borrowing the car

    Now, you may think our present car ill fated, what with the loss of £5k in an internet scam in trying to buy it, and the difficult discovery by Alex, Giles and the girls that it had no airconditioning during the maiden voyage across europe a few years ago. But, actually, it's been pretty good, getting 50 miles per gallon (really!) and seating seven on lots of occasions. It's been great to drive and very comfortable with tea trays, cubby holes, vanity mirrors, and courtesy lights all over the place. But, it's still a car. A machine. It's far more reliable than your average person, it even gives fair warning before a nervous breakdown; but this time was a combination of bad timing and bad luck.

    Alex lured her head-of-house from school days for an overnight visit through facebook. On the morning of their train departure, Thomasina ran in saying she couldn't open the boot. Dead battery. Two days before, we'd driven to the coast and back with a full load, then to Lake Trasimeno the previous day and now, suddenly, nothing. 

    My battery charger snapped its fuse as soon as I touched the terminals, and in disbelief, I snapped two more replacement fuses before I believed I had a problem. Hijacking a neighbors car, I took the battery to the mechanics down the hill. They received it, saying they'd check it and then went on vacation for a week. In the meantime, I found a circuit in the car that was also blowing it's fuses. Coincidentally, we also filled the house with four (yes) workaway volunteers all requiring food and trips to the train station.

   At last count, we've now used four different neighbors for transportation and shopping. 

   In the latest twist, our helpful mechanic, unable to find the faulty component, has taken it to another auto-electric specialist. There we are told the alternator is bad and a new one will cost £500 installed, a price the original mechanic can't stomach; so an intrigue is beginning where the estimate is rejected, we retrieve the car, and pay the original mechanic to find a used/reconditioned alternator. But, of course, it's summer and these mechanics need another week at the beach. It all began on the evening of the 13th.

Post Script:   On the 8th August the car was returned to us. Our favorite mechanics, who freely admit to being mechanics and not electricians, saved us $120. I was called upon one Saturday to help retrieve the car from the specialist elletrauto. Nico drove us in to Chiusi, he had a long chat with the specialist, paid $40, put me in the driver's seat and I followed him home, running on the battery with the alternator bits sitting on the passenger seat. A few days later Nico's father returned the car to us at supper time with a new alternator installed $120 cheaper than the specialist. That's how things work here. Sometimes.

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My guitar show (posted by Thomasina and David)

   Rolling Stone magazine is seen as an authority when it comes to the 'Best of All Time.' They keep a list of the best guitarists of all time (Jimi Hendrix on top). The guitar is the reigning Queen of musical instruments. I tried to play one once, with mom. What a mistake. Perhaps the Petersen gene swaps musical talent for something else... or nothing else.
   Lately, though, the Petersen gene may be diluted enough to allow Thomasina the ability to play something. She's been seeing a guitar teacher every Saturday in Paciano for the past three years, seldom practicing (without serious force from Alex); but she actually can play. The guitar teacher, Paolo, is clearly fond of her and thinks she has natural talent. He must exist in a world of constant frustration, trying to get lazy kids to remember 10 notes in a row; or perhaps he really is the most patient man in the universe. Whatever the case, he lately managed to organize a concert featuring his pupils in a collection of tunes dedicated to two local school children killed in traffic accidents. One family took offense, but the other was gracious enough to get the ball rolling. Paolo took it upon himself to organize everything including a strong pitch for a local charity dedicated to child safety. He's a nice guy.

A month ago, I had a guitar concert.

To most of you, that might think that sounds normal and you are probably thinking:

"I've seen lots of concerts and shows, whats the big deal?

But what if I tell you that you're wrong? Going on stage is a HUGE deal! 

Let me ask you something: Have you ever been on stage, in front of hundreds of people and double the amount of eyes looking at you almost willing you to make a mistake?

Well I have, and I tell you that it's no piece of cake.

   The hall was small, but purpose built. Stage, seats, speakers, lights, curtains, the whole deal. It was a two night affair. The students had to learn a couple of pieces each, and the selections were varied between generes with Paulo often sitting in, in fact often leading, and in some cases singing. Mean spirited members of the audience might have called it a venue to demonstrate Paolo's command of the art, but the audience was entirely parents or friends of parents forced to be there, so nobody really complained. There they were. Our kids demonstrating talent. Remarkable.

I've been doing guitar for almost three years and last month we finally had our first concert (if you could call it that). I do admit that I have done close to no practice for all these years but I still enjoy it.

I started working really hard a week or two before the concert and did at least half and hour of practice a night. I should probably have done more because my performance wasn't exactly outstanding, but that's not the point. 

   The only people likely to read this post besides Thomasina and myself (Alex won't go near my blog) is John and Grazia so I'll say right now that a boy named Luca stole the show. He dazzled us with riffs as delicate and inspired as anything the instrument has ever produced. We all sat goggle-eyed while he stole our hearts with his improvisations. Paolo was stunned. Luca, rumor has it, has been signed by four recoding companies who are now locked in litigation over copywrite. The recording in my portable camera has been confiscated.

So the big night came and I was sitting in a tiny room, backstage, sweating and trembling with fear together with all the other kids who were doing the show.

I had to do two guitar pieces and sing a song with my friend Lisa.

Now this is when I ask my self: How in the world do all these people like Obama, Michelle, Pop singers, Doctors, Teachers...get up on stage and talk, lecture and sing without breaking into a sweat and run screaming from stage "Mommy!!"?

I mean seriously, I know I haven't had any stage practice or anything, but you are under so much pressure when your in that spotlight and all eyes are on you.

   On the first night, Thomasina performed a solo classical number and sang a duet with her friend Lisa.  There she was. Up there. In the lights. A nervous wreck. I couldn't have done it. But she did and we were thrilled.

Anyway, the first piece was a solo and it went ok,

   On the second night, she played rhythm in a trio featuring Alessio and Paolo. Remarkable. Of course by the time we watched her on stage we had the music memorized, and memorized, and memorized; and we were confident because she had the sheet music with her on stage.

but the second bit was a complete disaster!

To be continued.... possibly.

underpinning

    Underpinning. I think it means shoring up from below. Foundation work. That's what we're up to foundations?! Talk about an upside down project.
right now. Foundation work. It's been what? eight years? And we're finally getting around to the
    But, yes, foundations. Or lack of them.
    It all started with a damp spot. A damp spot that spoiled the nice new plaster that was to be our kitchen wall. The kitchen that would set us free from so much crowded, time consuming inefficiencies that have plagued us for the past eight years. 'We are experts in temporary kitchens,' I heard myself say to our latest volunteer. We have known nothing but temporary kitchens for as long as our children can remember. And a pantry? We've got plenty of food in storage but do we have a pantry? If we need a roll of loo paper, we hunt around upstairs in the dusty corridor (which is the last place left in this building site for storage) among anonymous cylindrical formations of brick dust until we find something squeezable. Hopefully it's not last years zucchini.
     The damp spot grew. Another one appeared. Then standing water. Standing water cannot be explained away by global warming. Standing water in one's future pantry is... not allowed. So we tried to melt tar paper against the wall. And we tried to will the season to return to normal. Both strategies proved futile. Then, pouring water. Water began to pour into our new stairwell. It poured in from the surface of the wall at about waist high. Just poured in. It ran down the stairs into our wine cellar where we had to siphon out lots of it every day. We were visited by an expert: waterproofing the foundation from the outside was our only choice. We dug and we dug deeply and we finished the surface and we

waterproofed and we protected the waterproofing and we... we came to a point along the wall where the foundation stopped. Oh mio Dio! Now we were not just waterproofing, we were underpinning. Serious structural stuff. The oldest part of the house had a very shallow foundation which we exposed as a rustic wall when we leveled the ground floor rooms and the outdoor terrace way back in the very first summer. Now, looking for a solution to some creeping damp, we've found a very good reason for some creeping damp but saddled ourselves with a much more serious solution.
    Ironically, at the same time, we've been applying for a new building permit and waiting for a new set of permissions along with an engineer's report before we can legally begin work. The last thing we needed was the engineer to find out that part of the house had no foundation. Especially that part where I had already, without official permission, enlarged both the window and door openings (which weakens any wall). By pure dumb luck we had excavated only newer walls when he looked around, but now we must hurry up and get some cement in, waterproof and push the dirt back before anyone notices.
    All this excitement began when we had Charlie and Richie here to push on with the heavy lifting. They could make short work of the heaviest projects (have a look at the photo of a beam replacement on the third floor. They are lifting that thing with a rope, by hand). But now they're gone and in their place are workaway volunteers. Poor things. Down in the ditch with bucket and trowel. It's been a month and a half since Charlie and Richie left. The rain has stopped, spring flowers have finished, school is over for the summer, everyone heads for the swimming pool after supper, the vegetable garden is off to a new start along with the irrigation system, the damp spots are fading, the lawnmower and strimmer are wheezing, but the waterproofing job is still not finished. We are still surrounded by a (dry) moat and the piles of mud have hardened into mountains of pottery clay. With tall weeds growing out of them. And this project is still waiting for its underpinning.

 

irons in the fire

    We've now got ourselves a fine list of jobs. The rough landscaping that had developed over the last 9 years has been uprooted to make way for our waterproofing project. The trenching and finishing touches will require the design and construction of a new outdoor stairway connecting our terraces. The stairway will require a strong retaining wall to keep the upper terrace where it belongs. The bottom of the stair will require a final plan for the old rainwater cistern which sits right where the stair will land. On the north corner we are rebuilding our drains and footing a low retaining wall to outline our little corner patio. And finally, all that soil will have to find a final resting place somewhere, before we can claim our downstairs, main patio back.

    You'd think we'd be eager to get all this over with before the busy spring season begins, but actually we've taken a pause from working outdoors (european weather is horrible this season) and decided to begin constructing two new bathrooms, one on top of the other in the stairwell. This, of course, leads to a final design decision on our underfloor heating of the top floor which requires tearing up the old floors up there to make way for the pipe runs. The trouble is these rooms have been lived in for the last 9 years and have accumulated a LOT of stuff. All that stuff has to be moved either out to the garbage bins or up into the attic and that's what we've been doing.
    It's been a busy couple of weeks. (months? years?)

Isolde's opinion of cleaning the playroom

this post is unfinished and still being edited.

My thanks to Thomasina.
    I would never help my sister clean out her future room, even if half of the stuff in it was mine.
   Well, I might take out my stuff, but not clean out two shelves of books (I think it was about 18 books in all) just before going on a school trip. I mean, I would be packing or looking up places on the internet so I could impress my friends with stuff about all the places that we'd be going to. But Tommy worked all day and would not let anyone help her. When she got back from her trip, she went straight to work. I admire the way she makes everything fun. I'd be putting away books and she would plug her MP3 player into the jambox and we would throw books at each other and sing along to the songs that would be playing and do a few dance moves to them as well. Those 4 days were a mixture of hatred for books and board games, and triumph at the end of the day when we had put all the books in the attic or had managed to drag a heavy bookshelf downstairs. At the end of each day I think we all heaved a sigh of relief and and smiled at our success.
     Our first step was to clean out the bookshelf and we did that in the first two days (we have a lot of books!). We put them all in the attic and put all our toys and games either in the attic or downstairs in our current bedroom, and that took up the second day. On the third, we cleaned the whole room except the huge wardrobe that now lay face down on the floor.
     We swept the floor and at the end of the day all traces that two kids once occupied that room were gone. We had played in that room for practically our whole lives. 9 years.  During that time we had learned how to read, write, draw, paint....

When we took apart our shelves and cleaned out our drawers, we found all the things we had made and done while we were growing up, we remembered playing with the toys that now were doing no more than collecting dust.

It was a time to remember...

a reminder of how much we had changed...

But the room itself had changed too....
Before 


After

Gita, posted by Thomasina Cadell

      It was 4 o'clock in the morning. Somehow, Freddie woke up and actually got herself ready. We had to catch the bus to Puglia, leaving our school at 5:30.
     Weighed down by our suitcases, backpacks, bags and money we climbed in the car and drove to Paciano. In the black of the early morning that was quite thrilling and exiting, there was a huge crowd: mothers, fathers and kids all waiting for the bus. When it finally came, there was a big rush to get our bags into the bottom and get the best seats.
    Seven long hours later we finally came to the first stop. It was a castle. We looked around for half an hour or so and piled back into the bus. The hotel was lovely:  big, posh, three star...one problem...it was falling to bits. The pole that opened the shutters flew off in every single room. The drawers wouldn't come out of their sockets, the lights flickered; and you could hardly fit your leg into the bathroom. But the elevators were great. We were whizzing up and down in them all the time we were there!

      On the second day we went to Alberobello to see the "trulli." They are the cutest little houses with slated roofs and white walls. Our guide took us in one of them. He also owned a food and souvenir shop so he took us there and got a lot of money from us!
    All the driving around in the bus was beginning to get we down. The air conditioning didn't work so the silly driver put on the air heating instead. We drove around for hours in a sauna. I knew that the south of Italy was going to be warm but I wasn't prepared for this! Also, there was no free, fresh water I could get between meals so by the time dinner came I was as dry as a bone.
The same day we went to Lecce and got guided around the town. I bought some souvenirs and only spent five euros fifty. The minimum amount of money that other kids spent was 30 euros, some even managed to spend 160! Mostly the money was spent on candy, potato chips, games and souvenirs, so considering everything, I'm quite proud I only spent 5 euros.

Last day in Puglia: We went to Trani. Here there were lovely gardens with lots of flowers and trees. We were right next to the sea so we could look down and see the waves crashing up the pebbly beach.
Here we saw the cathedral of Trani and a palace. The cathedral was beautiful! It was old and not very decorated. Inside was lovely too. It had huge pillars all down it, an alter at the back and next to it there was a HUGE organ with giant pipes and pedals. It was fascinating!
We ended our three day trip with a big lunch in a fancy restaurant and a spoon of nutella.
And then waiting for us was the dreaded bus to take us home.

trenching

   When Matt and I were growing up, Dad used to take us camping for a holiday. I was going to say 'Mom and Dad,' but I think if it were up to Mom, we would have spent our holidays reading a book or seeing a film rather than feeding a family on a makeshift gasoline stove outdoors in the rain somewhere.
   Dad taught us to pitch the tents and build the camp cots and organize the campsite: all good fun. Once the tents were up they had to be trenched. The trenches were intended to take rainwater away from the sides of the tent before it had a chance to seep underneath the canvas floor and flood our sleeping bags. This was normally done as a precaution, but I can remember trenching and re-trenching in the rain, after dark; and waiting for the pools to form in order to get the flow right.

    Now, 50 years later, I'm back to trenching. Rainwater is finding it's way into our nice new cellar and stairwell. This winter has been particularly gloomy and wet, coinciding with the closing stages of our downstairs conversion. Numerous wet spots and floods have dampened the joy of the occasion, but maybe it's a good thing. We've been forced to take on the mammoth task of trenching the house before we actually got our 'sleeping bags' wet. We delayed our hire of a digger until we got a couple of clear days and it's been a big rush to get the job done before the next rain.
   Two days later and rain will begin this evening. Stay tuned for more photos of me reliving the experience of trenching the tent in the rain, getting the flow right.