Mud Plastering Video - Part Two

Here's the second part of the mud plastering video. Lielle decided to say a little bit about the wasp that she noticed while we were working..... check it out on her blog: http://www.liellesblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/nature-lesson.html

Voditsa Garden Opera

Lielle loves singing and dancing and has recently been listening to music from the the opera 'Carmen'. While humming some of the tunes to myself as I was working in the garden the other day I remembered how when I was a young girl we had a family game, usually while on a long car journey, where we would take the tunes from this famous opera and make up new words....

Inspired by this we made our own little Voditsa Garden Opera .... it's very short, and in Hebrew but describes the abundance we feel here and our wish to share. Enjoy!

(A rough translation to English: Here in Voditsa we have a garden with cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers - green and red! Come eat, share and enjoy!)

Getting Plastered!

As promised - here is a short video about our latest project... replastering the entrance, with mud. It has been great fun and a we learned such a lot from the hands-on experience. For Lielle it was also a nature lesson as together we followed how a wasp was coming along to collect the mud for building its nest.

(For some reason the video didn't want to upload so I split it into two parts - here is part one - part two to follow soon).

The family is reunited!

Dani arrived five days ago! He surprised us all when he showed up at the village about 6 hours earlier than we were expecting him having sussed out all the various transport options from Sofia. Since he arrived hungry one of the very first things we did was to show him the garden and he picked himself a salad. There is nothing quite like eating fresh food from your own garden that has been picked only minutes before! Check out the video above.

We have already got stuck in to a few of our projects: Together we have almost finished the mud-plastering in the entrance (more about that soon), and Dani has painted over the wallpaper in the guest bedroom to at least give it a nice fresh clean look. The time just whizzes by between working, preparing food and eating. We still have the bigger projects ahead of us: dismantling the old summer kitchen and making seating areas outside, organizing the compost toilets and shower room... the list goes on ... but we are doing it all bit by bit and by the end of each day there is always something to tick off the list, however small.

Now Dani is with us we have decided to establish more of a routine to our day and have started off this morning with a bit of homeschooling. Dani is teaching Lielle maths and after lunch I shall sit with her to learn about the upcoming Rosh HaShana holiday and make cards to send to the family back in Israel. The idea is that she will become more of an independent learner and will be able to get on with many of the subjects by herself. Watch this space!

Wishing on a star

Last week was the annual Perseid meteor shower that often gives a lovely display of 'falling stars'. It promised to be a good one as the viewing conditions were pretty much perfect: a new 'early to bed' moon and a cloudless night meant that there would be dark clear skies. The Bulgarian village where we are living is far from a big town and has very little 'light pollution'.

We were hosting a couchsurfing friend from Israel and together with him and our neighbour Dancho, Lielle and I set out a large inflatable mattress in the grassy lane that joins on to our house and laid back to enjoy the show. Although we were out pretty early and well before the peak we saw maybe 20-30 in a couple of hours.

I told our neighbour that he should make a wish each time he saw one and asked what he was wishing for. He replied quite simply that he doesn't feel he needs to wish for anything. He has good health, good friends, and everything else he needs. And this reminded me just why we decided to make this move in the first place. Our lives so often become one big wish list of things that we want. Often they are unattainable or if we do attain them we quickly become obsessed with something else. How refreshing it is to just live in the moment and enjoy what we already have and to really appreciate it.

Let's get this show back on the road!!

It's rather strange that the whole reason for setting up this blog was to document our year away 'living the alternatives' and that only now, six whole weeks after leaving our old lives behind, have I got around to writing about our experiences so far. Since leaving home Lielle and I have immersed ourselves in our new experiences from morning to night, leaving me very little energy come evening for sitting down and writing about it all.

The original plan was that Dani would take a week or two after our departure to tidy up his work affairs and would then be joining us, but the weeks rolled on by until.... TODAY! We received a surprise phone call a few hours ago telling us that he is on his way right now! While Lielle and I have both loved the laid-back time schedules and holiday atmosphere I think that we both feel that the time has come for a little more routine and to start getting stuck into some proper work, both projects on the house and with the homeschooling.

So, a few updates since the last post:

* Never underestimate how important it is to have backup copies of all your important stuff on the computer! Shortly after we arrived in the village I spent several hours right into the night editing and filing photos of our trip. I must have been really tired or just generally disoriented but when I thought I was deleting an empty folder the computer asked me: "Are you sure you want to delete these 34,867 items?" Silly me assumed that it was the computer that was wrong, so I hit the 'yes' button and it prompted me with: "Are you sure you want to proceed as these are too many files for the recycle bin and will be permanently deleted?" I clicked 'yes' once more ... and within seconds saw all my 6 years of family albums flicker and disappear before my very eyes. When I checked out the file that I thought they were all in and found it empty I was devastated. I was never so thankful that I had taken the time to transfer all my photos and personal documents to an external hard disk, although unfortunately all the new photos of our visiting friends on the way to the village were lost. Some of them were able to be recovered when I was introduced to a program that can be downloaded from the internet to recover lost files - but I had left it too late to recover them all. Still, I've learned a good lesson.

* We must be the world's worst (but luckiest) when it comes to leaving things until the last minute. Lielle's passport arrived via France just two days before we left. The even better news is that since we left home it has been confirmed that I was due for severence pay from my last job which I held for around 14 years. The pay has already been put into my bank account and should provide a safety net for the project. Although we knew the project would be very low budget we also knew that it would be impossible to live without any money at all. It's very good to know that we shan't go hungry and can afford the travel costs between our various destinations.

* One of the last things we did before we left home was to spend a few hours on the beach watching the sun go down with the children and the grandchildren. These precious family moments are the ones that I shall most treasure and they make me realise that, with all the learning we shall be doing this coming year, the main thing is to learn about ourselves and each other and to relish living in the moment and being in each others' company.

* Now that Dani is on his way (he should be sitting on the plane right now waiting for take-off!), I am hoping that I shall find the time and a few quiet moments every few days to keep this blog properly updated. I have so many ideas in my mind of things to write about and share.