In the past 4 weeks...

Matt has been to Istanbul, Milan, Zagreb, Manchester, Prague and Nuremberg. He has designed a website for my mother's music coaching business, he has fixed the rotten piece of #@%&!!! that is our flat....no wait... I mean the rotten piece of wood at the bottom of the balcony doors, stripped some walls, plastered some others, made roasted wild boar, bangers and mash, chicken kiev from scratch (with much swearing) and various other meals, countless cups of tea and coffee, and learnt to play 3 pieces of the Associated Board Grade 1 piano selection.
I've either been asleep or eating pasta.
Although I did go to an overnight training course on "Personal Leadership" in deepest Limburg, the entire thing was in Dutch and my brain was so fried by the end of it I couldn't string a sentence together in any language at all, the resulting effect was not unlike Esperanto.
Here are some pictures

Yes this is the progress we have made since April.
I say "we"...I say "progress"... hmpf.

I do not love the flat anymore. I feel a bit sorry for it though, which is daft, but a bit like a toy truck that's lost one of its wheels, it was once a source of all sorts of positive things and now it just seems like a piece of junk. Poor flat. I don't even want to live there anymore, it's kind of small and echoy and cold, it smells of dust and drains, the floor is full of holes and the walls are kind of moulting. We have owned it for a year. We have spent over 9000 euros of our budget on costs related to Crazy Bastarditis, and 3000 euros on miscellaneous renovation costs (of which 1000 is an deposit still held by Selfmatic in anticipation of us someday in the next decade being able to install some heating).

What a miserable post. I'll have cheered up by next week. For behold, I am making a list! Lists are a sign that things are moving in the right direction, right?