It's a jungle out there!

It's been a while since I've blogged but life has continued a pace, days have merged into weeks into months.It really doesn't seem like six months since we spent our first Christmas in our Irish house.

Hubby has been working hard both on the house and also on our house and garden in UK, whilst I have been working two jobs meaning usually only having one day off every ten days.

It's been exhausting and family and friend catch up time has unfortunately gone by the wayside.

We spent the full month of April in Ireland and the weather was really kind to us again, meaning that we made great progress on painting the outside of the house.

We have just had another week there with equally favourable weather and we've finally finished the outside.

When you compare it to what it looked like when we first voted the place, the difference it makes is so heartening and hopefully it looks a lot more friendly and welcoming than it did.

 

  

                                                                                        

As well as trying to get some decorating done we have also welcomed quite a few guests already this year.

It's great to be able to entertain at last but it does mean that decorating has taken a bit of a back seat, the house is in the sort of state now that everything has been painted and needs its top coat and final touches. To the unknowing guest it looks ok and I suppose it sort of means we don't feel the urge to paint so strongly! To be honest its nice to sit and enjoy it rather than be working all the time.

With such good weather our attentions have also turned to the outside space. The site our house stands on is apparently 1.3 acres. Essentially it was a field with house built on it and as such it still looks like that. Over the winter everything had obviously died off but when we came back this last time, with the recent run of hot weather, it came as no surprise that everything had grown slightly.

It can be a bit daunting but we have enlisted the help of a local garden designer. He runs a local garden centre and we first came across him when we were listening to the local radio station on a Saturday morning. He does an hour long gardening Q&A show and as his garden centre was fairly local we decided to pay a visit. We found out he offered a garden design service and we decided it would be a good idea. Hubby and I like a nice garden but we are no experts. We have a fairly small garden in the UK which doesn't take too much work to maintain and have over the years developed some raised vegetable beds. 

With such a large area of land we knew we needed some help and really felt that we would end up saving ourselves money too. Trees, plants and other things for gardens can be so expensive and we could easily have bought loads of things and found that they didn't grow properly resulting in a large waste of money.

So Padraic from the garden centre has visited and we have discussed our ideas with him. He seemed very positive and we await his first set of plans. Once we have agreed on a design we like he will put together a 3 years plan for us to follow in order to achieve it.  

So hopefully we wont be looking at this 'field' for too much longer.

                 

                  

Maisie has enjoyed exploring the garden. She runs off and hides and waits for you throw her ball, sometimes its a bit hard to see her properly.....

 

A weekend away in Tenerife

I've never done it before and it sounded so outrageous when I told someone I was going to Tenerife for a long weekend that I didn't bother telling anyone else.
There was a simple reason.
Hubby was there and I was going to visit him.
After a truly awful three weeks away at sea, hubby came home and uttered the dreaded words, " I need to go away, can you get some time off",
As hubby works away on a ship he is out of the UK for over half the year, and so is in the fortunate position to be able to claim back the tax he has paid. He keeps a very careful eye on his 'in' and 'out' days because once you have more days in the UK than out then that's it, you can't claim your tax back.
Every now and again, the numbers get a bit low and he declares that we have to go away, now, anywhere out of the UK. That's all well and good if only I could just turn round to my foot patients and say, 'sorry, I'm off on holiday for a few weeks, your feet will just have to suffer until I come back". Sorry but that ain't going to happen! I wouldn't have a business to come back to if I kept doing that. Anyway we are fairly good and plan ahead as much as we can so i know in advance when we are going away and just don't book people in.
Anyway this trip away saw hubby's ship have a major mechanical failure which saw them alongside for repairs in the UK and then him and his entire crew were transferred to another ship, which had been laid up due to no work in May. The company wanted them to bring this ship back out into working order because the repair time estimate on his ship is five weeks! Five weeks is a long time to have no ship working!
So they spent almost all of his three weeks away in the UK getting this other ship ready to sail.
You can't just turn up, put the key in, start her up and off you go though. Oh no, there are surveys to do, inspections, certificates to be re issued, crew safety inductions to do, fire drills, engine testing, everything basically!
So when he came home I wasn't surprised to hear that panicked, "we'll have to go away somewhere, now"
'Well, you'll have to go on your own' I said, 'as I've got patients to look after, they need their feet doing and I can't postpone them all at the last minute,
So he organised a two week holiday for himself to Tenerife and then when he noticed I had a four day gap in my diary he booked me a flight to go out and join him, he is a lovely man, isn't he?
Never before have I flown to Tenerife for a long weekend, it seems rather extravagant really but when I reasoned in my head that if I was to go to London for a weekend it would take as long, I decided that I didn't mind after all.
We had a lovely weekend although it has rained most days, very unusual for Tenerife apparently. We had hired a car so we drove to the other so of the island and enjoyed the sun over there instead on one of the days. Sadly hubby got the dreaded sickness/diarrhoea stomach bug whilst I was there so spent yesterday in bed while I went out between showers to explore a little.
I felt awful leaving him this morning as I knew he didn't feel 100% yet and was going to go back to bed.
Anyway we had a great time together, catching up really. We won't have seen much of each other in this three weeks before he is off again back to sea. The good point is that in three weeks he'll be back home again and it'll be Christmas!!!!! Joy!
But before that I've arrived home to a house with no heating, hot water bottle tonight, sort it out in the morning.
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