Bulgaria with Noodles

When we first bought the house, we did not really notice them. Then we saw them and said that we really must do something about them, sooner or later. I am writing about the splendid, old-fashioned cartwheels that we found hanging on the garden wall and by wall of the house, next to the front door. The bad news is that no one has looked after them. If you paint cartwheels every other year or so, then there is no problem, but they will start to rot if you leave them too long. The other piece of bad news is that it takes ages to paint them! It is a slow job and you just cannot rush it. The red ones needed three or four coats of paint, but now they do look rather good, I must say.

Well, Trump's second impeachment seems to be over, but the pandemic shows no signs of ending sometime soon. Maybe the Bulgarian government has plans to distribute the vaccine to everyone, but when will this actually start to happen? In the meantime, we are lucky to be able to stay in our country house and keep safe. In these days of the Coronavirus, the most exciting thing that we do is to take the dog for a walk.  The good news is that Tina is a naughty little doggie and she always enjoys herself. It makes Irena and me happy to see our little dog having a good time. The countryside around Daveri, although bleak and bare in winter, still has a wonderful, wild beauty that makes me think of that rather weird and emotional Gerald Manley Hopkins poem: What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

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Just in case you have not noticed, I have not been making a lot of blog posts recently. Hardly any, in fact. Well, the truth of the matter is that nothing much has happened.  We did have some SERIOUS snow, about 50 cms deep and not the feeble 5 cms you get in the UK, a useless excuse for snow that barely covers the grass.   We have now been living at our house in the village of  Daveri since August of last year and that is more or less all that we have been doing. The pandemic is not over and maybe it will not really be gone until almost everyone on Planet Earth gets vaccinated. When will that be, I wonder? The good news? Yes, there is some. Even after some serious snow, maybe fifty cm deep, the Coronavirus is not going to stop the return of the Spring. It is coming.  We had a little foretaste today, when all of the snow finally melted and even the tulips that my dear Irena had planted at the bottom of the garden last year started to show some signs of life. The...