Bulgaria with Noodles

My beloved Husqvarna tractor mower, home at last! Yes, it is back. No, I am not talking about the return of my "Gardening Bore", although you are no doubt very excited about that. No, my Husqvarna tractor mower has been repaired and the service centre in Veliko Tarnovo delivered it to our home. Hooray! As you can imagine, it has had quite a bit of use recently and I am pleased to say that it has been working perfectly. There was a bit of a problem with picking up the grass, as the grass was so wet that there was a blockage and it would not go through to the bagger. Anyway, I cleared the blockage and everything was fine. Here is a photo of the spindle, a kind of axle for one of the cutting blades. It has snapped off. As you can see, the mounting for the spindle broke away from the chassis in four different places. (I thought that it was steel, but most probably it is aluminium.) In case you have not guessed yet, there is a clear moral to be drawn from this story. Husqvarna tra

Dear Sally,  I was very pleased to receive your e-mail because it gives me the opportunity to say that I really am alive! Yes, still here and breathing. However, there have been a few changes over the last few years.  With some Chinese friends After five years in China, we left Shenzhen and moved back to our house in Bulgaria, about 60 kms north of Sofia.  Having been retired for about six months, I was a bit bored and applied for a teaching job at St. George's School in Sofia. Irena was quite happy with the idea of living "in town", especially as the school provided us with quite a nice two-bedroomed apartment next to a huge park. The park was particularly popular with our naughty little Jack Russell.  A tiny Tina, before she became bigger (and naughtier) After 18 months of teaching at St. George's, the pandemic came along and so did the lump sum from the TPS, so I asked myself, "Do I want to carry on doing this?" I retired again and a few months later we s

You thought that you were not going to get any more "Gardening Bore" posts, didn't you?*  You were mistaken, alas. Sorry about that. Well, the seeds for herbs that Irena planted in her herb garden at the end of the garden and next to the wall are coming along very well. The irises by the end wall are also looking rather splendid. We inherited the irises from the house's previous owner and Irena replanted them in their new location. The painting of the old wooden fence with engine oil takes ages and ages. The good news is that it is not as smelly as the rather expensive wood preservative that I bought before I learned the error of my ways. But is it going to do any good? The old wooden fence is horribly brittle, rather reminiscent of the Tudor timbers of The Mary Rose , and maybe the engine oil will help to preserve it.  *Do you like asterisks?

When you start to use a log burner, aka wood-fired central heating, one of the first things that you notice is that you need to use a lot of logs. And then some more. Then what? Yes, well, you keep putting them into the stove and they get burned, turned into ash, and then you need to put in some more. Of course, this was not really what you signed on for, but hey, let's just order some more logs. Although buying properly seasoned logs is not too much of a problem in the summer, it is not so easy in the winter. I do not know why I look so happy in this photo. They just dumped ten cubic metres of firewood on the grass outside our house, as the lorry would not fit under the roof of our large front gate. Next I had to put it into the wheelbarrow and carry all of this wood into the woodshed.  And in case you did not know, let me tell you that splitting the larger pieces with a sledgehammer and a wedge is a very time-consuming and exhausting business. After we made the video of yours tru