Today started with a dilemma…. under normal circumstances this wouldn’t even be a dilemma, but it shows how fried your brain gets when ‘business is not quite usual’. 🤔
One of the most beautiful things about Austrian summers are the flowers… in window boxes, hanging baskets, pots, gardens, you name it, the flowers are everywhere and they are stunning. Every house, every business, building, roundabout is adorned with abundant and flowing arrays of the most bright and colourful blooms. It’s a part of life here and from a business perspective, it’s expected.
Every year around this time, we start avidly watching for the Hofer special offers on surfinia and geraniums as, with our house, we need a lot… and I mean A LOT… of flowers. To give you some perspective, we have 11 large window boxes, 2 small ones, 5 hanging baskets and assorted planters, pots, barrels and the like.
Traditionally, I perform a dawn raid on ‘Hofer Flower Day’ so that I can actually get enough matching colours to do them all. So I went to bed worrying about whether I actually should do it or whether this really doesn’t constitute ‘urgent purchases’. It would be cheaper to buy smaller plants now, but will they be available later? Will we even have a ‘high season’ later? Would I be tempting fate buying them? Would it be the correct thing to do to buy them in these circumstances? And round and round, ad finitum. Took me a while to get to sleep…. 😬
Eventually, I decided to do a speedy visit to Hofer. In any case, I needed vegetable seeds, onion sets etc as soon as possible, so I should get those at least. Our veg patch has taken on a more important role in life this year.
I needn’t have worried about it all though, there were no flowers in Hofer. 😝
(** Mostly because I have discovered today that I had my days wrong… the offer starts Thursday, not Wednesday… 🙄 🙄 😂 😂 )
I did manage to get the seeds and onion sets though and a top up for our fresh veg supplies, and got to thank the lady on the checkout for continuing to work, so win-win really and my poor head can relax again. Yes, I know – first world problems.. although it does show how your head starts to work in weird ways when you’re trying to train it to work effectively in a new and completely alien lifestyle 😳 Lesson learned.
This is the first time I’ve been out since all this started, OMG… it was like driving through a set of 28 Days Later… there are no cars, no people, the main road was empty, Hofer was well stocked of everything you could need, but empty bar 3 other people. The Austrians apparently turned out for one day of panic buying (or maybe just stocking up) last friday and then nothing, no problem. Stuff is there if you need it and courtesy of the Austrian rule of always having 2 weeks supplies in your house at any one time, they clearly don’t need it yet.
I passed the Waste Collection Lorry, waved and got cheery waves in return (so that answers the question as to whether we were right to have put our bins out last night). I passed the local bus, empty of people but piloted by a very cheery waving bus driver and saw a total of 2 cars on the road. Weird, eerie and quite unnerving. This should have been rush hour but there was literally no one around.
Another beautiful sunny day and with the weather due to deteriorate over the weekend, it was back to work on the outside jobs. Mark had been continuing with his epic ‘dumping ground’ clearance and has made real progress today. The new 3rd compost bin position is cleared and a lot of the accumulated compost has been moved. The photos really don’t do justice to just how hard he’s been working out there! 🙌
I decided to clean and oil the front deck, another of those annual jobs after a year of hot sun/rain/snow and de-icing salt (plus a lot of foot traffic) have taken their toll on it. Brief panic when I realised we had next to nothing left in last year’s tin and then I found some that we must have brought with us from the UK. Consequently, it’s a different colour this year, but it’ll do.
The day ended sitting on the logs in the front garden with a beer each, contemplating our efforts when our lovely, lovely neighbours called across that they had fired up their bread oven and had some fresh bread for us. Handing a bag carefully over the fence without touching and keeping sufficient distance, there were two fresh white rolls and half a loaf of brown bread…. how utterly lovely! 😍 On so many levels, we are unbelievably lucky to live where we do!! 😁 😁 😁
