The tremendous heat

The tremendous heat continues. Temperatures are in the mid- to high 30s, with not much respite at night. The cats lie around in shady corners barely breathing and Maxim has dug himself a cool pit in the bank. In the hottest hours after lunch the whole countryside has a stunned air. It's almost impossible to work in such heat but here I am, chained to my computer and attempting to edit a book on design. Not getting very far.

The drought has reached emergency levels and the Comune are cutting off the town's water supply from 5pm to 9am every day. Our own mains water cuts off during the morning, when the main tank that serves our area has run out, and starts again sometime in the middle of the night, when the main tank has filled up again. This is enough time to fill up our holding tank — 1,000 litres of water, enough for a day if we (and the rental guests) aren't bothered, two days if we're careful. Today the water never came back and we were down to our last couple of hundred litres, so I phoned the Comune, who said the main tank must be empty. They fiddled around diverting some pipes or something and later told me that our water was back on. It wasn't, and we were starting to get alarmed about how much longer we could feasibly go without flushing the loo or washing. So they sent a very charming man from the Protezione Civile with a just-big-enough tank in the back of a pickup!

Luckily for the veg patch we have access to the spring water that collects in Mario's troughs, though there's less of it this year and Mario uses most of it on his own veg patch via a Heath Robinson system of pumps, cables and hoses plus extensive use of duct tape. Whereas I lug watering cans about and manage to be the only person to have muddy feet in a drought.

Just emerging

Just emerging from a few weeks of chaos. Alessio was off school for a week, which is the longest he's ever been ill for apart from chicken pox when he was little, and although he did nothing but lounge around all day keeping himself entertained on his PS3, for some reason just having him around was very time-consuming. At the same time, Cassie went badly lame. At the same, same time, the boiler started seriously malfunctioning, billowing out huge amounts of foul, acrid smoke, much of which got into the house via our bedroom (boiler room being under bedroom and apparently the floor isn't smoke-proof). At the same, same, same time our landline went down.

I got the vet out for Cassie because she was really limping in quite a frightening way and didn't want to put any weight on her foot. He said her front feet needed trimming and that the soles were bruised. He prescribed Bute (anti-inflammatory). This was a Friday evening. The farrier came out on the Sunday morning, trimmed her feet and put on a swanky pair of new shoes (normally she's barefoot). Alessio asked if they were made of silver and I said no, that's the wrong kind of metal and anyway it would be too expensive, and the vet said, titanium alloy, causing me to choke and wish they were silver. In the event he only charged €40 which considering it was a Sunday morning urgent callout I thought was jolly reasonable. Cassie carried on limping for another few days though, despite the Bute, and her leg started to swell up. The vet came out again and it turned out to be an abscess at the top of her hoof, and the swelling was the infection spreading up her leg. Nasty, but the abscess was a relief, because it's treatable. Since then I've been irrigating it with the hose and disinfecting with Betadine twice a day, and she's had five intramuscular injections of antibiotic administered bravely into the neck with a huge needle by John, who is needle-phobic despite being an insulin-injecting diabetic. Cass is much better now and hardly limping at all though the top of her hoof still hurts her when you press it. She's very sweet when I get the hose out and likes to suck water from it, but she hates it on her feet because it's so cold!

As for the boiler, I tracked down a chimney-sweep team and it turned out to be a hornets' nest blocking the chimney. Must have been in there since the summer, gradually getting more and more tarred up and eventually causing an almost total blockage. Boiler now working fine. Which is just as well, because it has now become very cold here, after weeks and weeks of mild, wet weather when the UK was under a foot of snow.

The problem with the landline was eventually solved after a week and was the fault of the kittens, who must have dislodged a wire in the phone socket. The Telecom engineer wasn't too pleased and we have yet to see if they send us a bill.

Luckily the kittens are unspeakably cute and so escaped all punishment.

It turned out to be the last fine day

It turned out to be the last fine day of autumn yesterday, so I'm glad we spent it among horses (although other members of the family might disagree). We went up to Monte Catria, to the Cavallo del Catria horse fair, which we went to last year for the first time. The Cavallo del Catria is Cassie's breed and once again it was funny and delightful to see lots of Cassies all together. We watched a sort of obstacle-course competition, which was encouraging to me in the sense that although it was supposedly high level, many of the riders were having real problems in getting their horses to do things that I'm pretty sure I could get Cass to do fairly easily (walking over platforms etc). The immobility test would be a challenge for her though. The quality was notably lower than it would have been in the UK at a similar event, with very small jumps which despite their smallness a lot of the horses simply refused. I also watched a demonstration of people working with Parelli-trained horses and was hugely impressed and inspired by what these horses do and the relationship between them and their handlers. Cass only responds to me like that if she can actually smell the polo mints.

The country band with inscrutable line-dancing couple was an added bonus.