Thursday 23 June 2011

It's June Already

Hello to you all, and greetings from a sunny Bulgaria where the temperatures are now regularly in the 30's. At the start of the month we did have some downpours of Biblical proportions, but now it is back to the nightly watering of the garden. It's not too bad as I often end up with either 1 or 2 cats helping me, not that they are very good at holding the hosepipe.
I always like June here, there is always something going on in the garden. At the moment the tomatoes, garlic and onions are all swelling nicely, the cabbages are forming hearts and the fruit is ripening nicely on the trees. I can see the walnuts up in the trees, and in a couple of months they will be falling so we can harvest as many as we wish.
June is the time to sit and watch the Fireflies, as sure enough on the 1st I saw my first one. Sadly there don't seem to be quite as many flitting about now, maybe their batteries are running out and the only ones that get noticed now are those powered by Duracell. We have even had one floating about in our bedroom, we never even noticed until one morning when we were woken up by a thunderstorm and there it was. I am only guessing that it was thunder that woke us, and not the Firefly back firing. I love sitting out on the patio of an evening, as the heat drains out of the day, the scent of the Honeysuckle wafting on a gentle breeze and watching the night sky and the Fireflies. One good thing about living in our little village, there is so little light pollution that it is a star gazers paradise, and my telescope is all set up.
We are back up to our full quota of cats now, with the introduction of Mini Mog and SillyO, both females. Mini had to be taken to the vet as the village Romeo Toms had been pestering her, and at times it sounded as though all of the village cats had descended into our garden. We were told that a cat has to be a year old before getting spayed by our vet in Gorna, but were able to get her booked in with one in VT. So we now have five and a half cats again, the half might sound a bit odd, but Splodge used to be Baba's next door and seems to have adopted us when Baba died last year.
Since our last blog we have renewed the gravel on the driveway, it was getting a bit thin in places. Someone had promised to show us where to get it from in Polski Trambesh, but in the end we went and found somewhere there ourselves. 10 Leva a metric tonne, and only 45 Leva delivery, so much cheaper than getting it from Gorna and closer too. We did have a slight problem with the septic tank as it needed emptying, thanks to the rain. The problem being, who do you call and how do you get their number? It seemed like a job for our Kmet, so first thing in the morning I was round at her office, I must have been early as she was still sorting out the village work parties for the day. Nothing seems like too much trouble for our Kmet, not only did she sort out the lorry for us, she also brought them round and made sure that it was all done properly. Shame that we were charged more than the Bulgarians who also used them in the village that day, but we can't have everything.
I've also had problems with villagers going through our bin outside, but I think that we might have solved that. I put my collections from my daily poo patrol in a doggie bag and placed it at the top of the bin, that didn't work. But phase 2 seems to have, after I cleaned up from a Mini Mog accident and placed it in a carefully knotted carrier bag in the bin, we seem to be rummage free. I wouldn't have minded too much but they never used to put the unwanted stuff back in the bin when they had finished.
They say that things come in 3s, we also had an engine fault light come on when we left the Popovo fair. We drove home carefully and consulted the manual, it was only something to do with emissions, no not mine. Had to wait until Monday to take it in to out friendly mechanic Peter, he didn't have the correct diagnostic lead, but said that we had bought rubbish fuel from a garage, and to put 10 litres of 98 fuel in and then disconnect the negative lead on the battery overnight. He was right the problem has disappeared.
That is probably enough of my ramblings for today, I'm off to enjoy the sunshine and maybe a dip in the pool.