Me, out on a family (and dog) bike ride to the beach and back this morning. It was flipping freezing but I enjoyed my pasta carbonara for lunch all the more after that!
Then I popped out to see my daughter, SIL and the lovely grandson for a cup of tea and catch up (it had been 24 hours!), and the dog got yet more playtime with her best friend - a five month old Boxer puppy called Vico.
Then I cleaned the car (it was absolutely DISGUSTING, dog hair, horse hair and Mud with a capital M, and as we are off to a graduation on Wednesday I thought it had better be sorted before everyoneâs smart clothes got trashedâŠ), did a few bits and bobs and am now waiting for supper to be served. Itâs brandade de morue
Not a lot! I was going to take the motorcycle for a run but itâs been cold here in Sud-Angleterre today so I wimped out on that one.
So mainly domestic chores (washing) and taking it easy listening to music - Iâve upgraded my editing Mac so the old one is now on âstore all the musicâ duty so spent some time setting up Apple Music on that. Discovered that you canât share CD drives from one Mac to another over the network any more so have had to order an external DVD/CD drive from Amazon in order to be able to transfer CDs to it - only ÂŁ25 but still annoying.
Iâm giving a 10 minute talk to our local business networking group on Wednesday so also spent some time trying to work out what Iâm going to talk about and mostly failing.
Church this morning, a walk in the country this afternoon, then a Candlemas cum memorial service in the village church remembering a local who died unexpectedly yesterday this evening. Just finished dinner, and looking forward to posting pictures from the walk in the randos thread.
Been packing all day. Movers are coming tomorrow so my stuff will soon be on the way to France. A few more boxes and then time for a Martini and watch some golf.
A quiet morning arranging a photo blog on the computer before going outside to tidy up some odds and ends, cut some firewood and put my scaffold tower next to the bay tree I started trimming yesterday. After lunch I went out into the warm sunshine climbed the scaffold tower and removed about a metre of last yearâs growth from the bay. Itâs now the shape and size I want it to be. As it was such a lovely afternoon I decided to go out on my dual sport motorbike. I enjoyed that for an hour but got it muddier than I had intended so cleaned it, put away the scaffold tower and went in to light the fire. Later I went to talk to my neighbour and we ended up going for a starlit walk to a neighbouring village and back.
If only all winter Sundays were like today.
Morning started with dumb bells and kettle bells, then catch up on SF and the world over breakfast, followed by splitting kindling, curing duck legs for tomorrowâs confit, tidied up some garden, Duolingo, lunch,9km round walk along the Lot to the auberge in the next village.
Get home, clean and refill pellet stove, lay fire in log burner on the floor below, cook dinner filet de porc fermier with roasted butternut grilled green pepper and tomato confit tossed in sage and chili oil. Eat dinner and explain why itâs healthier to ignore Trump while privately despairing over over Man Utdâs latest collapse. Then watch Martijn Doolaardâs latest beautiful weekly video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN8mhROP5qI&list=UUlkUhTjFbQbtGfS14h9Vw5g&index=1
Then ask why arenât I working that hard? Then tell myself itâs because Iâm seventy-two years old and happily married to someone who hates DIY.
Canon Pixma printer stuck ink carriage prevented my access to clean the ink reservoir and reset. Sending it off to repair costs more than a new one. Ordered a new HP Envy that uses cheaper inks. That should piss off Canon!
Pool pump has given up the ghost and maker no longer in France. Letâs hope our pool guy Charley finds an alternative so we donât have to replace the entire salt system.
Orange fibre installed on Friday. No internet connection. Luckily, found slot for tech coming to fix this morningâŠ.
Dumped an oven hot pyrex dish into the sink and broke it, then deeply cut my finger trying to retrieve bits. Bled like a stuck pig
The good part is that my husband and I, without recourse to constant internet, have been chatting more
Spent all afternoon laying pavers and mixing concrete, it was very warm again in the sun so snacked outside to save taking off dirty clothes. Went to L.Merlin to buy materials, good they are open on sundays so went at lunchtime when no one about and filled the boot with more pavers.
Spent much of the day trying to find, on the map, one of my favourite routiers which seems to have disappeared, ready for my dog collection in Agen on Saturday.
Went out in my slippers to the car because there is a year 2000 edition of Michelin in there whose sole purpose is to display a little circle over every routier in France that I have ever visited, but then remembered that the car was parked outside the gate because, leaving the dogs, free range, at home on Saturday evening to go to an occasional meal at the bar with friends it is too much of a faff to go through all the motions in the dark to secure them in order to open the gate.
I began to doubt myself about this routier, and still am, it simply isnât there on google and it isnât at a different place because, when I finally checked the map in the car that is where I have it marked. Bizarre, so I will stop for a meal and park up at a non routier resto instead.
Having to recover the car later gave me the excuse to do the dog walk down by the river again. it is lovely down there, a very large open 2 fields and the scenery around the river and so safe, what could possibly go wrong?
The usual walk if we donât go out in the car is out of the back gate into forest and field but I am finding the uphill (10%) of the field increasingly tiring on the rough ground left by the sangliers during the night, and the route back down through the forest is very trippable with all the loose stuff on the ground.
One of the friends I met for a meal on Saturday is about the same age as me but much more decrepit and, as his wife was explaining, he fell recently and landed full face on the kitchen floor, breaking his nose. Unable to lift him she called the pompiers and they winched him up again a bit like @JohnBoyâs farmerâs cow.
We are on the penultimate day of our regular winter sojourn in SE Spain, not far from Cartagena. The sun is quite warm but the air a bit chilly. I went for a bike ride to a local nature reserve where there are chameleons, but I have to wait until the spring to see if I can find any. Cycle home via the takeaway for chicken and potatoes. Rugby and footy on the iPad later on. The chilly north is now 24 hours closer.
On Sunday I managed to get my new novel on âKindle Unlimited.â And then I tagged all the places mentioned in the book (Corsica, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Excel London (yeah, forget that bit) for extra publicity.
The great news is you can either read it for free on Kindle Unlimited or read a huge sample of it free here (https://tinyurl.com/4sp5kv64)
Not a good strategy for making a fortune and buying the vineyard, but⊠hey-ho
Had a large grasshopper sunning itself on our veranda today. It was 15 C in the north facing shade but the south facing veranda was very warm. Never seen one this early before. Looked it up and it was a female Egyptian Grasshopper, which overwinters as an adult.
