Boarding up for Winter

Today I got the house boarded up for winter. Well, not our house, but our neighbor's house. Sofia, Ali and I had taken Watson out for a short walk when our neighbor (the one who didn't use to like us) said hello and then said she needed some help. She doesn't speak any English so the conversation was restricted to my limited Czech. I sent the girls back to Mary and I helped her get a number of wooden shutters out of their basement to put on their windows. Hers is a summer cottage so they will be away for the winter and board up all the windows. After getting those out I thought I was done but then she offered coffee, which I didnt feel I should say no to. We sat for a bit and tried, with a struggle through language, which included a few drawings, to talk about why I moved with the family to Prague, what I do here, what we like about the Czech Republic, etc. She also asked me to help watch their house over the winter and call if anything happens to it during any storms.

Only after finishing coffee and concluding that we would now be friends and she would try to learn a few English words while I continued to try to learn Czech, we moved on to putting all the shutters on the windows. She directed where I should go and I put them up. This process was briefly interupted with a discussion of how much she dislikes the trees in our yard that drop pine needles all over her lawn and make it impossible to grow gross and she suggested we cut them down. As we're only renting the house I repeatedly suggested she talk to the owners until she realized I wasn't going to be cutting right away and we went back to finishing the shutters. Once I finished getting the shutters on she was very grateful made a reference to me being like Rambo and we said bye for the winter. I suppose in the Spring I'll be helping take the shutters down.