This little piggie.....

Today's excitement was a sighting of a whole herd of wild pigs.... drinking from the irrigation channel which has now been connected all the way from the spring to the village. As you see, I took photos but they were a long way away. After a while they went back over the road and off up into the hills. It is amazing how quickly they disappear even though the slopes are hardly thickly wooded.

On Monday I took Marmela to the vet who pronounced her ill and gave her some injections and a prescription for antibiotic and baby aspirin (to get her fever down) to be given twice a day for a week ...... needless to say she is hating every mouthful. She does appear to be getting better - only the very occassional sneeze.

All the cats are very flea-ridden at the moment and no amount of frontline seems to be making an impact... I don't know where they are coming from. I think Elvis spends a fair amount of time in the goatshed (from the smell of him) and apparently the goats have loads of fleas so maybe that is where he is picking them up and then passing them on to the others.

Building work has somewhat stalled... we are just about ready to do the roof but the wood that was to be used for shuttering is now being used elsewhere and will not be available for another week - so the workers are starting on the outside walls, "papering" as Mohamed calls it, and I think we will be doing the arches in the patio as well.

We are expecting a visitor later today... he doesn't know yet that we are about a month behind with the building work so I just hope he is not expecting too much in the way of luxury. He has cycled from Tangiers.

still WIP

Well we are now into our second week of building. The patio is completely surrounded and just about all the internal walls are up. I think the next step will be the archways on either side of the patio .... and the then roof and the stairs up to the roof and then the balcony outside the living room. The picture shows the view diagonally across the patio to the kitchen.

I have to stop myself thinking that the work is almost done... we then have to get the electrics sorted, plumbing, "paper" ie render in cement all the walls, windows and doors, paint, think about what we can afford to tile...

We finally have our car back... it died last weekend some issue around the work that was done previously. I hope it is solved now. Mohamed spent half his time last week hitching into Agadir in the hope of getting the car back only to come home around 10pm with no car. I gave him a short shopping list on Thursday - essentials for couscous etc and he came back with no garlic but 2kg of carrots, 2 kg of turnips, 11kg of oranges and an assortment of melon. When I asked what on earth he was thinking of (no car!) he said - but they were really cheap!

It is almost melon season proper now. Pickups filled with watermelons parked at the side of the road selling off melons to passerbys and the men staggering home with their fat friend under their arm. Watermelons are great when they are sweet (and in the summer here they are) and so refreshing - but they take up all the fridge!

Marmela is still sneezing... though she does seem better she has given me a lot of anxiety this week by disappearing all day (I was convinced one day that she had gone off to die). If she is no better tomorrow I will try the vet. I couldn't take her without the car - we would have had to put her in a bag and maybe walk 5 or 6 km or wait an hour before the minibus came along (the bus service that used to run has been stopped). On top of this our experience with vets in Agadir has not been good. It is typical that we just found a good one in Taroudannt before we moved. The vets here just don't seem that interested in cats... they are either large animal vets or have practices that revolve round the various little pedigree pooches that the french expat residents are so fond of.

Her neck is healing up and I can now see distinct tooth marks where something - probably a dog - has grabbed her by the neck. I am wondering if her infection has anything to do with being bitten.

WIP

We are now on day 4 of building, the pictures show where it stood at the end of day 3. Things are going slower than we hoped... today we are down to just one builder and Mohamed.






















Aretha likes to inspect the work everyday.

Here is a picture of what it is going to look like (sort of)... though the fountain will be in the centre of the patio and the passage will be covered at both ends of the patio and over the entrance.




I spent a good few hours yesterday trying to work out the best layout for the bathroom in my dad's room - bearing in mind that his mobility may get less. I think I have it sussed.... but then who knows what the actual fittings will be.

Oh and I did see the windows that Mohamed had found, while not really what I had in mind they were nice. We have however both agreed on something else from the same carpenter though I think we will shop around a bit to check prices. Really nice carved woodwork.... moorish designs of course and at last Mohamed has stopped talking about massive plate glass vista windows.

There is an arabic saying along the same lines as "no good turn goes unpunished".

We were all set to start work about 2 weeks ago but our neighbour asked if he could borrow our builders and labourers for "a couple of days" so that he could get just a little bit of building done before he had to go and harvest his wheat. So, being good and considerate neighbours we said yes - and of course that couple of days turned into almost two weeks. What our neighbour didn't tell us was that he was also going to pinch our labourers to help him harvesting his wheat. So as previously explained poor Mohamed is having to do all the labouring himself. I did volunteer to help shifting bricks etc but that just is not going to happen.....

We have had another breakdown in the car... something not right with the work that was done before but we are stuck between two different mechanics both saying it was the other person's work that is wrong. We are beginning to wish we had gone back to the Renault dealership to get the work done.

I am also a little worried about Marmela, she has been coughing and I am not sure if she has a bug or just something caught in her throat. I have to say that she is not in the least worried about herself and has disappeared off out after wolfing down breakfast. She has had a horrible set of wounds around her neck - not sure how she got hurt. Seems have got her neck caught in something but I don't know if it was a thing or another creatures mouth! It is all healing up and her hair growing back (I did cut it back to try and get ointment on).

We have also been hosting some huge wasplike creature that was building a very nice little mud house on the light fitting in our spare room. This turned out to be full of green caterpillars ..... It was a very big waspy like insect so I do hope it is not too cross when it finds out we have wiped out the next generation! Oh how I wish I had an insect book.

Building Work has started

Yesterday we restarted the building work, and as I sit here I can hear various scrapings, hammerings, squeaky wheelbarrows and builders whistling (yes they do it in Morocco too) and the unique slushy sound of concrete being thrown around going on overhead.

Here is a photo of what it looked like yesterday evening.


I will post more photos as work progresses. We have not managed to find any labourers at the moment so poor Mohamed is up there carrying bricks and mixing concrete for the two builders.

I have spent a fair part of the last couple of days watching the election results unfolding and feeling very down about it... at the same time very happy that I am not back there struggling to deal with all the cuts in social housing and benefits that are now bound to follow. The North-South divide is so glaring again.... and there must be lots of questions about the role of the Westminster parliament in Scottish affairs now.

Well I must go into town and do some shopping, trying to get back to normal (well as normal as you can be when you live under a building site) now that I have recovered from jetlag and a little tummy upset last week.

btw I saw Elvis (twice) in Las Vegas and an Amish couple when I was in Chicago (they were up the Sears Tower)!