Sunday 19th August 2018

There are lots of advantages and disadvantages to living alone; advantages include being able to get up in the middle of the night when you can't sleep, make a cup of tea and do some hoovering, or knowing that you need never queue for the loo, and that no one will ever have eaten that last packet of crisps. The big downside comes when waiting for a delivery, as then you are tied to the house and can't go anywhere else. In Bulgaria this is even more of an issue as deliveries are slightly less precise than in the UK. For example, an Argos delivery in the UK will be given an exact day and a two hour slot, and your item will invariably arrive during that interval.  In Bulgaria the best they will offer is that your goods will arrive some time in the late afternoon in August.  Thus, having put my order in for 12 cubic metres of cut and split fire wood, I knew I needed to get as much 'away from home' stuff done before the wood supplier phoned to say the delivery was imminent.

My MOT and insurances were all due, so last Thursday I headed off to Dryanovo to begin the process.  Regular readers of the blog will know how much I dread the MOT, not because of fear of the car failing the test, but because of having to drive backwards and forwards across the neverending inspection pit whilst various tasks are carried out.  This year when the guy did the looking under my car whilst I waggle the steering wheel bit, he announced that I needed to go and see my mechanic about it. (He mentioned this 5 years ago at my very first MOT, but back then it was just an advisory 'if it gets any noisier, see a mechanic' bit of advice). The car's well overdue a service so I will get the steering issue sorted at the same time. Hopefully the entire steering column isn't about to become detached from the wheels or anything!

Despite noisy wheel waggling, the car still passed and so I headed off to the insurance office to renew my policies. This year, for the first time in my life, I've opted for the basic compulsory car insurance only, as opposed to fully comp, on the basis that the car is so old that by the time I've paid the excess on any claim I won't reap much benefit. I'd anticipated making a tidy saving doing this but it turned out the compulsory bit had gone up a whopping 50% this year (apparently due to the collapse of Olympic Insurers). Ah well...

Lucky I got these things done when I did as the aforementioned wood began arriving the very next day. The guy said that he'd drop off 4 cubic metres one day and the other 8 the next, and, wanting to know exactly how much he was bringing, I managed to press gang a couple of friends into helping me stack the wood so I could measure it. Imagine my annoyance when it barely came to 3.3 cubic metres.  Not wanting to attempt arguing on the phone, my plan was to drag him into the woodshed when he arrived the next day, and ask him to explain (and hopefully rectify) the huge discrepancy before allowing him to drop the next load. Sadly the next day came and went and no more wood.

Several days later there's a toot outside and low and behold the next load of logs, alas without the devious boss, but two of his lackies instead.  I explained to them that I'd been short changed on the previous lot, and they then phoned their boss to let him deal with the confusing foreign woman.  His mad excuse was that when wood is chainsawed up and then split, a lot of it is lost in sawdust! I stopped his fantasy at that point and said that no way was that much lost (unless he has some kind of Edward Scissorhands device splintering the logs) at which point he agreed to bring some extra in the final load to make up the shortfall.  Once this second load was stacked it proved to be much closer to 4 cubic metres than the first lot. 

This kind of thing exhausts me. I hate having to deal with problems and when they drag on for days it hangs over me like a dark cloud of discontent.  More days went by when finally he rocks up (in person) with the final delivery. I could see that the wagon was piled higher with logs than before, so clearly he'd found a few extra bits of kindling to try and appease me.  He was till adamant about the sawdust thing, and I wish I'd had the presence of mind to demand that he bring me a couple of cubic metres of sawdust since that was where my wood had gone, but hindsight is a great thing.

All in all I got about 10.5 cubic metres of wood off him; still less than the 11.5 I'd anticipated but not as bad as if I'd accepted his first delivery as standard.  Needless to say, dear Mitko will not be gracing my doorstep with his dodgy deliveries again.

On a much nicer note I finally came up with an idea for making use of the massive steel flue pipe which came out of the old open fireplace I had knocked out last September, and which has been loitering in the garden under plastic sheeting ever since.

I got some paint and primer and turned it into a garden seat and planter.

It's in a shady corner of the garden which doesn't get the sun until about 2pm, so it makes the perfect spot for my morning coffee break. Genius, even if I do say so myself! The open end makes the perfect hidey hole for one or other of the cats too, though they tend to emerge a little grubby from the bits of soot still clinging inside.

Despite the savage swarms of gnats this year, I've been braving the patio at night to have a little go at photographing the stars.  I've only just begun experimenting with the manual settings on my camera (that scary moment when you first click the button away from automatic focus and set sail upon the sea of independent grown-up photography) so these first couple of photos are not the best focused by any means, but I'm thrilled to discover that I can actually have pictures of stars!

This one shows a plane trail and possibly a satellite one (heading top down)

A view of Mars which inspired the night photography session in the first place

Totally over exposed the lit part of the moon, but I quite like how the dark part actually shows up too

I've a bazillion things to learn (first of which will be how to focus on things you can't see properly through the viewer) but it's going to be great fun, especially if I head off to a place with minimal light pollution. Can you imagine what the Milky Way would turn out like!