(Sunday, 3 May 2020 & Monday, 4 May 2020)
I think I’ve discovered that I have skills… and for the avoidance of doubt, I’m firmly classing my ability to search stuff on google and watch youtube videos as a skill. 😂
I seem to have done a lot of this recently what with the coffee machine and the blog, to the point that most days finds me scrabbling around for a charger for the iPad at some inopportune moment, since my aged device is buckling under the strain and rarely makes it past lunchtime. Oh for the glory days of its existence when it would last a full 5 days… sigh… 😢
I resisted buying a tablet for so long, I had a PC on which I spent most of my working days, a laptop for taking out and about and a smartphone. I figured that was more than enough and a tablet would just be an expensive luxury.
Fast forward a decade (a decade?? Yikes!!) and whilst my phone is relegated to living on a shelf in the hallway or deep in the blackhole depths of my handbag where it can squawk away with various notifications without being heard to its heart’s content, my ipad is rarely out of sight these days and I can’t remember when I last used my laptop.
Since I can pretty much run everything on my tablet for the business, as well as stay in touch with facebook, messenger and the like and… here’s the biggie… it has a nice big screen and keyboard which I can actually see with my dodgy eyesight and operate with my big fat fingers, I find it much easier to use.
I’m not quite sure when my relationship with my phone became so strained. Probably the years and years of being welded to it out of necessity or obligation. Having your work (and the associated stress) follow you around 24/7 – even on holiday – was just a part of life, as was regularly getting emails and calls late into the evening to solve problems etc. My previous working life started each day when I woke with checking emails and pretty much finished with doing the same thing right before going to sleep.
Giving up all that and moving out here has been like a breath of fresh air and stepping away from the corporate rat race had a very marked and positive effect on us both. We both had good jobs and both had the same problem of never really being off duty. Guests often ask us about how we came to be here and what jobs we did before. They’re often quite shocked that our previous jobs were completely unrelated to what we do now. Some wonder why we gave up the careers we had and others completely get it. We simply tell them we swapped ‘ having money and no time’ for ‘having time and no money’ 😂
For me, having spent the last couple of days being largely welded to the pc learning new things and building the blog, it has been both a welcome challenge (I do like a challenge!), a change from the norm and conversely, a weird feeling of deja vu.
We had a fab evening out on Sunday, having been invited for dinner with some friends here. What a treat that was! Being our second trip out since lockdown finished, we weren’t expecting to be so excited to be driving out and about. But this time, it was in a different direction and we were headed through Bad Goisern towards Hallstättersee.
It was a beautiful clear evening and we realised with some shock that the last time we had travelled this road, there had been snow on the ground and a wintry landscape. We seem to have missed spring entirely and catapulted straight into summer down here in this valley… albeit with plenty of snow on the peaks. It was a shock to have so graphically illustrated the time that had passed since we’d last travelled in this direction!
We had a wonderful evening with good friends and it was just so lovely to see them all again. Lots of chatter, laughing and excellent food, we left at the end of the evening feeling tired, full and very happy. Thank you guys, it was a great night! 😘
Mark has been continuing with the wood shed project. As with everything we seem to do here, the original remit being to clear out the wood, tidy, organise and dump the excess…. it has turned into a whole other, larger problem. Having finally exposed the back wall of the shed, it became immediately apparent that a) it wasn’t straight and b) the rear external corner of it was a couple of inches lower than it should be… which would adequately explain point a). 🤨
We have 2 natural springs on our land, both of which we have no rights over, but flow through and serve the neighbour’s houses. We’ve always known that we have to be very careful not to disturb them or even, allow anything to happen on that land immediately above them. One of them provides our neighbour with their only source of water and so can’t be contaminated for example.
One of the springs runs very close to the corner of the woodshed, so being unsure of exactly what was what under there, Mark popped round and asked our lovely neighbour for advice. Not only did we get the information and advice we were looking for, but also learnt a lot more about out house and its construction. We really are lucky with our neighbours, they are fantastic! 😁
We learnt for example that there used to be two fish ponds, one flowing into the other on the site of the old chicken run. That would explain the remnants of concrete edging that can still be partly seen today, which had been a source of much wonderings of late!
We also learned that there is another small spring on our land, which flows right past the house and straight on down to the river, it is not used by anyone and therefore may be of some use to us. That’s a job for another day though! 😂
Stay safe everyone xx
