I can’t believe a month has gone by

Last month has pretty much been all about La D’s mum. La D had to go over again and sort out her mum’s situation. We bought her a one way ticket as she wasn’t going to leave until she had sorted it out.

The long and short of it is that her mum is unable to live at home any more. La D, together with her dad and, with the support of her siblings, have managed to get her out of hospital and into a very lovely nursing home close by.

The processes and protocols that La D had to go through have, to be honest, quite daunting, especially as for more than half the time, all the parties involved seemed to be working on the same objective but with different scripts! Not helpful when you are trying to deal with something like this.

The hospital’s nursing care was not good. La D’s mum was passed around from pillar to post, with no-one really knowing what to do with her. Of course all this time her  physical and mental health was deteriorating as there was little interaction by the various staff. It was a very poor nine weeks for her and for the family.

The nursing home staff are a very different bunch. OK you may say, they only have to deal with people like La D’s mother, but there was nothing stopping the hospital staff to give a little more thought and time to her when she was in their care.

Anyway there is no more to be done.

I flew out a few days ago and we did a bit of family visiting, which was fun. We got back on Sunday leaving a very chilly UK (no snow encountered thank goodness) to return to a cold and very rainy Le Marche. Brrrrrrrrr.

We collected the chickens on the way home from some good friends who looked after them and who gave us a welcoming bowl of soup bread and cheese. Wonderful.

We got unpacked, put the heating on, put the chicks in their pen and then went to collect the Bert.

He was ecstatic to see us, especially La D as he hadn’t seen her for three weeks.

More refreshments were offered to us and gratefully accepted.

Got back home, had a lovely hot meal and glass of wine and then collapsed into bed, pretty pooped. It was going to be a busy day tomorrow too.

Olives

Because of all the goings on in the UK we still have to pick our olives. November is the picking season around here so we are at the end of the picking time.

Well we were out at first light and apart from a quick coffee and some soup and bread for lunch we worked until we couldn’t see the olives dropping onto the net. We had bagged about 140 kilos and reckon there is probably about another 50-60 kilos on the remaining trees. The weather was great. Windy and sunny.

Since Monday evening it has been p***ing down and no more have been picked.

We are hoping that by this afternoon the rain will have cleared off and we can pick the remainder. We really want to get the olives pressed by the end of the week. Here’s hoping…….

Ciao, mantenere la fede