Bulgaria with Noodles

Yikes! We have had some serious, serious snow and it is still only November. I think that here in VT we had maybe 30 cms of snow. There were lots of branches broken under the weight of the snow and many of the villages round VT seem to be without electricity. So what is going to happen in January and February? The heavy fall of snow has damaged quite a few trees in the woods around our apartment. What a pity I left my chainsaw back in Daveri!

Yesterday we came back from Daveri, having stayed there overnight. Whenever we move from Daveri to VT or the other way round, my dear sweet wife always manages to find piles and piles of stuff that she wants to move from one to the other. Anyway, Daveri was blooming freezing when we arrived, but I am glad to say that our central heating worked pretty well. What was not working so well was the electricity. There wasn’t any. Although power cuts do tend to happen quite a lot in the Bulgarian countryside during the winter months, it was a bit of a shock to arrive in Daveri and find that there was no power. Fortunately, the electricity came back on fairly soon and so we were able to get on with all of the jobs associated with preparing for winter. If you are going to be leaving your house empty for some length of time during the winter months, of course you need to drain all of the water pipes. Before you can do that, you must turn off the water. The next day we were just about to leave

If you are reading this blog post, then I suppose that it means that you must have electricity and, unlike quite a lot of places in the UK, a tree has not crashed down onto your house and you have not been drowned or swept out to sea. The dreadful storm hits us about midday. It was bad. Tina was terrified and part of the roof was ripped off the greenhouse. Two of the trees in the garden are more or less wrecked, so they are going to be chopped up for firewood, and four sections of the old wooden fence are down in the Secret Garden. Two of them are so badly damaged that it was quite difficult to repair them. We had brought the old green plastic garden chair with us when we moved to Bulgaria from the UK, so it was a bit sad to see that it had been broken in the storm.  As for the roof, two ridge tiles were completely blown off and of course they were smashed, as was the special rounded tile at the end of the ridge. The answer to most problems is Vincent and he managed to find a replaceme