(Saturday, 16 May 2020)
Finally the sun reappeared this morning and it was great! There’s something about a sunny day that energises you and just simply makes you feel happy. After several cold, damp, gloomy days on the trot, it seems that Ice Saints may be over and ‘Sophie’ has finished casting her grand finale spell for another year.
I’m quite glad that I spent the majority of the last few days fruitfully doing the shite jobs, paperwork and stuff, because once Ice Saints finishes, there is usually a period of furious activity that needs to take place in the garden. Window boxes will need planting and putting up, the veg patch planted up and of course, with the early warmth and rain of the last few days, the weeds will be having a right old post lockdown party of their own. 🙄
Yesterday morning when I was sitting out on our terrace writing my update, there was a crash on the roof as something fell on it. The boys and I jumped out of our skins! It turned out to be a baby bird that had presumably fallen from the nest. It looked a bit shell shocked but was otherwise fine. Mum was in attendance in the walnut tree and when I went back to check on it an hour later it was gone, so hopefully it was a happy ending. Fingers crossed
Just as Mark was about to start with painting the bathroom walls, we had a bit of a crisis of confidence in the colour we had chosen. Way back before lockdown started, we’d dashed out to the DIY store to get enough paint to see us through and eventually decided the colour we’d got was just too dark for that room. Mark dashed out to change it and get another shade and when he started putting it on, it was clear we’d made the right call. Phew!
It’s all starting to come together quite nicely now, although difficult to photograph being a small room with a window right in the middle. Despite my best efforts, the colour looks like a dull dark blue… you’ll just have to trust me that it isn’t. 🤨
I took the boys out for a bit of fun in the afternoon. One of their favourite pastimes is paddling…. any river, lake, puddle will do, they just love it. We popped out in the car to the road up to Postalm (a ski area in winter and hiking paradise in summer) and cheated by finding a place to park just before the toll road.
It’s a funny old system they have here, some mountain roads or passes are privately owned and you must pay a toll to use them, others are completely free to either access or park.
Postalm is one of these toll roads. The road winds up through the forest before coming out in a beautiful bowl of meadows at 1300m. Parking is free and there are several mountain restaurants to choose from too, so it’s not all bad! Once there, you can choose to either come back down the way you came, or carry on over the pass and come back down on the Abtenau side of the Salzkammergut Mountain range. It’s an absolutely stunning route and one of our favourites. But that’s probably a whole post of its own, so I’ll save that for another day! 😉
The boys enjoyed their fun and spent most of their time running between the water and the grass bank whilst I took my life in my hands trying to balance on rocks to get across the water without getting wet. They weren’t so careful and I brought two soaking wet but very happy dogs home with me! 😍
A random conversation about a particular shelf/rail combo I’d seen on Pinterest and found to show Mark, led to an equally random recipe suggestion coming up on my feed. That’s dinner sorted.. it was experimental but it was bloody lovely! I think that will become a regular in my repertoire going forward!
Stay safe everyone xx
