Posted on by activejon

Our first booking made real and other stories..

This week saw the arrival of Ines and Daniel and finally weather so clement I was able to work out in the garden during the day time!

Ines and Daniel were our first ever booking at Barabrith and a delightful pair the are. Amusingly enough it turned out we were entertaining them on the third night of their honeymoon!! We played some pool together after breakfast and then they set off to do the Croatian coastline. They have booked to stay again on their way home so it cant have been too bad for them!
Eighteen burek (pita) might have been a tad excessive but they were a hit with Daniel and Ines and there was enough left over for them to take some away as a packed lunch the next day and for Sanja and I not to have to cook for another 36 hours! Every one of these had a different combination of appproximately fourteen different vegan fillings. In the bakeries of Croatia one is lucky to get a pure potato pita unspoilt by cheese!
I made a Bara Brith tea cake in honour of our first guests, they seemed to like it but not as much as I did!
Having my own pool table and the space to put it was always on eof my dreams. Ive topped that off by purchasing a set of snooker balls and now I am very happy!
Sanja took to snooker like the proverbial duck to water. She kept accusing me of making up the rules to my advantage but then I showed her my KTG Snooker and Billiards book that I was given for my birthday in 1976.
Sanja does like to model/wear/steal some very fine t-shirts from my collection. Amusingly though the larger sized ones tend to balloon in the wind when we go out on bikes making her look like a different being alltogether!
Sanja and her shadow, wearing a non-billowing shirst heads along our scenic route back from the post office.
Donji Budacki’s little chuch is in the middle of nowhere -aka Donji Budacki- but it is on the scenic route that Sanja and I take when coming back from our regular trip to the Krnjak post office. Imagine our suprise one day to find this little grass cutting robot trundling backwars and forwards across the increasingly short neatly cut lawns that surround the church! I was sorely tempted to grab it and pedal off to see what it would manage to do around our estate!
The robot grass cutter up close!
Does this need an explanation? Is there an explanation? Does the word “weirdos” suffice? Nice blue sky though!
There was a bit of wire fence that had been squashed and served as a way to step over and out of our lower field. Sanja and I built a gate in its place, in what I like to call “squatter style”!
I have an idea to replace the rotting wooden planks that are part of my outside staircase with branches from the woods. Sanja and I cut down a few to test the idea out. More to follow!
There I was innocently whittling away on a piece of wood (I was in fact making the shaft of my rake smooth and no that is not a bizarre euphemism!) when one of our dopey hornets came walking up the stick towards me. I say dopey because it turns out hornets are pretty laid back. Sure they are scarily big for a member of the wasp family but Sanja and I have succesfully removed about 9 of them from my room at night by coaxing them on to a badminton racket and then carrying them to the door and flicking them out in to the dark!. True one did sting me one night when it eneded up in our bed but it turns out I’m not allergic to them and so I survived. That was in fact the day I was stung four times by wasps whilst clearing a path in the woods! The hornets have cheekily squatted one of my bird nesting boxes but thankfully it is so high up on a wall with no doors or windows it is not a problem.
We have quite a few apple trees of varying productivity. Some of the newer little ones produce nice red sweet apples which appear to be a favourite of the hornets. Wasps and worms bury in to many of the fruit whilst either still hanging on the tree or fallen. The hornets however leave the skins and eat out just the insides. This can leave shells that look like mini chinese lanterns. Here are three horents busily eating away at an apple!
The cat, Matchka, likes to keep an eye on everything on her estate. And so when we venture up the ladder in to the wooden house’s attic she will often come running up the ladders and join us. She knows she will get a lift down if she asks and till then she likes to sniff around the attic and the survey the scene outside.
They say two heads are better than one but Im not sure it applies in the context of “scary”!