(Friday, 17 April 2020)
After the… cough… excesses… of last night, we both awoke pretty early and bushy tailed, which is quite impressive under the circumstances. Whilst you might think that the opposite would happen, it turns out that Mark had the best night’s sleep for a while upstairs as he’d gone out like a light long before me and rather wonderfully, Jack managed an uninterrupted night too. Even better, both boys religiously kept to their own spaces, lying alongside me and I had a fab night’s sleep as a result! Who’d have thought it took inebriation to achieve the perfect night?! 😂 😂
Mark has decided that his project for the day will be widening and moving back the base for the swimming pool. Our little pool – which is an absolutely treasured and much appreciated piece of equipment in summer – is just a basic Easyset type. Essentially a paddling pool with delusions of grandeur! 😆 It relies on sitting on flat ground to work and has somewhat disastrous consequences if it isn’t. Last year we noticed that the ground at the front of it has sunk a few inches and had visions of it collapsing and dumping a few thousand litres of water straight into the back of the garage. As good as Mark’s new french drain is, it ain’t that good! 😬 😆
We’re setting it up early this year as we are hoping to rig up something or other to capture the rain water that falls on the garage roof and direct it into filling the pool instead of having to pay for the tap water that we usually use. It’ll probably be the only time we actually hope for rain!
Progress was briefly interrupted when we suddenly realised that Aten was missing. 😱 It turns out that the gate that we had thought shut, was not actually latched and the little monkey had pushed it open and wandered off. OMG, panic stations! 😧
Mark raced off down the road on foot whilst I gathered leads etc and the car and prepared for an epic searching session. I cannot even begin to express the panic, fear and just awful, awful feeling that engulfed us both. Thankfully, our neighbours had spotted him heading off down the road a few minutes earlier and that made it much easier to track him. By the time I got down there with the car, Mark had found him and was just heading back. He’d decided to go off for our normal walking route in that direction and had diverted off for a swim in the stream. 🙄
Coming back up out of the river a bit further down, he had got stuck behind a fence and was waiting patiently for someone to come and rescue him. 😆 We are normally nothing short of OCD about closing gates and keeping the boys safe, so we were horrified that we’d failed on this occasion. The boys are also normally very good about not wandering out of the gates, even if they are open. They know which areas they are allowed to be in and are usually very good at respecting that.
One of the side effects of this lockdown that we hadn’t considered was that they have had new and different areas opened up to them during this time, so now think it’s ok to just wander through previously forbidden areas. Well, when I say ‘they’, I mean Aten… Jack still won’t go through a gate uninvited. Bless him! 😍 It won’t happen again.. there will no doubt be many months to come of checking and double checking ahead of us. 😉
After the stresses of the morning and the work completed, we took the opportunity to relax in the sunshine for a couple of hours. Beautifully hot and sunny again today and the weather is due to change again for a couple of days over the weekend. It’s quite odd, we have had the most amazing week days, but this will make it the third weekend on the trot that we have had rain forecast. This would normally send us into a panic, March and April are times of the year that we are heavy on guests at the weekend and light in the week and the weather has been less than perfect for that scenario. But this year? We just don’t care! 🤷♀️ 😂
Once the sun set and the air was cooler, Mark and I popped out for a quick half hour walk to suss out a potential new dog walking route. Yesterday evening, our friend had told us about a path that goes across the mountain directly opposite our garden. It is possible to do a quick half hour circular or carry on and access the forest tracks that lead up to the Rettenbach Kreuz. It’s quite a climb up, but apparently well worth it for the views of Bad Ischl from there.
I’d first heard of the Rettenbach Kreuz from some friends who live nearby and had also only just discovered it. I can’t quite believe that the easiest place for us to walk the dogs is actually right opposite and accessible virtually from our back garden and that for most of the last 4 years, we’ve been looking out straight at its location with no idea it was there! 🤷♀️ 🙄 😆
On the way up through the village to start the circular, we ran into another friend, stopped and chatted and were offered a beer, we declined since we’d only been walking all of 5 minutes and if we stopped at that point, simply wouldn’t get going again! 😂
On the way back down into the village again, we passed some more lovely neighbours sitting in their garden, stopped to chat and were again offered a beer. This time we felt we had actually earned it and were touched to be invited. They pulled out some chairs into an empty space for us and we joined them for a fantastic hour of beer, schnapps, chatter and laughs. It made our day, we are so bloody lucky to be living here – this village rocks! 😍 😁
Stay safe everybody xx
