Bulgaria with Noodles

The only rock group's concert that I ever went to was (yes, you guessed it) a Pink Floyd concert in London. And what were they playing? All of the tracks from their album, The Wall. And yes, that was a long, long time ago, more years than I care to remember, thank you very much.  Well, now we have quite a lot of walls going around the garden and two big stones have fallen out. Does this mean that more stones will be falling out before long? Is the whole wall about to fall down? Watch this space (or spaces). Christian friends will no doubt quote the title of that famous book about the Resurrection, Who Moved the Stone?

Rain. We have not had much of it recently. The veggie raised bed is looking pretty good because we have been watering it fairly regularly. As for the old wooden fence, yes, we are painting it with old engine oil and the process takes ages and ages and then a bit longer. We are hoping that the engine oil will stop the wooden fence from disintegrating even further. 

Recently Irena and I had our first guest to stay at our house in Daveri. Patricia is a dear friend from IBC, the International Baptist Church of Sofia. I collected her from the coach station in Veliko Tarnovo and we stayed overnight at our apartment in VT.  The next morning, Patricia and Irena did the obligatory visit to Tsarvets, the huge castle on the other side of the Yatra River. On the Monday we went to Daveri.  What did we do? Well, not much. We went for a walk with Tina around Palitsi Dam and then a wander around the old part of Elena, but most of the time we took Tina for walks in the countryside around our house in Daveri, had some nice lunches and caught up on news. Irena and Patricia also watched a few "chick flicks", aka girlie films like Julie and Julia, Florence Foster Jenkins  and A Good Year.  For the benefit of Patricia's husband, Suhail, we also made another video of yours truly chopping firewood. (Although we have missed this year's Golden Globes, ...

You should have realized that, sooner or later, there were going to be some more "Gardening Bore" posts on this blog and that these post would most probably (a) be all about gardening and (b) be boring. Well, if you managed to guess (a) and (b) correctly, then you are quite smart. Well done. Irena's daffodils and multi-coloured tulips have been putting on a good display. Less pretty (and a lot more hard work) has been the long and tiring business of splitting the logs and stacking them next to the house, where we hope the wind and the sunshine will dry them out and slowly "season" the firewood, ready for the winter. I'm not a lumberjack and I'm not OK. Yes, Irena's  tulips are coming along very well and that is not something that I can say about the wooden fencing. Painting the wooden fence with old engine oil seems to be taking forever. The wooden fencing has dried out over the years and now it is very brittle.

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. (...