolute darling not telling me off and now we will have to try to get some car polish and a paint stick, should it be needed.

The public well just down the crescent

Finally, there is a fourth thing for today, which I forgot about, but it has just happened and it's a good one. Our neighbour appeared with our large food shopping, and it looks as if we are not going to starve any time soon. It actually cost very nearly £200, but it was a really big one. They told us that they cannot do it any more, so we asked them to enable us to stock the freezeer, and that's not cheap. Once this lot of food is gone, we will have to go to Tesco's ourselves. I am not looking forward to it, but at least I will get exactly what I want, and that is something after all this time.

Looking down towards the well

Must go and feed the invalid. Next post sometime next week!