Blog ZZZZZZZZ

I have been here in this little village for a while now; each morning, lying in our snug bed, we evaluate the pressures and priorities of the day, and I am interested to see how a good  lie in prevails in the presence of so many things to do. We have been battling to make progress here; now we accept the inevitable slowness of the Slovenian process, and lie in easily, rarely getting up early unless an appointment somewhere has been ordained by some official. Everything starts at 7am here, as, in our timezone, we're among the first countries to get the rising sun; so the working day usually ends at three for the office workers and administrators; it makes one wonder at daylight saving in a timezone as wide as Central Europe....but that is one of the useless facts of life... and I just looked at the time on this computer and it read 23.23.23.... and we need to get up early tomorrow to 'work instead of play', as there is the annual wine parade, where you pay €8 and get a glass and walk around the entire region with your engraved glass and drink EVERYONE'S wines, and some of them will be only 3.5 weeks old, and I frankly prefer to try them in a year or two, but there will be between 600 and 800 people on this walk, and I just don't fancy being the linguistically challenged drunk that I'm sure will be the fate of most folks tomorrow.... so we'll mix concrete and do heavy work and feel self righteous about it I'm sure.... Nuff said.

Blog Y

One of the advantages of living in central Europe is that one has the chance to exist in an environment divided and accessed by the prevailing geography; taking a 'short cut' from our little village to one town, requires that one confronts a lot of Y intersections, and, contrary to the common sense of A to B, it is essential to take the opposite branch to the sensible one, as the sensible turning is coming up in another 300 metres..... as these trails 1000 years ago just got bigger and bigger, and avoided the switchback and chose the easy incline...though mountain biking it all is a pretty good challenge still.....and following instincts while motoring with 'short cut' in mind is really, REALLY timewasting, and dreadfully hard on the fuel consumption. Many of you will wonder why I don't have a better map; well they've been doing maps here for a while, and we have them in three different scales, and even the biggest and best of them, (which cannot be opened out inside anything as small as a car) has a level of innacuracy that can only be described as scandalous, with crossroads often being in fact a four way roundabout with another road (which you need) being 100 metres up one of the other roads)..... Others of you will wonder about signage? Signage is ruled by local councils, and they are ruled by local yokels (Blog Y) who figure that those going Sromlje - Krsko will of course choose the Zdole OR the Artice route, and by the time you've achieved either of those villages, you will of course be looking for Pleterje OR Dolenje Vas. Both these towns have signs for Krsko. The others don't, and therewith lies the future of this planet; our mayors don't have global issues close to their hearts at all; every autumn and spring they bonfire their surplus vegetation, they drive 100 metres to talk to their neighbours, and at the local choir practice, seventeen tenors drive seventeen cars even though they all live on three roads, and the math defies me, but saving anything is a distant prospect here. Do I worry? Should I walk or cycle? Should I get rid of that second motor vehicle? My contribution here is insignificant; every day I am sorely reminded, when even the train causes delays to enormous traffic flows at every railway crossing, sometimes the traffic not clearing before the barrier arms come down again. The arms descend to the Timetable; automatically. They raise when the train has passed, often more than five minutes late. It's called 'living in Europe', and is really cool, but could someone start waking up to the tiny picture, as two hundred years is too long for change, and they've only had cars for 100........ Nuff said.
But.... today our petrol is the cheapest since we've been in Europe,  yet yesterday oil reached $90 a barrel.....er.....and demand is at its highest level yet? You explain it; I can't.