Our temporary house - 27 Jun 2010

Here's a picture of the house we're temporarily renting. As you can see, it's not very large. But it's comfortable and what's even more important, the owner is a wonderful lady called Rossana. She's already invited us a couple of times for dinner and she's so very kind. I'm terribly happy that Christine found this place in the nick of time because I was expecting a lot worse when I was on the aircraft heading for Italy. It's not that we had a lot of choice with our four cats. By the way, if you look closely you can see little Flora relaxing in the doorway. :-)

So for the time being we're living in the village of Sologno, which is in fact visible on the panorama picture I posted earlier (take the picture on the far left and look on its right, almost against the overlap with the second picture, just behind the hill on the foreground). So it's only a couple of miles away from our own house, which is very convenient. Especially when you arrive at the building site, prepared to do some work and then find out that you've forgotten to bring the power plug adapter... hehehe...

The way things are going with our own house, we'll probably have to rent Rossana's cottage until the end of August. But we don't mind. We've got a roof over our heads and we will no longer allow ourselves to be put under pressure. We've had too much of that in the past.

My secret garden - 26 Jun 2010

When the people who bought our old house first came to visit it, they were stunned by its beautiful setting amidst the green hills of the Belgian countryside. Later on, when the movers were emptying the house, they even confided to me that they had always been wondering why we absolutely wanted to move to Italy. They were afraid that we'd very much regret it later.

Well, in order to appease them and all the other people who were having doubts about our decision, here's a picture of our new secret garden. It's in fact a collage of five pictures I made last week on a hilltop, just a few miles away from our house, going from south-east to west. Our house can not be seen on the picture; however, if you take the second picture on the left, you can see a dark-green hill on the foreground. Our house is situated just behind the rim of that hill, also facing south.

From now on, every time when I'm feeling a bit down, I'll take a look at this picture and smile. Or better still, I can just go outside and take a look at the real thing! :-)

Optimism please

I know, I know... I haven't really been myself lately. And the reasons for that are fairly obvious. Take them in combination with my natural tendency to worry too much and my fear of the future and you'll understand.

Then again, I should try to keep in mind that I'm now living in a dream environment, that the house we're restructuring is so beautiful and that I have the most caring and understanding wife on the planet. So all in all, I'm not doing al that bad, now am I? Therefore I'll try to be a bit more optimistic and to indeed live life by the day, as was my intention. Will we run out of money before we can finish the house? So be it. Will we be found guilty in the courtcase over Flora? The love between Christine and I'll never die. I have to keep repeating this, over and over again, and to cast away all the dark and gloomy thoughts that come to haunt me at night.

There is no more fear. There can only be happiness.

To make things right, I'll try to create a new post later on with a spectacular picture in it from our new "garden". If the wireless key will allow me to upload it, that is. NOOOO!!! STOP!!! The wireless key WILL allow me to upload it! :-)

What do you think? Is this already an improvement or what?

Flora - The courtcase

I'm living in Italy for about three weeks now, and I'm already summoned in a courtcase. You'll remember that last February I bought a Main Coone kitten through the internet for Christine because she was in so much pain because of the loss of our favourite kitten in an accident with a car. And that the kitten she received turned out to be seriously mistreated and totally different from the one I had selected on the website. Eventually VISA said that it was indeed a rip-off and refunded my money immediately.

But only days after I had received a refund, the sellers suddenly came back to the surface (they had so far never cared to answer my mails or phonecalls). They had sent me a message to let me know that they would contest the rip-off and that they would contact their sollicitor. And indeed, last week I received a letter from an Italian court, instigated by their sollicitor. It claims that "for an inexplicable reason" I had asked my bank for a refund. You get the idea?

Ss it looks like I'll have to go to court to explain myself. We'll see where it goes because since I didn't send a registered letter (I was convinced that it was an internet fraud and that the sellers would already be long gone) my position is not as strong as it would appear at first sight. As usual, my emotional self took control over my actions. I was so furious about what the seller's done, not only to the poor little kitten but also to Christine's emotional state, that I neglected all normal "protocol" and went straight for the kill. Well, we'll see. At least I have VISA on my side (the seller never cared to reply to the inquirey from VISA either!) and I have a very angry letter from our Italian vet, explaining into great detail the precarious condition of little Flora when we received her.

All in all, Christine and I are not really scared or anything. It's just that it's an additional worry in a period where we can really do without. We're desperate for a bit of good news or a small stroke of luck.

Here's a picture of Flora, right after we received her. Barely weighing 2kg, 40% (!) below the normal weight for her age.

Some progress at last

Yet another week’s gone by and here’s a new attempt to add something to my blog. The internet connection problems are driving me mad, but until we’ve moved into our new home and the ADSL connection has been installed, I’m afraid there’s little we can do.

Regarding the works, the floor heating’s finished and we’re waiting for the topping in terracotta. This has been deferred by a week so once more we’re suffering some delay. Unfortunate, but so be it. We’re feeling so happy here that this small stroke of bad luck doesn’t affect us in the least.

Last time, I already told you about Nezio’s final bill. Well, we’ve just reduced it by another €500,-. For more than two months, Nezio totally neglected to deconstruct the scaffolding against the façade of our house. Probably he thought that he could cause us some more trouble this way. Well, yesterday we’ve done it ourselves. It was a couple of hours of hard work but we managed. So that’s yet another part of Nezio’s bill we’re no longer going to pay for. All parts of the scaffolding have been placed very neatly on the side, where they’re out of the way. Even if it takes years before Nezio’ll show up to collect them, we won’t lose our sleep over it anymore. So here’s a picture of our house the way it is now. What do you think?

In the mean time I’ve also been quite busy to find a (part-time) job so I can earn a bit of money on the side. Christine and I’ve been going about, asking some of the local merchants whether they’d mind if we’d put some advertisement posters in their shops. I’ve made one for private piano classes and one for English lessons. Both were regarded as very welcome by the people who were around, although I haven’t received any phonecall yet for further inquiries. What’s more, I went to the town hall of Castelnovo ne’ Monti, the small city in the heart of our region. I offered my services as an English teacher and asked whether we could not organize something to the benefit of the local community. The lady who’s responsible for education was very happy with my initiative indeed and she’s going to discuss it with the rest of the council. She assured me that she’d let me know as soon as possible. I’m really looking forward to this! Even if it’s for perhaps only 2 evenings per week.

And for the rest… The weather’s just fabulous and we truly feel at home in this absolutely magnificent country. On Wednesday and Thursday we’ve had some rain and also today it’s a bit cloudy. But even when the weather’s not so nice, the views you get around here are stunning, wouldn’t you agree?

A new life in Italy

After two weeks in Italy, the least you can say is that I've settled realy well. In spite of all the difficulties. Life over here just takes a different pace than in Flanders. For example, the whole morning and part of the afternoon I've spent chopping and sawing scrap wood which we can use for our stove next winter. And after that... well... a relaxing pint of course. So you can't really say that I've come here to sit on my backside and do nothing at all. In fact, the work Christine and I've done over the last couple of days was quite hard. But it gives so much satisfaction to see how slowly our yard is cleaned up. Christine also already painted the wooden beams above our windows in a special wood varnish.

Regarding the house itself, since Thursday they started to lay the floor heating. Probably next Friday the concrete topping will be laid and then we only need the floor tiles for the ground floor and the windows and front door to make the house habitable. Christine had the idea to also install a small gas heater so we'd at least have hot water, given that we can't really pay the expensive solar panels and hot water collector for the time being. I can alway serve as a backup system in case the solar panels don't deliver enough or when it would be ludicrous to light our wood stove during a hot summer night. The thing is that gas is very expensive in Italy. There is no network at all in the mountains so we're obliged to install a container and have it refilled when it's empty. Fortunately, the gas company will install the container free of charge, but this doesn't take away the fact that the gas itself remains much more expensive than in Belgium. Anyway, at least we can start living in our new house.

By the way, the temporary house we're currently living in is small, but very cosy. And the owner is a very nice lady who's already made us dinner twice. We truly feel at home here and never want to go back anymore. Just before I left, people have warned me and even said to me thatI'd be back in Belgium before I knew it. But when I look out of the window right now, I can only smile and say how wrong these people have been. Even if our house would collapse and we'd lose all of our money, I'd still prefer to stay here. True happiness lies in little things. And there are many of those little things over here.

Christine's the best!!!

First of all, again my apologies that I don't write too often these days. It's got everything to do with this bloody wireless internet connection over here. During most of the day, the connection stays on for only a few seconds, or minutes at most, after which I have to restart. Probably because the wireless network is inadequate to accomodate all clients. Very tedious...

But here we are. Also I'd like to mention that our oldest cat, Canelle, has indeed returned quickly afterwards as we thought. She just wanted to go outside but she's never too far away. We trust her enough to let her out whenever she wants to. Our other cats, and especially our Norwegians, is a different story and we want to keep them indoors for the time being. They're too young and inexperienced and might wander off too far. But when we'll finally have moved into our new house, they'll have all the outdoor space they'll need for themselves and we won't have to worry anymore about traffic or cat-unfriendly people.

But I actually wanted to talk to you about Christine. Followers of my old blog may remember that together with that bastard of a geometer, Danilo, we also got into trouble with Nezio, the contractor. He's a close friend of Danilo's and then again wanted to continue the works and then agian not. So we decided to stop the cooperation and hire somebody else, much to his frustration. He sent us a final bill of €39.000,-. A lot of money for the work we still hadn't paid him for. So Christine put it under a magnifying glass. Eventually it turned out to be full of things that Nezio had double- or overcharged. And most important of all, he had "forgotten" about the arrangement he had with Christine, i.e. that all the many hours of hard labour that she had done would be subtracted. This made her even more determined to reduce that bill as much as possible. Eventually, she brought it down to... €25.000,-. Much more reasonable. Now we only have to see how Nezio will react. But given the fact that Christine has calculated everything thoroughly and that in fact nothing can be said against it, Nezio will probably not have any other choice. And in the end, Christine's still been very kind as she only counted €9,- for every hour she worked and she didn't even count all of the overtime she did. More than reasonable, don't you think?

The first week

It's been a week now since I moved to Italy and it's amazing how fast one can get used to a new home. Especially in my case. No, I never want to go back anymore, thank you! Every day when I'm wandering through these magnificent surroundings I almost start to cry of happiness. With every different shade of sunshine, the hills and forests seem to alter colour and appearance as well, just like in the story about the ever-changing mosaic which I told ou about in my former blog. It's all so incredibly impressive and makes you feel so humble against nature's beauty.

On top of that, all the people here are so friendly. When the lorry arrived with our furniture last wednesday, we certainly weren't short of people to help us with storing everything in the warehouse we received. Yes, received. It was offered to us by the kind lady who owns the local grocery shop. Mind you, we bribed her with a box of the finest Belgian chocolates though!

Our temporary home is small. It's perhaps only one quarter of our former Belgian house and we don't have a garden. This is really getting onto our cats' nerves. Especially Canelle, the cat we saved from an asylum two years ago, is getting more frustrated every day. She's already tried to run away twice and as I write this, she effectively disappeared. Don't ask me how she managed it, but she's gone. Then again, we have high hopes that she'll eventually return. She's quite smart and experienced and we don't believe she would just run off into oblivion. We're keeping our fingers crossed...

I sincerely hope that soon we'll have a better internet connection so that I can upload a couple of pictures. I'm sure you'd be impressed as well...