Back at work!

Now we are back to normal life again but in the new house. It is a much more sociable house especially now when it's warm and nice since the heating was fixed. We are spending much more time together as a family due to the wonderful layout of the house. The snow has now melted but the photo shows what it looked like on the day of the move!



The cats are allowed out now and since the neighbours were away last week they had the chance of exploring the outside in peace. The peace ended this morning when the original cat inhabitant (very small pretty black thing) surprised our cats and we woke up to the sound of horrendous meowing and hissing! She left but was followed promptly by their Staffordshire bull terrier trying her luck through the cat flap only to be frightened away by Tikka, who is already twice the size of a normal cat, inflating herself to huge proportions. I'm sure they'll get used to it! They certainly have got used to the AGA as you can see from Keema curled up asleep in front of it.



The other picture is the view from the patio outside the living room and the last picture is taken from the valley opposite showing our house as a small white dot on the hillside.






Phoned BT up today to get a phone line installed. Tried doing it on-line 1 1/2 weeks ago but it turned out they'd lost that order. Many people have ranted about how impossible it is to get these things sorted out and how many options "press 1 if... or 2 if..." You all know what I mean I'm sure. I didn't actually think that it would be quite as bad as people made it seem but o'boy was I wrong!!! In the end (and this is no guarantee that actually this is over now and that we actually will get a phone...) it took over 45 minutes continually repeating my name and details (when I didn't have 54 different options to press different numbers) to 4 different people (of which two were based in India) until I at least got the impression that someone might be coming out sometime on Friday to do something. If everything goes well, which I very much doubt it will, since I now believe everything people have told me about phone/broadband arrangements, we might be back on-line in a weeks time.....

Finally moved!

Sunday night it started snowing and there were still a couple of inches of snow on the ground on Monday and very cold. John set off straight away (falling promptly on his bottom on the ice just outside our front door!!) to try and grit and chip away at the ice to make it possible for the removal van to get to our new house. It is very difficult access on a dirt road with some steep slopes and massive big potholes. Thankfully after the guys had loaded the van the sun had helped with melting some of the ice and the first load could be off loaded. 4 loads later and we were finally in the house.

Tikka and Keema has slowly settled and yesterday William had his first day at his new school and really liked it. Unfortunately the heating system has broken in the house so we are very cold. The AGA in the kitchen helps a bit and we have used odd pieces of wood that we thankfully brought with us from our old house as fuel for the cast iron stove in the snug so we are surviving! The plumber is coming today to sort the heating out.

Everything is in a huge mess at the moment, but when I've finished unpacking and we have arranged for Internet at the house, I'll post some pictures.

Moving!

Finally! This morning we arranged the final details with the people currently owning the house we want to buy. Because of the paperwork taking longer than expected we are now going to rent it starting from Monday next week. They are moving out this weekend and we are exchanging the contracts for selling our house tomorrow. I'm now going to be very busy packing for the next three days. Monday and Tuesday we are moving and hopefully I'll be back on-line towards the end of next week for some proper country-living blogs! Still I suppose it's hardly nothing compared with the rest of you! All living on your "farms" with many more animals than we are ever likely to get! But it is as close to it as you can get with a 3 million people city on the doorstep!

Snow!

Only yesterday I was drooling over the photos of the snowy winter landscapes on my mum's blog! My wishes were granted! This morning everything was covered 2-3 centimeters of snow and the sun was shining! I cycled into work and through out the day it's been snowing on and off. Couldn't resist taking a few photos now when I'm back at home and now, while I'm writing this, the snowflakes keep getting bigger and bigger!