Husband from the UK just received his permanent CDS in the mail.
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And hereās his gorgeousness in a more relaxed mode but heās very intense and never takes his eyes off meā¦sometimes I think heās sleeping but he moves as soon as I moveā¦
I love him to bitsā¦heās so funny 
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Beautiful, thank you. 
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Looking forwards to lots of photos of Jules and your new additionā¦.we never seem to have enough hands when interacting with our 4 legged friends who seem very adept at knowing what weāre thinking before weāve even thought it
New 33 metre line for Noubia the newbie arriving tomorrow, bright blue to make it distinguishable from the red one of Jules. Ideal for trailing through the forest with hands free. Then, maybe, some photos. 
Plan is that, unlike Jules, not with hunting genes, she will be offlead very soon. Never had a dog before Jules that wasnāt. He is a one-off.
For the moment, after a long and fearful life, she is reluctant to leave the security of the garden.
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It arrived (the 33m) and she was attached. A few teething problems as these red and blue streamers streaked out into the forest, but generally all went well.
The really good news was that, in the open field beyond with both dogs at the full 30 odd metres, I whistled and called them both. Jules returned to the whistle and Noubia raced straight back to my call of her name.
I feel it may not be too long before Noubia, like Harper Grace before her, will be running free while Jules remains with the lunge. 
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@hairbear ā¦you echo my wife, a roasted gammon joint and gammon rashers are missed, there are similar cuts but they arenāt quite the same. With the recent rule changes i canāt see any being imported now. There seems to be a very kind of pork cut in France and some unique to France except (cured) gammon.
So todayās good news for us is that our CdeS arrived less than four weeks since we went to Cotes dāArmor PrĆ©fecture.
In fact looking back getting them and Carte Vitale and driving licence (once deal was done) all went incredibly smoothly with any hitch at allā¦guess we have been lucky on hearing of some of the problems.
ā¦but now I can worry about losing it, so unless Iām going far I will leave it at home and if challenged apologise for forgetting my wallet that contains it ! I understand that getting a replacement of it and also of a driving licence is both expensive and a hassle!
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We have friends who arrived here on 30th December 2020 and at last today they have received immatriculation for thier campervan they brought with them which has taken a long and frustrating time to achieve but all sorted now.
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This evening, I have finally got all the elements of my astrophotography setup working in harmony (so far) and all controlled remotely from my PC in the warmth inside ā¦ itās COLD outside. I have the main and guide scope tightly focused, the polar alignment spot on, the autoguiding working and am at the moment taking 40 separate 2 minute exposures of M31 (Andromeda galaxy). When Iāve processed the pictures Iāll post my first ever astronomical picture. Well ā¦ Iām cheered up by it anyway.
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Looking forward to seeing it
Donāt get your hopes up to much, it may not be too spectacular as itās my first ever attempt and the exposure time of 80 minutes is probably way too short. Weāll see what happens.
Yes definitely looking forward to it. Too much light pollution near Toulouse. Not to mention te street lights outside my place.
Best News for a long timeā¦ family in UK are all OK ā¦ yippee 
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This is good news of a sort, but hearing Noubia barking just now, not so sure.
She seems to bark a lot, especially at the front gate through which she can see comings and goings at the neighbours. This worries me as they are good neighbours.
So today I trained the movement activated camera on the gate and left it running.
In 7 hours from 10.22 this morning it was only triggered 10 times, and two of those were me setting it up and taking it away, and, in only 2 of those 1 minute clips was she barking. 
And in neither of them was there anyone there. 
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So, @AdrianTB , your not very far from me then. Light pollution in cities can be really hard to get around. For the old style sodium vapour and mercury vapour street lamps, yuu can get filters as they output quite narrow ranges of frequency. The newer white LED lamps output quite wide ranges of frequency, and so cannot be realistically filtered. One of the criteria of buying my house in France was low levels of light pollution for astrophotography. I have nominally Bortle 3 skies, although I do have two street lights within a few hundred metres, they are not an issue.
No photo (yet, I hope) but I was sitting here watching my bottom pond and bird bar through the glass doors this morning and was pleased to see a Robin and a Nuthatch, but then in the background for a nano second, re-focused on a flash of blue and orange from the overhanging bushes round the pond. Could it possibly be a Kingfisher? I promised that before I did anything else I would set the trail camera up and see what was captured. Picking it up I moved towards the door and, before I could open it, my eyes were drawn to the middle pond which is even more surrounded by vegetation. There it was, sitting on a branch and watching the antics of another largish bird in the water below. Definitely a Kingfisher and soon it dived down for its own splash. I hope he will back, but there are no fish here, so it is fingers crossed. The camera has been set up.
I have never seen one before in the garden but more than 30 years ago before we bought this place we would visit several times a year to the local riverside campsite. We learned to set the caravan so that its picture window faced up the river and gloried in the repeated runs over 100 metres or so directly towards us. So today is a special moment.
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This sounds good. Iāve a feeling we need a new thread on stargazing.