One thing I loved about my previous life as a city girl was libraries. I would regularly go and draw out as many books as I was permitted, and then start reading them all at once, finishing first the one that held my attention the most.  Though we have a book swap shelf at Nový Mlýn, and there are swap shelves in hostels and restaurants in Prague, this really hasn’t given me the range of reading material I needed.  Mike recently bought me a Kindle – and this, combined with Project Gutenberg has been my literary saviour.

Previously my genre of choice had been travel writers, however on Gutenberg I am beginning to explore authors who can help me here and now.  Gutenberg contains thousands of books which are out of copyright – meaning that the author died more than seventy years ago.   So far, I’ve found several books by people who have, like us, moved from city to countryside. To hear these voices ring out clear and true is a strange experience – they are long dead, but I am so grateful they wrote about their lives. We have so much in common, and I have so much to learn.

“The best things to scrub the churn and all wooden articles with, are wood ashes and plenty of soap.”

Up to today we have hosted Jess, Rosie, Sian, Caro, Helen, Rachel, Rosie (2 – our research shows that 66% of English women are called Rosie), Esther, Matt and Andrew… ten people…  and only three people have ever left!

We started in June with individual visitors – though the house was often full with family, friends or the Global Agents for Change (team of 20 riders plus film crew). We doubled our numbers when Sian and Caro were here at the same time… then Rachel arrived as well. Caro and Rachel have formed a crack baking team – they’ve really shown us how far you can go with the new oven – with a constant production of cakes and pies to keep our energy levels up.

Currently we have Rosie and Esther here too … they had been volunteering at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales for the past year.  I have heard a lot about CAT so it’s wonderful to have visitors who have spent a considerable amount of time there.  It’s been really great to compare notes with them about all sorts of eco technology – high and low.

Sian is leaving today. She has worked like a trooper and is incredibly strong – she also blasted a lot of my students’ stereotypes about women… her job back in Australia was working in explosives in an iron ore mine – and her ovaries are fine!* Sian single handedly shifted tonnes of rubble away from the kitchen & we suspect would have dug her way back to Australia given too long. We now have a cellar with lighting and a concrete floor, walls in the hallway, stripped and varnished floors in all the bedrooms, a hot shower, washing machine, oven and freezer – (all post Sian developments). She’s been great fun to spend time with and we’ll really miss her sense of humour.  Our plots to keep her here have so far failed – (finding a Czech for her to marry – for example) but we hope she’ll come back some time.

It has been really useful seeing how the house operates with 7 visitors… though Matt and Andrew (also from Australia) have their own camper van so I didn’t need to find a bed for them. Andrew has contributed way more experience in chopping wood than I was expecting from a design specialist!

Over recent weeks we’ve eaten some really fantastic meals (though, now, cooking for nine, people are a little more daunted by the task!) and been introduced to the idea of desserts (not at all usual for us two). We’ve heard lots of new music and been educated in many different ways. By the end of October we’ll be down to one or two visitors and things will quieten down for mid winter – I can’t now imagine Nový Mlýn with only us here!

(*My Czech students often warn me that certain types of work are bad for the ovaries and so, as a woman, I shouldn’t dig or lift heavy things).

Apparently, we have some buildings missing.  Because of this, the Czech government register of property will not enter our mortgage on the property register.  Potentially this means that we are not meeting our side of the mortgage agreement. And this means… that the bank could ask for it back. After all, banks need money at the moment.

We’re totally stressed out at the moment, with George missing and the house in such a mess. Extra pressure is the last thing we need. With my doom-mongering head on, I think they’ll take the house off us and sell it.

The missing buildings have been gone for years – but somebody should have let officials know about it. Let’s hope we can get this sorted out, and quickly – unlike the water permit, which took 18 months.  My positive motivation is nearly completely destroyed.

When I lived in London, I wanted to do an MBA (masters in business administration), but there was no way in hell that my employers would commit to this. Instead I researched the syllabus of a decent MBA & studied each area in turn, using resources such as the library system. I don’t have the kudos of the qualification, but what I learned has been incredibly useful.

So… I will employ the same technique to learning about project management. I’ve project managed before – market research, events & playschemes, but I’ve had an inkling that there must be more method to complex projects than a business plan and a Gantt chart.

I had a bit of a search around to look at various project management software, and discovered that there are massive numbers of such programs. And they can be massively complicated or simple enough to miss massively important details.  I’m going to hold off on selection until I have a better understanding of what I’ll need it to do… but from my initial investigation some of them don’t even have budgets.

Likewise, there are plenty of websites purporting to be the industry standard in professional representation. One that I thought looked credible was the PMI – which has a qualification ‘Project Management Professional’.  Lots of companies offer training towards this qualification, such as this 5 day course. Now, with the help of wikipedia, we can begin.

Czech mushroom collection is an institution. We tried this for ourselves for the first time on Sunday and after an hour in the forest came back with a full basket. We were collecting the safest mushrooms – those from the Bolete family & I felt confident in identifying these. We fried them in oil, butter and garlic & they were very tasty. I continued to sort & chop our new food source and came across this…

I realised that it was unlike the other mushrooms we’d collected when the flesh turned from a pale yellow to a deep blue almost instantly (quicker than me putting the knife down and picking up the camera).

A little research revealed it to be Boletus Luridus. A fantastic name for a mushroom with a chameleon’s range of colour. At least this threw up the possibility of poisonous mushrooms in the Bolete family – before we did. The other one which is dangerous is Boletus Satanus – you could guess from the name… however this is distinctive with a white cap and red stalk. Apparently none of the Bolete family can kill you, but at least I know that some can make you very, very ill.

An interesting wikipedia article about the Slavic mushroom picking traditions puts it quite succinctly…  they think we’re being paranoid. A lovely American mushroom site is at pains to point out that the author (of the site and of the book 100 edible mushrooms), does not eat them at all.

We both spent the next few hours being rather too carefully observant of any physical sensations, and worrying ourselves into feeling slightly queasy.  The power of suggestion.  It was a lovely sensation the next morning, to know we’d just been typically Englishly paranoid.

Today it’s been raining, so I can’t wait to go out mushroom collecting again early tomorrow.

An easy & speedy dessert recipe which can be made for one person. The inspiration for this recipe is the English custard tarts I love and have not yet found in the Czech Republic. Using the apple itself for the casing means less cleaning, and incidentally produces a gluten free pudding.

*Mum used to make us apple bombs as children. It’s not the name she gave them, just the result of the occasional apple explosion.

Ingredients:

• 1 large apple
• 1 small egg
• A splash of cream (or two dessert spoons if you’re measuring)
• A drop of vanilla extract
• 7 large sultanas
• 1 dessert spoon of sugar
• Cinnamon
• Nutmeg (a generous sprinkling of freshly grated nutmeg is key to this recipe.)

Heat your oven to 175 0C.

Beat the egg and add the sugar, cream, sultanas, cinnamon & nutmeg. Chop off the top and bottom of the apple, forming a chunky cylinder, then, leaving no more than a cm of flesh attached to the skin, remove the core (a sharp, thin knife is useful for this). Cut a slice from the bottom of the removed core & put this back into the apple. Stand the apple on foil to stop any leakage sticking to your oven tray.

Pour the egg mixture into the hole, and cut wedges from the apple core into the mixture, until the apple is full. Finish with a sprinkle of sugar, nutmeg & cinnamon.

The apple will take half an hour to bake through – check the egg mixture in the centre is cooked all the way through using a blunt knife inserted into the custard. When it comes out clean, your Tábor Apple Bomb is cooked.

So… 4 apples down, three tonnes to go!

It’s a shame you can’t see a similar measure of energy saved by mass scale repetition, such as switching to low energy light bulbs, or making sure your electro equipment isn’t left on standby.

http://eobchod.fekar.com/

They are really very typically Czech, by which I mean interesting and a little quirky. It reminds me of the work of Denisa Grimmova – who produced a beautiful series of scenes in old fashioned tv set boxes. Funny, very human, monsters sitting down to tea together. They were installed in a bar in Prague for a while, but the last time I went there, they were gone. Shame, as I don’t have any pictures of them even & haven’t found any info on the web yet.

I’ve just had a quick look on Ebay. Hand made soft toys are not selling at a premium there, probably because lots of people can make them. Though, if she is prepared to make some toys from reclaimed materials, I could try putting something through to see how it goes. I doubt they would sell for as high a prices as they are in her shop. The toy patterns are selling, however, especially those with a seasonal theme – so at the moment Halloween theme toy patterns have a lot of bids on them. It might worth a try?

To be continued