This morning we woke up and turned on the heat as it was quite cold inside. We huddled in bed until the chill was off the bathroom. It was 10 am before we left the house but that is often par for the course when we are here. We went off to Diecimo for coffee and pastry at Bar Bini, stopped to see our friend Anna at the ferramenta (hardware store), and then headed off to supermercato Esselunga for groceries. We ran into some neighbors there and chatted with them. It is amazing how quickly the Italian returns once we are back here.
At home I put away the groceries before we tromped through the fields to survey the grapes and vines. Here is another photo taken from our patio that shows how overgrown everything is. The yellow flowers behind Dom would be over my head if I stood among them and many of the weeds are waist high. If it was not for the paths the cinghiali (wild boar) have tromped across the terraces it would be difficult to get around out there. We discovered that what few grapes are left on the vines are pretty well gone. I took a small bunch inside for lunch. In the grocery store we learned that the cinghiali ate most of the grapes this year but it really did not look like there ever were very many. It seems providential that we decided not to make wine. In contrast, the olives look great. There is very little sign of olive fly and hopefully that will remain the case. The trees are heavy with the tiny green fruit which need to plump up and start turning dark purple in the next month or so. If all goes well we should harvest as much or more than our largest crop two years ago.
The rest of the day has been taken up with lunch, making flaxseed muffins for breakfasts and cleaning the house. It is amazing how cobweb laden the house gets after it is closed up for the summer. Now the worst of the cobwebs and the dead spiders and flies are gone and I can take my time doing further detail cleaning.
Since I am dozing off as I write this it seems a good time to give in to jet lag and go take a nap. Tonight we will go out for a real Italian pizza and I want to be awake enough to savor every bite.
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