the village has a pub again!!

All seem to think it wont last, but we keep our fingers crossed for
the sympathetic new landlord, (the one with the glasses on the picture) who - if the gossip has got it right - dont have to pay any rent... Alan checked out the place, and the pleasant surprise is, that beer was cheaper than when the pub closed down...
The other good piece of news is, that Magdi's house was bought by a couple,
one of them is a physiotherapist, who will also practice in the village.
Magdi says, they are nice people like us...
But going back to the pub, it could benefit from a bit of cheering up decor, see pictures...
Otherwise average days; Alan planted the mushroom spores we found -
in buckets of hopefully mature enough manure put in the cellar. And he started to make a wicker hurdle, but alas, not enough willows, as it turned out.
It was a lovely sunny day, we walked to the little sort of "everything for a pound " sale that comes to the village every few weeks. Got a new collinder, the little chinese balm, still no sign of the little self-generating torches. As Alan walked back from the pub later in the day, he had a chance to make a picture of me behaving like a proper pensioner should much more often preferebly,
sitting comfortably with cats, reading, enjoying the last of the autumn afternoon sun...

sun dried tomatoes

nice title to cheer me up, as we have proper English weather, cold and damp, though we did have a few intervals of sunshine, when the temperature gone to 17C.
We forgot about the tomatoes drying in Alan's solar fruit-drier, have the feeling
they are not supposed to be quite this hard and little... but, I'll search for
some applications... the picture shows them in the jar where I put them, after sorting - some had a bit of mold when we forgot to close the slash at night to stop the dew getting in... so the drier is working, just that we haven't got into the habit of using it properly... next year...
the other picture just shows the plants in front of the
main entrance door, the goji plant looks more impressive in reality, with lots of small blue flowers, but no "life-enhancing" berries yet. We sort of enjoy the peace and quiet, the last hostelguests arrived and gone - they were just one-nighters, but nice cheese-loving people; a couple from Italy, but in fact Russian-Serbian, and a guy from Boston, US. I think we won't have much more bookings this year - a wwoofer couple is coming for a few days next week; as they contribute for the heating of their room, they'll be sort of semi-wwoofer-guests, from the US.

Alan collected all the kohlrabis, red cabbages and spring cabbages, ready to start
to work the soil for next year - we might let Anna's geese etc to have a go over, they are good at pulling out the roots of weeds allegedly - but Jozsi and Jani bacsi stopped him pulling up the tomato/paprika/aubragine plants, they reckon more good weather and more stuff to get to mature... but where will I put them?? Both freezers can be pronounced full. Still more goes in than out. My constant nightmare is a meltdown - Alan is getting initially a conventional generator, but the idea is to
run it eventually by alternative ways...

oh, and the third picture is from my holidays; Eszter e-mailed it; made in Gibraltar, of course. And Ronda. Yes, I was there, honest...

(re)turn of the season, weather, world finance etc, etc.

yes, I'm back from Andalucia and a bit of the Cadiz county - from sunshine and
sublime beauty of buildings, old towns and flowers; not to mention the food; had the near perfect holiday
(I missed Alan - just a little bit...) with best friends, sea and adventures...
The weather turned horrid here on the day of my departure (hihi) with the most
terrible tempest ever, that took off tiles from most rooms in the village;
the wind-turbine experiment flew away - luckily not injuring anything;
our cheese-cloths - that were outside drying was returned for days from
various parts of the village. The rain was getting in the loft under the
still intact rooftiles, as it was "falling" horizontally. Anyways, Alan managed
to replace the tiles by 1:30 am over both houses, with some still missing over bits that were too far to reach from inside; I'll ring the insurance people tomorrow.
Alan made red tomatoe chutney from the fallen tomatoes. Otherwise all ok,
I got home to a beautifully cleaned kitchen. Tons more of paprikas, tomatoes and aubragines still to collect and proccess... we have also a bit of a cheese mountain, as Anna decided to ask about the legal dos and don'ts before selling them, and has not talked about this topic since.
the cold is continuing, with more of it forcast. This was indeed a sudden
change to autumn, not the lovely long indian summer we got used to here, never mind.
I forgot to take my camera to Spain - no pictures until the throw-away's pictures are developed - 24 of them only... the one included now was made before I left about a particularily big moth, outside - luckily... apperantly there are 10 times bigger ones in Paraguay, that bite - said Mikeala, the wwoofer who was there and seen one.

too busy to blog

tomato atuff, yellow plums, sweetcorns - that turned up to
be reasonable inspite going in late; still tons of aubragines,
and all those I forgot to mention...
excitement as one tall wwoofer who arrived late at night
run into a sharp bit of the ironwork on the well in the dark - 4 stitches
it took, very picturesque... he did not lose any work-hours, insisted on
getting on with jobs next day, proper wwoofer...
The fig-trees are re-planted as I speak.
Anna's animals are getting chopped, re-arranged in different bits of
the available space in such speed, that we can't keep up...
The cheese-store is building up. The weather is relentlessly hot,
though we had a few cool nights - no longer, maybe the autumn
is not yet ready to make an appearance after all.
We did have a steady trickle of hostel-guests, too,
some very decent comments, thank you. Oh, and Ujpetre had a "village-day"
pictures show part of the culture program,
and we cooled down in the park in Pecs the other day.