These last couple of weeks I’ve been on my own so I’ve had TV on in the background while I’ve been working to keep me company (or drown out the barking dogs)… One thing I’ve noticed is how depressing the news is and how it is always ‘bad’ news. The obvious reason for this is that ‘good’ news doesn’t pay, but then I thought maybe there are two sides to every story so I started looking closer to home…and this is what I found!
This week I have lost two chickens to our local fox. One of our chickens was sitting on 5 eggs and the fox took these too. Now whilst this may be annoying for me and pretty disasterous for the chickens, there are however some very well fed and cared for fox cubs enjoying fresh chicken and protein this spring…and I have less chickens to feed.
So it got me thinking, for every bad story there is a good story alongside it, it all depends on perspective and it does require a bit more detachment from the emotional involvement. So I thought it might be a good idea to see things from another view point and try to put out some good news each month…read at your peril.
So let me start by saying that I am not going to go into contentious issues like Big Ben’s lack of bongs, or doctors striking to get a bit of a rest or global warming or the UK referendum on the EU..although as an aside does Brexit mean we don’t have to suffer coming last in Eurovision anymore and having to pretend it’s because ‘people hate us’ and can just accept at long last that our songs were crap!! No I’m going to keep it local and personal (or try)…
So since Dan went to England where it rains for 90% of the year, it has done nothing but rain here – it’s like he pinched my sun and took it with him to give the poor Brits a taste of what they could’ve won. Meanwhile I have been permanently dressed in wellies and a silly hat, one and half wellies to be fair as one of them was eaten by Kia 4 years ago and I still haven’t replaced them. Actually I lie, I did buy a new pair and they were unceremoniously cut up to act as rubber washers when bolting the new roof to the dog pen this spring….while I was out somewhere….say no more! So where is the good news I hear you cry… well in the three weeks he’s been gone I haven’t had to water the garden once, I must have saved myself a fortune in water rates (at least 10 leva by my calculations) which means I must be nearly able to afford those new wellies.
Also for those of you fortunate enough to live in this incredible country, and clever enough not to go out in the garden when it rains, we are not all that clever. For those of you that don’t live here or have never had the pleasure of Bulgarian mud, well it is sticky and that is putting it lightly so after running around the land pulling things under cover to save them from the downpour I can now say I have finally achieved my teenage dream of being the required 5’10” of a catwalk model. This may however be the only grade I make….
So did I mention he’d left me on my own for three weeks – three weeks I tell you, so I’ve knuckled down and worked my socks off finishing off the lounge-dining room for when he gets back, only to 
come down one morning and find the fridge light didn’t come on when I 
opened the door….I did the thing of opening and shutting it a few times, waggled the little lever that does the business, to no avail…for a little while there was stunned, exhausted, infuriated silence and a couple of coffees while I thought of a plan.
I have a little beer fridge so I emptied the important stuff into the little fridge and threw some not so important (for that read I’ll make something out of it one day stuff) into the bin and the frozen stuff into the chest freezer. Job done…only although in my head I’d already picked out and chosen a new fridge and mentally placed it in a different location in the kitchen…I still couldn’t resist trying to find out why it had stopped.
What I found was the wire had been chewed through in two places…which renewed my frustration about the rats getting into my kitchen and by now I was jumping up and down holding a plug with 5 inches of flex attached to it shouting …’why don’t they die’….over and over again. It’s a good job I don’t have any neighbours but seriously if I chewed through a 220w cable I’m sure I’d be at least tingling 🙂
Anyway getting to the good news, I managed to fix the cable so I now had a clean, uncluttered working fridge and had renewed my passion for rat catching. It is a great sport if you have time and patience, I have neither but I do have a 
Shelby – he caught two in quick succession and I caught one in my rat cage…I know there’s more somewhere but they are playing hard to get but to quote the great John Goodman as Delbert McClintock in Arachnaphobia “would anyone mind if I tore this floor out” ….
