ok, one more... Happy New Year everyone!

The xmas card from Jocelyn - thanks so much remembering us, we'll write, honest! - mentioned the blog and that maybe some people still keep an eye on it - so a quick sum up of the last few fairly eventful months: We did manage to sell No 71 to a pleasant German couple - who turned up to be JW to our immense surprise - will be sort of interesting. They won't move here until they finished with a very thorough renovation. The bathroom and well, everything was taken out and broke into smithereens - and there was high power pneumatic drilling for weeks, not only shaking the other house, but this one, too - the last thing that mud-brick houses need - never mind. But we were left lots of time to fairly comfortably remove all our surprisingly large amount of stuff, now piled up mostly in the smoking room,nearly to the ceiling, even though we had 3 trips to the Siklós official, EU built tip, recently discoved, and managed to give away most of the Hungarian and Boully's Hebrew language books. We had a long planned "wellness" weekend, two night in the Sikonda in the Mecsek, 10min drive from Pécs, and we had lovely time, even if a tad more pricey than should have been. Managed to play tennis quite a lot in that wonderful Újpetre court, until Alan had various issues with elbow and foot. Bonzo became an "inside" dog, so he had to have a thorough cosmeticking by a professional who we managed to convince to come here, I did not want the poor old thing having two traumas on one day with the travel. Anyway, he was good as gold and in a better condition than we thought without any fleas and other parasites, unlike Erzsi's badly spoiled Yorkshire terrier bathed and pampered - which had fleas... He has been very well behaved, hasn't done anything wrong - except continuing his escapades when we are away, but would not stay with Erzsi, escapes back home from there... Alan (yet again) fixed the fence - so far so good - we'll see... We went to England in early December to see grandad and to have a pre-xmas with all the kidlings in a rented airb&B apartment in the newly rejuvenated Northern Quarter of Manchester. We had a lovely time, with lots of eatings, drinkings walkings and more eatings, kids seeing as much of grandad as they could. Oh, and Martin and Sharon bought a beautiful and large house in Toronto, thay moved in just a week before they left for Manchester. Grandad is doing fine even though the usual probably age related low level dementia was diagnosed lately. He manages alone quite well, but hopefully we managed to convince him about daily carers' visits. He definitely has all his marbles - hardly any more senile than we are... Well, that's it in a nutshell - meanwhile Alan and both kids are hurridly establishing EU citizenship - the world is becoming a much too chaotic and vicious place (again) than we envisaged in our hopeful youth of the 60s/70s. which reminds me ü we received from Maggie a fantastic photo we have never seen before from Somogyd0r0cske showing grandad and grandma being younger than we are now... Photos are not sorted, you have to guess which of the above has been illustrated... We had to get a car-drive-in built, which turned out to be a much simpler and cheaper procedure than we thought, also at last the front of the house was painted by a lovely local old professional.