Washed, brushed and waiting for a trim

Boy is it hot. Seven thirty in the morning and its already 24 degrees - the mercury will probably touch 40 today. The local farmer and his team have just arrived to help us cut the lupins in the fields to use as cattle feed. Their arrival is much to the delight of Wilf and Digby who see this as an excuse for ball games . The two troubadors got themselves so covered in weeds on their morning foray that they have had to be washed and brushed to get the worst of the debris out of their coats. For the next half and hour they will look sparklingly white and fluffy and then revert to their natural dishevelled look as they start exploring again. Later today, if I have the energy I'll give them a summer cut which will make maintenance of the little darlings easier. Their 50% rations diet is apparently having no effect on Wilfs waistline which continues to display a happy and contented curvature.

We sat outside by the pool until midnight last night with the boyz happily asleep by us. There was a thunderstorm far off across the valley in Tuscany. Every so often the night sky would be startled by bright flashes of lightning causing the owls that were nesting in the outbuildings to take wing. I would never have thought it possible that a dozen owls could be in the air at the same time. The sound of their whooping everytime they flew out was beautiful beyond measure.

Later today we'll be going off to Perugia to look at solar panels and wind turbines. We have managed to cut our energy usage by 17% over the last year but I'd really like to get it down by the same amount again.The problem with existing technology is that it isn't really that advanced - solar power is fine in the summer but near to useless in the cloudy winter. Windpower is fine in the winter but completely idle in the long still summer months. The bottom line is that the cost of the two systems is exorbitant . The capital cost is equivalent to something like 130 years of our current electricity usage.