Bulgaria with Noodles

Yes, it has come round again. Birthdays usually do. Every year, in fact. We started off by doing some wandering around in the Bulgarian countryside (always a good thing to do). It was a beautiful and warm Spring day, the last day of April and there was not a cloud in the sky.  Not surprisingly, Tina also thought that going for a walk was an excellent idea. (Yes, I know that we are actually holding the doggie in the photos, but really she did do some walking as well.) As usual, we went along the back road, up the hill and past the spring towards Arbanasi.  For lunch, we went to the strangely-named "Architect's Club" and we had some good food and a leisurely al fresco luncheon.  The stuffed peppers with yoghurt and walnuts were good, as were the Chardonnay, the super-cheesy chips and the main dish, a sort of meaty stew with peppers and lots of veggies. Of course, my Chinese readers will insist that I include some more foodie photos, so here we go. Super cheesy chips! Yummy...

Yesterday we had quite a shock. The previous owner of our house in Daveri, being the charming fellow that he is, had complained to the electricity company that we had not changed the name of the account (and yes, that was a bit careless of us). Anyway, two workmen from the electricity company turned up at our house in Daveri to DISCONNECT the electricity. They had already opened the main supply box, in order to turn it all off! Fortunately, Irena managed to persuade them not to disconnect our supply, on condition that we got the name of the account changed. I rushed off to Gorna Orachovitsa, a town next to Veliko Tarnovo, in order to change the name on the account. I had with me the Notarius Act (a bit like a Title Deed in the UK), in order to prove that it really is our house. Unfortunately, the women in the electricity office said that the Notarius Act has my name on it AND Irena's name, so she had to be there as well. This meant driving back to Daveri, collecting Irena and then ...

Somehow we survived the shock of the chimney fire and we also lived to tell the tale after our AstraZeneca jabs. Regular readers of Claire's excellent blog, Auntie Bulgaria , will know that she often has a section entitled "Gardening Bore". Well, just to be completely different and original, I have decided to include a section about what we have recently been doing in the garden and, as I cannot think of a better title for this series of posts, I am going to call it "Gardening Bore". So now you know. Is the video going to work? Well, this is the first time I have ever included a video in one of my blogs and so my guess is that no, it probably will not work. The video is supposed to show me cutting the grass with my new Husqvarna tractor mower. (Bosch never gave me a sponsorship deal, even after all of the free publicity I gave them in this blog, so maybe Husqvarna will come up trumps.) On the garden wall you can see all of the old cart wheels that I repainted. (...

Beam me up, Scottie! We had an interesting experience the other day. It was a snowy and chilly morning, so I put an extra log or two onto the fire. Then Irena said that she could smell some burning plastic. Well, I could not smell anything. About half an hour later, we found that a lot of the tiles in the bathroom had cracked. Well, the chimney from the main fireplace goes up through the bathroom. And the chimney was on fire! Then we started to notice the smoke that was coming from the ceiling. Yes, we have a wooden ceiling for all of the top floor, with big wooden beams. I managed to get up into the loft (the first time I had ever been up there) and yes, we had a serious fire. Some idiot had left a hole in the cement floor behind the chimney and now there was a serious fire inside the wooden ceiling. Well, to cut a long story short, I made a hole through the cement floor of the loft and poured in lots of water. Fortunately, this did not cause a huge electrical problem, even though the...

Several people have tried to contact me through this blog, as they miss my input on the TES forums. Well, the truth is that the TES teacher forums have disappeared and there is a technical problem that means that I cannot write replies on my blog at the moment. For years, I have been scribbling bits and pieces on the TES forums, as I would like to help other teachers, if I possibly can. Then the TES management (or mismanagement) decided to get rid of all of the forums, closing them down and scrapping them completely. To say I was upset by this would be a bit of an understatement. The good news is that there is now a replacement, staffroom.boards.net, and many of the old crowd from the TEs forums have gradually migrated to these new forums (or is it fora?) Including, of course, a smelly old hippopotamus.

Dear John, It is always good to receive an e-mail from you, old friend, and it is even better to get one in these sad pandemic days. We are here in our country house in the Bulgarian countryside and in some ways that is lovely, but really we are more or less stranded here as prisoners. Like everyone else, we are wondering when life is going to return to something like "normal". Well, I have put rather a lot of woodash on my new veggie beds. Maybe I will not be putting on any more! I know that tomatoes like alkaline soils, but perhaps one can overdo things. I was very sad to read about your sister. Do you normally go out to see her a couple of times each year?  I cannot believe two thousand quid for a British Airways ticket. That is outrageous. Perhaps you should do a Michael Palin in reverse. Get a cheapie flight to New York and then take the train across America. I would love to do that. I mean, if it is going to be a twenty-hour journey anyway, then you might as well take a...

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.