Hello Again! We haven’t had Internet for two weeks because the antenna fell down from the twenty foot pole. We had a very stormy night…we heard the rush of the wind through the walls, clattering and banging of things in the yard and then something “big” falling down and bouncing about to and fro. We didn’t go outside because it was the middle of the night and deferred to the morning to assess the damage. It wasn’t too bad; luckily the antenna was still intact and didn’t fall into the big tank of water!
Well, after that day we continued to have wet days. It was too slippery and wet for Gnome to climb up the ladder, climb onto the roof and attach the antenna back onto the pole. We waited until the first bright and sunny day to get the Internet antenna back. Hurray for Gnome for the bravery required in climbing on top of the house. I must say that we were both okay without Internet…no fits of rage or frustration! After two weeks, we down-loaded all 300+ emails and only two of them were semi-important. We realised that we hadn’t missed much at all. We do have Internet but the connection is slower because the antenna might not be pointing in exactly the right direction…downloading is slower so our communications are still not perfect!
Anyway, what has been happening. We did finally get the flood flies; ironically, we were ready for them up until the day they came and ironically enough, I had just spoken to Gnome’s Mother about “…not having flood flies this year.” My last picture was titled Flood Flies 2016 because for the last two years, we have managed to close up in time to avoid them. We got caught out this time…here is a picture of Flood Flies 2019:
We got caught out this time because dinner had not been “ready-made” on the stove as it had been for the two weeks waiting for the fateful day! I had decided to make yum-yums because we had harvested our first giant aubergine (they get to about 2lbs in weight). I was in the middle of making deep-fried aubergine sandwiches filled with mozzarella when the little buggers came winging their way towards our house. Ha-Ha!! We ate our yum-yums in the dark with flood flies flying and crawling around everywhere. Well, at least we ate something nice:
Other news: we have our mower part and we are ready to mow. One slight problem: wetness, rain and puddles. Again, we are waiting for a run of sunny days. Meanwhile, we have been cooking and baking lots of goodies. We even made a Christmas Stollen with our own home-made marzipan! I will write a dedicated Blog post on it but I will leave you with a few enticing pictures:
Stollen with vanilla ice-cream:
It took us days to make this but it was definitely worth it in the end. We polished off half of it and the other half is reserved for Christmas…meanwhile I am pouring generous amounts of our Cacao- fruit Elixir to make it extra special!
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