Tag: cats (Page 3 of 4)

Ground-breaking news

2 November, 2015 / Sirem

Since the last post a lot has happened. So many months of planning, waiting and worrying have finally started to bear fruit. Such a relief!

For some reason the council insists on the entire plan being printed on one long sheet. This leads to much slapstick comedy when the wind is blowing.

The first job was heartbreaking but necessary: we had to cut down some fig trees. :( We lost about fifteen of them and had to relocate three olive trees. Olive trees, we were told, are very tough and will tolerate relocation as long as you prune them hard and give them lots of water afterwards. Time will tell whether this advice is correct.

Looking up the block at some of the lost fig trees that had to go in order to make way for the foundation slabs.

The second job was improving the driveway. With last winter’s rains we had some erosion and it had become more like a goat track than a road.

Our driveway: the “before” photo.

We needed to do something if we were going to get heavy machinery, cement mixers, and delivery trucks up there.

Excavator starting on the driveway. Jason really wanted a turn but was not seen as responsible enough.

One of twelve truckloads of gravel to make a nice compacted base for the drive.

The “after” photo: from goat-track to motorway. We like it a lot and it’s so wide that it immediately solves some of our future parking problems.

A view from the top, showing how the drive curves around to allow access to the cafe. This was about halfway through. More truckloads of gravel were dumped on the right side of this picture.

Then the excavator moved up the hill to start digging out the soil for the three buildings’ foundations and the pool.

Digging out the base for the cafe and first two rooms.

We had mountains of soil that we didn’t know what to do with. At first it just got pushed over the edge of our hillside, but there was so much of it we were in danger of causing an avalanche onto the road. So we had about 20 lorry loads worth of soil taken away, and lots of neighbours turned up with tractors and helped themselves to a bit. We did keep some, though, for the mud plaster.

“And you could have it all, my empire of dirt…”

Rise of the machines.

The guys worked incredibly fast and before we knew it they were putting formwork, steel reinforcement, and the first loads of concrete in.

Early layer of concrete. This not the real slab, just a bottom layer to make a good surface for the concrete formwork.

Early layer of concrete. This not the real foundation slab, just a bottom layer to make a good surface for the concrete formwork.

Pool starting to take shape.

Formwork for the second bungalow. One day this will be rooms three and four.

Underlay slab for our house, right at the top of the hill.

Solid reinforced concrete beams that will support the restaurant. The step up in the slab is so that rooms one and two will sit a little higher and not cut too deeply into the hillside.

Reinforced concrete beams that will support the restaurant. The step up in the slab is so that rooms one and two will sit a little higher and not cut too deeply into the hillside.

Improvised tent so there’s somewhere dry to store gear and make tea on rainy days. The workers were sceptical of Jason’s plan to build this out of scrap wood but so far it is holding up.

Panorama from the top of the orchard, looking west. Click for full size.

Another big job that is now done was to lay 66 metres of concrete pipe in the ditch next to the main road and then cover it over. The idea is to carry away the rain water that comes down the hill, and also to stop our new driveway from acting as a dam. Each pipe section was 1.5 metres long and 80 cm in diameter. I am so glad that this job is over now as it was the scariest and most dangerous of all the work done so far. Watching the excavator lift and swing a very heavy concrete pipe in the air, hanging from a chain, 44 times in succession while traffic was still passing on the road was very nerve-racking! I don’t think we remembered to take a photo of this job because we were so busy watching it nervously.

“Before” photo, taken in March 2014.

After: you can’t see it, but there’s 66 metres of 80 cm concrete pipe buried on the right-hand side of the road there. Smoothing it over afterwards makes more handy parking spaces.

During these exciting times we had my parents and Jason’s uncle John and aunt Marg staying with us. In the evenings one or two drinks were had in order to celebrate the start of the building work.

John and Marg inspecting the site.

Jason tells me I have to add cat photos to a blog post or people will complain. So, here they are. The kittens are getting bigger every day. They have names now, but we are still trying to adopt them out.

Panda.

Pablo.

Panini.

Coco.

All together.

And finally, a big thanks to JP who sent us a wonderful 24mm lens that took most of the photos above. Cheers, JP, we love it!

Planning permission is go

22 August, 2015 / Jason

Big news: the council has finally granted planning permission for our revised four-hotel-rooms-plus-a-house idea. Like every bureaucratic process it took longer than we expected or wanted, although we did get some reassuring feedback on the structural soundness of our designs. Anyway, we’re really glad it’s all sorted, and now we can move on to getting quotes for the concrete-slab foundation work and the pool.

Now we can build all this!

A while ago we passed our one-year anniversary of being here. It would be great if more had happened up in the orchard by now — at the moment it’s just the fig trees, dry grass, marker pegs, and one steel telegraph pole with a light and a power connection box. But we’re optimistic that with all of the red tape out of the way, some earth should start getting moved around very soon.

One thing that we did manage to finish before the one-year mark was the kitchen. I know it has been drawn out over many blog posts, but it is now finally, properly finished. Here are some shots showing the tiled worktop and the finishing touches on the woodwork.

High-angle view of the kitchen. Hope everyone likes the tiles.

The kitchen sink view looks out into the street at tractor-wheel height.

The kitchen sink window looks out into the street at tractor-wheel height.

Free-standing cabinet between the fridge and the door. Plus added cat (Maya).

My mum and dad came to stay with us for the first half of August — we are trying to talk them into coming at a less outrageously hot time of year for their next visit. But it was good seeing our progress through their eyes, as they were last here almost exactly a year ago. Dad was extremely helpful in the garden, as he was the first time around. And they talked us into taking a seaside break for a few days: the first nights we had spent away from this place since we arrived. (A huge thank you to Sirem’s sister Çisem for holding the fort and feeding all the animals while we were away.)

We spent three nights at the Panion Park Hotel in the coastal town of Guzelçamlı, close to the entrance to the Dilek National Park. It was a really pleasant, quiet hotel and we can recommend it. They have a lovely pool and an equally lovely bar by the pool. They’ve only been open for six years and we were impressed with how well their landscaped garden had come along. Lots of ideas to file away for future reference.

The view from our room in the Panion Park Hotel. Great garden.

What else have we been up to? A recent carpentry project was the door to the second bedroom. The old door was a bit of a mess and we had to lock it with a very amateurish chain and padlock around the handle. More importantly, the doorway was much lower than it needed to be, with a small window over the door for no good reason. More than one taller visitor had smacked their head on the low lintel (sorry, Mark). So we came up with a plan for a full-height door that included a central window with shutters for extra ventilation in summer. Sketchup again, of course. We think it all turned out OK.

New door from the outside, shutters closed.

From the inside: going for a medieval look with all the black iron hardware.

And with the shutters open to let in a breeze.

The weather has been really hot, of course, but never humid. We found that the sun was tracking so far north that we weren’t getting enough shade on the sedir in the middle of the day. So we’ve rigged up some sheets to make it feel more pleasant.

Dealing with the heat: sheets as shadecloth.

The grape vines do well in all that sun.

Summer also brings the insect population to life. (Which is mostly fine, honest: even the wasps have their role in pollinating the figs.) One day we found some ants struggling to lift something up the wall and into the garden. Turns out they had stolen a cat biscuit, and were cooperating admirably to get it back to the nest.

The ant helpfully standing on the biscuit must be the one in charge, surely?

And to conclude: some readers will be unsurprised to learn that our four kittens have not found new homes yet. We still haven’t named them, because we are clinging to the (perhaps foolish) belief that we’re going to successfully give most of them away. In an effort to show potential adopters how cute they are, here are some photos at 2 weeks and at 5 weeks. Incredible how much the ears grow over that time.

The tabby one.

The black one.

The white one.

The grey one (who Sirem refuses to give away).

Summer: postscript

11 July, 2015 / Jason

As promised, some photos of the finished furniture that Joe helped to make. The desk is great for days when it’s too hot to sit inside with a PC exhaust fan going, and the cupboard is built like a tank and will outlast us all.

Portable computer desk

Cupboard for the verandah

So much room for shoes, pet food, vacuum cleaners, etc.

Also, some gratuitous kitten photos.

The kittens are getting bigger…

… and cuter.

Summer

3 July, 2015 / Jason

In another few weeks, we will have been here for a year. Predictably, the time has flown past, and I suppose I should be more worried that we don’t have any new buildings yet. But I’m still happy with our progress: we’re getting there. The bureaucratic checklist is nearly complete and we should be able to break ground on the foundations for the cafe and bungalows soon.

In the meantime, summer has definitely arrived. Afternoon temperatures are in the mid 30s, and we can go for a couple of weeks without any rain. The sea has warmed up and an afternoon swim at Pamucak Beach or in the Dilek National Park is always tempting.

Visitors continue to give us a good excuse to get out and discover all the fantastic places around us. I know I keep going on about ruined Ionian cities, but there really are dozens of them around here. Priene was one we hadn’t seen before. It sits up on a bluff overlooking the mouth of the Meander river, and is only a few kilometres from the site of the Battle of Mycale where the Greeks destroyed a retreating Persian force in 479 BC.

The theatre at Priene.

Sirem among the columns.

Priene is big enough and famous enough to have a ticket office and a very reasonable admission charge, but like Tralleis and Magnesia, we had the place pretty much to ourselves. It is a great spot to visit on a hot day, because the elevation means you get a breeze coming in from the sea, and the encroaching pine forest gives a lot more shade than at other more exposed sites.

View from the ruins of Priene out across the Meander Valley.

Priene is also close to the half-abandoned, half-restored village of Eski Doğanbey, so we dropped in for another visit. I can’t help taking photos there.

Blue shutters in Eski Doğanbey.

Renovation project, would suit first-time buyer.

Our guest that day was Mark, an old friend of mine from Australia. Here he is getting comfortable at Priene. Mark was only here for a few days but I hope we helped him to unwind.

A game of thrones: Mark briefly appoints himself king of Priene.

The day after Mark left, Joe arrived for a two-week stay. Joe is a friend of ours from Southampton, and a former work colleague of mine. He wanted to get some sun before an imminent move to Norway. Anyone considering visiting us in the future should know that Joe has set the bar very high in terms of helping to build things. He helped do the last of the cabinet doors in the kitchen, as well as a large (and very heavy!) storage cupboard for the verandah, and a computer desk on wheels that makes it much easier to watch movies at night in the courtyard. Joe, thanks again.

Joe enjoys a mug of refreshing ayran (yoghurt, water, and salt) at a lakeside restaurant.

The storage cupboard and the computer desk deserve photos but I’m going to wait until they’re sanded and stained, etc., so Joe’s efforts get the best possible presentation. Also, for anyone who wants to see Ephesus but only has 37 seconds to spare, I give you Joe’s GoPro video of his visit.

Most of our visitors have arrived at Izmir airport, about an hour to the north, but Joe flew into Bodrum/Milas, which is south of us and a little further away. The drive down there is interesting, as the middle section runs along the shore of Lake Bafa, which was once part of the Aegean Sea until the Meander River silted up and blocked the connection.

Sunset over Lake Bafa.

Fish restaurant on the lake.

On the way back we saw brown tourist signs for “Euromos”, a city we’d never even heard of. Very glad we stopped though, as we got to see the sun setting behind the Temple of Zeus.

The Temple of Zeus at Euromos.

Summer has also brought a different species of visitor. We try to be responsible pet owners and get all of our animals spayed as soon as they’re ready. But our youngest cat, Sookie, got pregnant sooner than expected and we missed our chance. (If your vet tells you six months, do it at five.) So we are now the proud and slightly alarmed grandparents to four new kittens.

The proud mother with her kittens, less than 24 hours old.

We are of course looking for good homes for them all. It would be crazy to keep four more cats. Totally crazy. Out of the question…

Winter brings more animals

10 February, 2015 / Jason

It’s February already. How did that happen?

I have to confess that January wasn’t our most productive month. We’re not too worried though. More than half of our rainfall comes between December and February, and on rainy days there’s nothing for it but to sit inside and drink coffee and watch movies. That should change in the future: as we empty out the last of the moving boxes in the barn, there’ll be more space to do carpentry in there. But for now the courtyard is our workspace and so if it’s wet, we have a quiet day.

The bigger confession, and maybe another reason for low productivity, is that our animal population has grown again. I know, I know: that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be building a hotel / fig-farming empire, not playing pet rescue with all the local strays. The problem is it’s very hard to say no when the animal in question is cold and wet and hungry and outside your front gate.

Meet Zeliş, our new dog.

This is Zeliş. We found her out in the street, looking dangerously thin. We tried feeding her by the roadside for a while, but during the January cold snap we were worried she might freeze. She didn’t have a protective layer of fat, and she seemed to have had a tough time in general: just a very skinny, submissive, and sad-looking dog. So she went from being a street dog to a yard dog, like Zeytin before her.

Zeytin and Zeliş at play.

Luckily the two of them get on very well. Zeliş is a kangal which means she’s been bred for guarding sheep and fighting off wolves (!). She’s already big and she’s going to be huge once she puts some weight back on. But, luckily for us, she is extremely sweet-tempered. She barks if there’s a noise in the night, which is good for security I suppose, but I think an actual intruder would probably get licked to death.

Sirem with Zeliş. Dogs love hugs.

Unfortunately for Zeliş, her previous owners chopped off her ears. There’s a misguided belief around here that says you have to do that so the dog will hear better and won’t have floppy ears for another dog or a wolf to latch onto in a fight. It’s a real shame, but we try not to make her feel self-conscious about it.

Sookie the kitten. Could you reject this animal?

We also have a new kitten, Sookie. We did try really hard not to have a new kitten. We told the neighbour who brought her to us (as a crying wet little bundle in the middle of a thunderstorm) that this was not on, and never to do it again. We even found a new owner via the internet, and drove Sookie to Izmir to meet her new adoptive family. She lasted about four days. Bothering the other cats in the apartment, constantly growling, and crapping everywhere. She seemed to be of the firm opinion that our place was her real home. So we drove to Izmir again and brought her back.

Sookie yawning.

Sookie stretching.

Sookie is named for one of the characters from the show True Blood (if you’re a fan of that show, note that I am increasingly thinking we should have called her Jessica because of how much she enjoys biting people). She has almost exactly the same calico colouring as one of our other cats, Sutlaç, who is also from the village. So we’re thinking they’re probably sisters, and somewhere around here is a mother cat who really needs to be snipped.

Sookie’s nephew (?) Sam looking all grown-up and handsome. Don’t tell the other cats but I think he may be the best-looking one.

All the other cats are doing well, although some of them think Sookie is a bit of a pain. There’s still a bit of an apartheid system with the Turkish cats living outside in a heated cat-box and the English ones tending to come inside, but the boundaries are blurring now that we have installed some cat flaps in two of the bedroom doors. We will see how long the outside cats take to figure out that they can potentially be inside cats now.

Sookie’s other nephew Sezar looking intrepid.

Donkey is feeling a bit morose.

We’ve also adopted a donkey!

No, I’m kidding. We are not quite that crazy. This is a picture of our neighbour’s donkey grazing on the side of the road. She doesn’t look too happy but I guess donkeys usually don’t.

In other more practical news, we have made some progress in the kitchen. But I’m determined to stop showing you embarrassingly incremental photos of that and just get to the end of the process as soon as we can. In the garden we’ve started building a big hügelkultur bed: basically a raised bed with lots of old, rotting wood underneath the soil to act as a water reservoir in the drier months. We’ve fixed some leaks in the barn roof by taking sections of the old Roman tiles down, cleaning them, and replacing the cracked ones. And we are only one more tiling and grouting session away from having all three bedrooms renovated.

Finally, after being told off by our postman for not having a letterbox, we built this one.

Our new letterbox.

Although we’ve had a run of rain over the last week or so, I don’t want to give the impression that there are no sunny days. In late January Sirem’s sister Çisem was visiting so we took her over to Kuşadası to see what the beachfront promenade looked like in winter. Some of the cafes were still open and we had a really nice lunch.

Winter sun at the beach with Çisem.

Taken from the same spot: a view of the Greek island of Samos.

Sunset in Kuşadası.

A few days later we had a chance to see one more of the amazing ancient Greek sites in the area. We were in Didim, a seaside town about an hour down the coast, and stopped off at the Temple of Apollo, which was the religious centrepiece of the ancient city of Didyma. Most of the other ruins we’ve seen are in splendid isolation out in the countryside, but the Temple of Apollo just rears up from its surroundings in suburban Didim. Incredible stuff.

The Temple of Apollo.

It must have been spectacular in its day…

Not in the script

12 January, 2015 / Jason

We moved to this warm, sunny corner of Turkey partly because we were tired of UK winters. You can therefore imagine how thrilled we have been to get a blast of cold weather from Siberia. On the coldest day, the maximum was only two degrees, and at night it got down to minus seven. I know that’s nothing for readers from places like Canada or Scandinavia, but it felt pretty cold to us! Very tough conditions for the local stray dogs and cats, too, so we’ve been trying to help them out as much as possible.

Snow on the peaks.

People in the village are telling us it’s the coldest weather they’ve seen for fifty years. Neighbours have lost crops like spinach and broad beans, which is a shame — these weren’t crops for sale, but to make their winter diet a bit more interesting.

We switched bedrooms to help stay warm: we had been in one of the newer farmhouse rooms as it’s a bit larger, but moved back to the small bedroom in the old house. Compared to the basic breeze-block construction of the newer buildings, the half-a-metre-thick mud-brick walls of the old place make it so much easier to stay warm. Which is probably a good sign for what we can expect from our straw bale walls in winter.

The truck has coped well with some winter mud.

The truck has coped well with winter driving conditions.

I suppose the good news is that this was just a freak weather event, and not something we should expect every year. And the dusting of snow on the hills and mountains did look great.

Not so much snow in this shot, but you can see how green the landscape looks from all that winter rain. That’s the town of Selçuk in the distance, with part of the ruins of Ephesus in the left foreground.

Yesterday things turned warmer so we got some work done, but today there’s been a big downpour of rain: we’re expecting about 30 mm. A great excuse to sit in a warm room with a coffee and write blog posts.

Sam looking fat and happy: the warm-milk ration has been increased because of the cold weather.

Marlowe drinking from a bucket and thereby doing his best Nosferatu impression.

Kitchen progress

24 November, 2014 / Jason

I’ve lost the last couple of days to flu — nothing serious, but Sirem has been very patient with the usual tragic man-flu whining. So this seems like a good moment to take stock with a progress report.

Currently, the kitchen is our big priority. As usual we’ve sat down with Sketchup to figure out what we want to build. Because the room is not that big, and there’s only the one door, we’ve found it much easier than when we designed our kitchen in Southampton. Basically the strategy is to build as much worktop space as possible and then to cover every available bit of wall with cupboards. Nobody ever complained that their kitchen had too much storage space, right?

Planned kitchen layout in Sketchup.

The door is at the back of the picture, and that slot on the front left wall is an old fireplace where we plan to keep the gas bottles for the stove. The window ends up traditionally placed over the sink, front right. The microwave and our small oven get stacked on top of each other, and there’s a chunk of bonus storage space above the fridge.

So far, we’ve started on some of the framing work, and found some 18mm plywood to serve as a base for the tiled worktops. We’ve been lining things up out in the courtyard to check that it’s all going to fit. Once we take the pieces into the actual kitchen, there will be a lot less room to move.

Kitchen cupboards and worktops starting to take shape. None of the kitchen walls are at right angles to each other, so there’s some fiddly bits with the carpentry.

At the risk of appearing to have gone full red-neck, here’s a shot of the nail guns I mentioned last time. They may look excessive but they’ve been extremely handy in putting together framing projects like the kitchen. Of course sometimes you have to use screws, but when you can get away with nails, the power to get twenty of them into the work piece inside a minute is just amazing. The little one, the staple gun, has probably been the big surprise: you can use it to put together something like a mitre-cut picture frame very easily, and it’s great for pinning up wire mesh for plastering.

Nail guns: the one on the left fires nails up to 5cm long, and is moderately scary. The one in the middle fires staples deep into timber, and is not so scary but will still hurt you. The one on the right fires 9cm nails and is absolutely terrifying.

This is what a box of 5000 wire-coiled 90mm nails looks like.

This is what a box of 5000 wire-coiled 9cm nails looks like. I hope not to need to go back to the shop for a while.

Last week we put a solar hot water system in. Or, more correctly, we paid the professionals to put one in. Previously we’d been using an instant hot-water heater but that was going to lead to big electricity bills if we kept it up. Solar has been great so far, with plenty of hot water even on the cloudier days.

Our new solar hot water system, on the roof above the bathroom.

While we had the tools and timber out for the kitchen, we also thought we should put some kind of bed together for the cats that are sleeping outside. (Yes, I’m ashamed to say there is currently a terrible apartheid system in place where the pampered UK cats are sleeping indoors and the hard-grafting Turkish street cats are sleeping outdoors.)

Combined bench and cat box project. The cats were supposed to sleep underneath so people could sit on the top, but as you can see the cats had other ideas.

Combined bench and cat box project. The cats were supposed to sleep underneath so people could sit on the top, but as you can see they had other ideas.

The idea was to make a box to keep the cats out of the wind, and to put some cushions and blankets inside to make it comfortable. We’ve since put a panel of clear plastic over the middle section to help them keep more body heat in there. They seem to appreciate it.

This is Suzi, one of Sütlaç’s kittens. How can you look at that face and not build some kind of shelter for her?

Zeytin is shocked to learn that the cats now also have a house.

On our way back from a walk today, we climbed the hill across the street to get a new view on our place. I really like the shot below, because you can see all the different bits and pieces that make up our little compound. From the front left, anti-clockwise, that’s the disused chicken coop, then the old house, the new house, the barn, and, if you look carefully in the foliage at the back, you can see the slab of metal roofing that keeps the rain off our clay oven.

The farmhouse from a new angle. I like this shot because you can see all the different buildings.

Our farmhouse from a new angle.

And, in conclusion, a shot of a poplar tree to show the advance of the seasons…

Autumn colours in the village.

PS: there is one more thing. We really appreciate all the comments on the blog, but we’ve been a bit surprised to find how prevalent spam commenting is in the blog world. (Probably many of you out there already knew this.) At first I was manually approving or deleting every comment, but when the spam count got into the thousands it became overwhelming. So we’re currently relying on some spam filters that work on keywords. It makes my life a lot easier, but the downside is there’s a small chance that every now and then we’ll block a legitimate comment. If a comment of yours seems to go missing, I apologize in advance, and please feel free to email me and I’ll sort it out.

More local discoveries

6 November, 2014 / Jason

It’s getting colder now. Late last night the thermometer went into single figures (9 degrees) for the first time. But most days are pleasant and sunny, and we’re pushing on with a long list of projects. Small steps, but we’re getting there. For example, we had a solar hot water system installed on the roof today, and I spent the afternoon pulling down the last of the old shed so we can re-use the bricks to make raised beds in the garden.

Still, that kind of activity doesn’t necessarily lead to good photos. So I’ve decided to use this post to show you more of the beautiful towns and landscapes we’ve found on our days off, touring around what was once Ionia.

First, Şirince: this pretty town in the mountains is very popular and worth the drive up from Selçuk. Local mythology says it was founded by escaped slaves from Ephesus. Until 1926 it was called Çirkince (“ugly”) which was apparently a strategy to discourage too many visitors.

Distinctive Greek architectural influences.

View from the window of the old Byzantine church.

Looking across the rooftops as the sun sets.

Shop selling fabric.

On another trip we visited some friends who were staying in the much quieter village of Eski Doğanbey, on the south side of the Dilek National Park peninsula. This place has a similar Greek heritage to Şirince. Both villages were inhabited by Greeks during Ottoman times, and it was only in the earliest days of the new Turkish state, during the population exchanges of 1923, that Turkish farmers first moved in. In Eski Doğanbey those farmers found that they preferred working the flatter, more fertile land down in the Menderes valley, and so the town was abandoned for many years. In recent decades people have started restoring the traditional stone houses, but the village remains a quiet place to get away from everything.

Looking south from Eski Doğanbey to the mouth of the Menderes and the Aegean sea.

Restored house with fantastic bay window.

Streets of Eski Doğanbey by moonlight.

We also returned to the mountains behind our house. We tried a different road this time, east to İncirliova (halfway to Aydın) and then north, across the hills to Tire. It is very special up there.

Pine forest, lake, and sweeping views in the mountains.

Top left shows geological strata in a road cutting; bottom right there’s a tiny farmhouse.

And finally, the latest animal-related drama: we always suspected that Sütlaç had had a litter of kittens in summer. They must have been under our noses all along, as the three of them are now living in the field across from our house, and we’re feeding them regularly. Aydın has a shelter for dogs, but there’s nowhere to take cats, so the responsibility is on us.

They’re just a bit too timid to allow themselves to be picked up (yet), but are very sweet nevertheless.

More kittens.

Sad news

7 October, 2014 / Jason

We had an awful day today. We lost Tarçın. He started choking on a piece of chicken — we got it out, eventually, but I think we were about 30 seconds too late to save him. We feel hollow and empty right now.

He was a great little guy. We miss him terribly.

What have we really been doing?

16 September, 2014 / Jason

It’s been a while since our last post. Sorry about that: must do better!

We’ve been a bit distracted. We have lots of projects to work on, as usual. But more than that, one of the cats (Molly) has been ill: liver problems brought on by the stress of the move. Which makes us feel very guilty. And means a 50 km round trip every morning to get IV fluid treatment for her at the university vet clinic in Aydın. Thankfully, though, she seems to be getting better.

So: what have we really been doing? I looked back at our previous blog posts and it struck me that often I would write about something just because I had a decent photo of it. No big deal, except it doesn’t give you a representative view of what life is like here. Sometimes cool things happen and I am not quick enough to get the camera: two camels being led out of the neighbour’s front gate, or a dapper old man riding past our door on a donkey, coming down from the mountains carrying a rifle as old as he was. Sometimes you don’t get the camera because it doesn’t feel right. You don’t want to be rude and in-your-face with people you don’t yet know very well. And sometimes you’re just busy.

The point of this post is to talk about the stuff we don’t have pictures of. Nevertheless, you will be needing some pictures, so here’s our place from the street.

A typical un-photographed day for us starts early as we’re woken up by either the call to prayer or a tractor going past our bedroom window. Then we go back to sleep until about eight in the morning when we get up to reliably blue skies and the hope that someone else has already started making breakfast. Sirem and I take Molly to the vet clinic in Aydın: a flat, straight drive into the morning sun, with the mountains on our left. Treatment takes a couple of hours, but the staff are good people. On the way back, if Molly is in a reasonable mood, we try to do some shopping. A stop in the sanayi (industrial estate) to buy tools and building materials, or a stop in Germencik for fresh bread, cheese, and eggs.

Shopping in Germencik

By the time we get back, it’s lunch time. After lunch, if it’s a hot day (and all of them have been) a siesta is tempting. Then we get started on something that’s actually useful: tiling, plastering, painting, concreting, working in the garden — that sort of thing.

This is how the bathroom looks now. It might seem all that great but that's because I didn't give you a proper "before" photo showing how the walls and ceiling looked.

This is how the bathroom looks now. It might not seem all that great but that’s because I didn’t give you a proper “before” photo showing the crumbling walls and the dark and dirty ceiling.

The current state of the garden. The neatly dug beds are due to my dad’s efforts while he was here.

Early experiments in lime-washing the walls are inspected by Tarçın.

Early experiments in lime-washing the garden walls are inspected by Tarçın.

Around sunset on every alternate day it’s time to go and collect figs. We walk around all 65 trees, looking for figs that are already on the ground, and shaking the trees a bit to get the partially dried figs to fall. We’ve got other jobs too, like laying the figs out to dry, sorting them into different classes, and rinsing them in salty water to help preserve them for the winter. This last step gives them a fantastic shine though.

One of our better figs.

If lunch was big we don’t eat a lot in the evening. Or sometimes it’s the other way around. Dinner might be just bread, cheese, potato chips, and a beer. I say “beer” in the singular because the truth is we’re drinking a lot less than we did in the UK. I remain a fan of beer but after a day in the sun it only seems to take one to make me want to lay back in a chair and look at the stars.

As the evening goes on we referee a few fights between our cats and some of the local strays who wander in, and then eventually bed.

What else have we been up to? Just recently we found a good local welder in Germencik, and he put us onto his friend the window guy, and so we had new windows and security screens installed on some of the rooms. There’s not a lot of crime here, so hopefully we needn’t have bothered, but it gives us some peace of mind when nobody is home.

Security grille and fly screen for the kitchen; new window in the background.

In earlier photos of the garden, you may have spotted a half-ruined shed at the back of the block. I was a bit worried about this because it looked like the roof might collapse, so last week I decided the time had come and I pulled most of it down. No cats were inside. Now we’ve got a source of roof tiles, timber, and cinder blocks to recycle elsewhere.

The shed after my amateur demolition.

Zeytin, the dog, is still very pleased about her change in status from street dog to garden dog. It’s not really cold at night yet, but nevertheless we gave her a little house. Well, OK: a cardboard box with a blanket inside. She was incredibly happy about this development.

“Nobody ever gave me a house before!”

And finally, here’s a picture of a different sort of visitor. This guy sat on the back of one of our chairs and posed for photos for quite a while before he had to fly.

Grasshopper is ready for his close-up now.

Tag: cats (Page 3 of 4)

Ground-breaking news

Planning permission is go

Summer: postscript

Summer

Winter brings more animals

Not in the script

Kitchen progress

More local discoveries

Sad news

What have we really been doing?

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