(Wednesday, 22 April 2020)
Today, I woke up in my own bed, next to my husband and with two happy and contended pups in their own beds – all in the same room. What a lovely feeling that was! 😍
If you’ve not been here, its difficult to explain the way our living accommodation works. We have the whole of the first or top floor, which consists of bedrooms and bathroom and half of the ground floor, which is our kitchen and living room and, of course, access to our terrace and garden is via the living room. The entrance hall, breakfast room and the big double room is also on this level. The staircase between the two areas is in the public part of the house and our private areas are separated by two lockable doors. The whole of the lower ground floor is public and guest rooms. The house is set into a slope, like most Austrian houses and so the rear half is underground and the front half opens onto the guest car park.
The upside of all this is that our own private living areas are pretty spacious, but the downside is that our access to each of them involves passing through public areas. It generally means that I can’t put my PJs on of an evening to lounge around in them, or conversely, pop down to the kitchen in the night without passing through public areas without the possibility of frightening guests with my bed headed and slightly scary first thing in the morning look. 😂
Having an empty house has, of course, meant that no such issues are of concern and I am happily wandering around the house in varying degrees of ‘scary’ and my PJs with no risk of running into guests or even the possibility of visitors. 👍
Sod’s Law dictates that normally on any given day that we have no guests, have a rare lie in and I decide to wander downstairs in my dressing gown, is the day the chimney sweep comes. It turns out that Sod’s Law will not be thwarted even in the event of a national lockdown and this actually happened last week. The only visitor we’ve had in weeks and I was in my dressing gown. 🙄
The reason I mention all of this is that it probably adds a little perspective to the whole ‘sleeping downstairs’ thing. It isn’t just ‘downstairs’, it’s felt like we were actually sleeping in different apartments, so the wonderful feeling of being back all together again, was truly wonderful. We both smiled this morning at that warm fuzzy feeling of having a reunited family. 😁 💕
Despite the boiler having another hissy fit and going on strike yesterday evening, necessitating a delayed journey up to bed, it did at least deign to start again on the first attempt. I am also happy to report that setting the alarm early and taking Jack down promptly worked well and was successful. Yay! Looks like I’ll be sleeping in my own bed again tonight. 👍
Today I spent doing admin stuff again…. fixing the website included. Took me a while, given that I’m no expert, but at least it’s working again now. I also had a sudden urge to make a cake. Most of my cakes are variations on Delia Smith’s all in one sponge cake recipe. If you’re not familiar with it, I urge you to give it a go, it really is the simplest, quickest and most reliable cake to make. You have the basic mix and you just add in whatever you have to hand or fancy… coffee/walnut, chocolate, lemon drizzle (thank you Alison, you inspired me to do this today 😘), you name it, it normally works well.
Of course, having declared how easy it is, today’s lemon and ginger drizzle cake… [drum roll]… was not quite so successful. 🙄 I made two mistakes, adding lemon juice to the mixture (I should have just stuck to the lemon zest and maybe just a touch of lemon essence, rather than the juice as it needed cooking longer as a result. The second mistake was failing to turn it out of the tin before it cooled. I blame procrastination for that…. or rather the lack of! 😉
Having had yesterday’s attempt to knock jobs off the list scuppered, I was determined to get them done today and simply forgot to turn it out. The end result was very crumbly (but not dry, thankfully) and I had to serve it as a pudding in a bowl rather than a pretty, very photogenic slice of cake, but it did taste bloody lovely, so all was not lost.
I’ll have another go at perfecting it, but adding some of my stocks of ground up crystallised ginger to the mix made for a particularly scrummy taste sensation. I know this because the mixture on the beaters tasted amazing (and no, I have never grown out of this 😆). I just need to adjust the recipe a bit and perfect it, for presentation purposes.
Mark was equally determined to be productive today and continued with his project, on what is now officially called the ‘sodding balcony’ and was alternating between painting various bits of it and preparing the new bits of wood. I was called out on occasion to hold various spanners and stuff, but otherwise he left me alone to get stuck into some of the paperwork that needed doing.
As a result of reading yesterday’s post whinging about our trip to source wood, our lovely friends in Bad Ischl phoned and offered us some wood from their ‘come in handy’ stocks. It turns out they had exactly what we needed and promptly chucked it in the car and brought it up here. 😁
Can we get any luckier with the friends we have out here??! They really are an amazing, supportive and generous bunch, over the years they have been absolute rocks for us and the source of much wisdom and advice, not to mention practical help – thank you Trevor & Linda, not sure what we’d do without you! 😍 😁
All in all, today was a very nice balance to yesterday, harmony and positive vibes are back to having the upper hand in this household! Thank gawd for that, I can’t abide negative people, it’s one of the things that has me running for the hills. When the negative person is me, I can’t even bog off and leave myself to it! 🙄 😂
Stay safe everyone xx
