Winter is coming, Part 1

The other day the sky was looking grey and ominous. I saw an advertisement in the TES for an English teacher at St. George’s School. I was quite tempted to apply, for about twenty seconds, but then I recovered my senses.

How do you know that Autumn is coming? We drove back to our apartment in Veliko Tarnovo from our new home in Daveri the other day, an easy 45-minute drive, and the trees were the most amazing mixture of colours: the greens, yellows, browns and reds. For once, Irena did the driving and so I had the time and the leisure to enjoy the scenery, the beautiful nature of the Bulgarian countryside, the sort of thing that we used to have in the UK before we built all over it.

Another indication that Winter might not be too far away is that Tina, the naughtiest Jack Russell in Bulgaria, becomes very interested in finding warm places in the kitchen for a good snooze.

You can also guess that Autumn is coming because my dear wife becomes obsessed with her hunter-gatherer tendencies, especially when it comes to collecting lots of walnuts and mushrooms. Our new neighbour, Vincent, has two houses in Daveri and one of them has about 5,000 sq  metres of land (quite a small plot by Bulgarian standards) and ten walnut trees. And guess who had the job of removing the green outer shells of the walnuts that we collected?

Yes, it was me. First the nitric acid turns your fingers yellow and then overnight it oxidizes, so the next morning your fingers are black. The wooden balcony upstairs seems to be a very good place for drying walnuts.

I have invested in a BOSCH 3000 spray gun. Although it was a bit expensive, it is supposed to be a very efficient way of painting just about anything and it is incredibly fast, as you can cover two square metres per minute. There are, of course, several significant drawbacks with using a gun to spray paint, as opposed to using a paintbrush or a roller. First, there is a fine mist of paint that goes just about everywhere, unless you cover up everything with a plastic sheet or something similar. Secondly, most paints that you buy in a shop are much too viscous for spraying, so you have to dilute them a lot, maybe even as much as 40%. That is not too much of a problem with water-based paints, but with other kinds of paint that is real issue. The good news is that I am going to be using wood preservative, not actual paint, and this is much thinner than the standard paints and varnishes. As I will be doing my spraying outdoors, I am not bothered too much if some of the wood preservative gets onto the grass or even onto the stone wall. For the stone wall, I might put something down to cover it up, as I do not want too much of the wood preservative getting onto it. Now all I need is a few dry days, so that the fence will be fairly dry when I spray it. The wood on the greenhouse also needs to be done, but for that I will have to use a brush.

I have finally “bitten the bullet” and hired an IVECO diesel van for the trip to Kalotina and back. We will be leaving VT on Monday morning, tomorrow morning in fact, and we should be back some time after lunch on the Tuesday, so I plan to take the van back to the hire company in VT on Wednesday morning.

The work on the central heating system is more or less finished. The workmen did not need to remove and replace the old woodburner and there was no need to demolish the stonework that surrounds it. They did put in some new big tubes to connect the stove to the chimney and they also made a new access hole, so cleaning the chimney should be much easier in future. (Imagine a Y-shaped tube, but with the branching part at the bottom.) They also replaced a lot of the pipes connecting the stove to the pump and the radiators. Instead of the smaller, narrower pipes, we now have some rather splendid and big copper pipes. Yesterday the workmen actually lit a fire and tested the whole system and it all seemed to work very well. The new pump certainly did its business and there did not seem to be any smoke at all in the living room, as the chimney was getting rid of the smoke very efficiently. Next Friday, the workmen will be coming again, to replace all of the water in the system with antifreeze (we get some cold winters here in Bulgaria!) and to replace the plaster above the stove. They are also going to install new meters, to measure the temperature and the pressure of the water (or rather the antifreeze) in the pipes. There is also meant to be a backup system or the pump, if we have a power cut.

Now it is Sunday afternoon and we have just come back from a lovely walk with Tina, the naughtiest dog in all of Bulgaria. There are some great walks in the woods, not far from our apartment in VT. There is also a splendid park that you have never been to.

I have heard on the news that the situation with the Coronavirus is very bad in the UK and it seems to be getting worse. I read that some schools in Suffolk have closed and there are new restrictions in the NW of England.

As for months he had denied that COVID-19 was a serious problem, refused to wear a mask and cut the funding for the World Health Organization, you could say that it was only right and appropriate for Donald Trump himself to get the Coronavirus. (The Bible says, “Be sure that your sins will find you out.”) But what really shocked me was the so-called “presidential debate”. Absolutely appalling! Trump interrupted Biden 73 times! I used to help to run the Debating Club at St. George’s and I would never have put up with such dreadful behaviour. Yes, I know that Biden is a bit old (he is three years older than Trump), but I have to believe that he will make a much better president.