Our bedroom is on the top floor of our limestone farmhouse. There’s kind of an outdoor landing outside our bedroom door, which you cross to descend stairs into the rest of the house. We’ve occasionally seen cats on this landing, as they cross rooftops and balconies and lick their tongues into the corners of the evening.
Last week, on three separate occasions, we’ve found, well, piles of crap in various corners of this landing. Large piles of crap for a cat. If the location wasn’t accessible only to cats, you’d think a dog was responsible (some of the cats around here are big, muscular beasts). And, without getting too graphic, these cats were not getting enough fibre in their diets.
What to do? The cats come and do their business in the middle of the night. There was no way to fence off the landing, or access to it from the roof. There was only one solution.
I made like Farley Mowat, and marked my territory. We figured a little human urine might turn off the fickle felines.
And we were right. It’s been four nights now, and there’s no cat poo in sight. Darren 1, Feral Cats 0.
It’s been occasionally windy here on Malta, and we’ve had a couple of storms. But last night was serious, which winds gusting up to 75 km/h. The back patio is covered in debris, and there’s a sizable tree limb on our balcony. I was surprised that our sun loungers ended up in the pool. They’re plastic, but they’re reasonably heavy:
It’s no wonder all the houses are built of stone here.
As I mentioned, we’ve had a couple of days of rain here in Malta. The first was an intense over-night thunderstorm. The next morning I snapped a couple of photos. The first is of the sodden fields behind our house:
And this is the rain in our pool. I took it while strategically folded under the patio table, to keep my camera relatively dry. I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out:
Our farmhouse has a cistern on the roof. As I understand it, water from the mains–the city waterworks keeps this shiny, metal tank full. You can see some of these tanks if you click on the thumbnail photo. The water’s then gravity-fed into our pipes.
It’s been really hot over the past few days–anywhere from 35 to 40 degrees, depending on who you ask. The sun, as you might imagine, has been blazing down. The farmhouse has crazy-thick walls, so we’ve been okay.
The tank on the roof, however, is just a big heat magnet. The peculiar result is that, first thing in the morning, there’s literally no cold water. It’s always a bit of a shock when brushing my teeth. Once we use some of the water, the tank seems to cool down a bit.
It’s no big deal, certainly, just an odd reversal for a Canadian accustomed to the reverse problem.
We live in a 150-year-old limestone villa. It has many charms, but one of its downsides is the constantly-decaying walls and ceilings. Simply put, they’re slowly falling apart.
The effect is most pronounced along the edges of the walls (see the above photo) and in rooms below rooms in which we’re active. For example, our office is above our living room. The coffee table is constantly being showered with little bits of the ceiling.
We need to constantly sweep. The photo shows a section of wall after two or three days without attention. This morning I swept the bottom floor of the house–the kitchen, dining room and living room. I’m not exaggerating when I say I discarded at least two cups of limestone dust. Another 100 years, and the walls will be half as thick as they are today.
Three weeks after vacating our Yaletown apartment, we’re have a home again. We’ve settled on Gharb, a tiny village on Gozo, the smaller of the two islands in the Malta archipelago.
It feels like the end of the world.
We’ve really lucked out with the villa we chose. It’s a three bedroom, three and a half bathroom stone house just down a tiny (too small for cars) lane from the centre of of the village. The building is over 150 years old, and has walls that are at least three feet thick. It’s been 25 to 28 degrees in the middle of day, but our house has remained remarkably cool. We’ll see how things feel when it’s 35 to 38 Celsius outside, but so far so good.
There’s a pool out back, and beyond that some fields, another little town and the azure Mediterrenean. If you sit in the pool and look east, you can see the Basilica of Ta’Pinu, a huge church that the pope visited in 1990.
It’ll take some getting used to this place. As I write this, the only sounds I hear are the tiny, chirping birds in the olive tree outside, and the occasional bleating of the two goats from down the street.
Once the cable guy comes on Monday, we’ll be all set up. I’m really impressed by that speed, by the way. Here I am on a tiny scrap of land in the middle of the Med, and we can get Internet access in less than a week.
Check my Flickr stream for photos of our villa and Valetta. Web access is tight this week, so I’ll organize, tag and all that crap next week.
Our bedroom is on the top floor of our limestone farmhouse. There’s kind of an outdoor landing outside our bedroom door, which you cross to descend stairs into the rest of the house. We’ve occasionally seen cats on this landing, as they cross rooftops and balconies and lick their tongues into the corners of the evening.
