My turn to do a blog update, and seeing as it’s today, I shall take the opportunity to wish one and all a very joyeuse Fête Nationale! This entry might take some time to write as my laptop keyboard is acting up at the moment and keys like ‘T’ ‘Y’ ‘DELETE’ and various other useful ones keep sporadically cutting out on me. If things suddenly become illegible in places, you know why!
The first thing to report about this week is the weather which has been basically appalling. It’s not gotten much above 20 all week, with the lowest ‘high’ being 19. It has been cool, overcast and rainy. Worse still, it’s not even the decent “oh well, at least we don’t have to water the garden” kind of rain; more just the erratic 10 minutes here and there of drizzle. Luckily, yesterday was the worst of it and the forecast is for more seasonal temperatures from tomorrow onwards, culminating in 33 by the end of the week.
The weather has sapped the cats’ enthusiasm for going out and instead they’re getting in a solid 20 hours or so of sleep per day, including spending all night on the bed. Good news for the small, furry creatures of Mazeroux but not so much for getting a decent night’s sleep!
I’ve had better news this week as far as work goes. After placing an ad on our expat network, I netted a new local client – a professional photographer offering courses and his wife, who runs a gite. They’ve already got sites for both businesses but did them themselves and weren’t pleased with their respective Google rankings. I was hired to review and optimise them both, which amounted to about a full day’s worth of work. It will take a few weeks to see how much difference I’ve made but hopefully they should be pleased with the end result.
At the same time, a school friend’s sister contacted me on Facebook recently wanting me to build her a website from scratch. She’s a counsellor and wanted a site to promote her newly established therapy business. We’re currently at the design phase so this should keep me busy for at least week or 2 yet. I also did a third “DVDs for sale” ad earlier this week, reasoning that the weather was on my side. We’ve only had 3 orders from that – but each one was for about a dozen DVDs so our collection is definitely shrinking.
For Matt, he has moved on to doing some enhancements to a system he built several years ago for a UK-based small business. The work’s been in the pipeline for some time but it’s only now he’s been able to make a start. He also had a call a few days ago from an old work colleague from London who is opening up a self-storage business and wants a fancy site making. The project’s not confirmed yet, but is so far looking likely, so his long run of work continues unabated. He has also taken the new mower out on its first outing and is pleased with it, although opportunities to mow have been sparse with all the rain.
In other news, Rigit, our UK friends from Nottingham are currently out here for 2 weeks. They’ve had a stinker of a first week so I’m glad the weather’s due to improve for them this week! They invited us over to theirs for dinner last Thursday, but ultimately had to postpone till Saturday as their water was abruptly cut off that afternoon. In between, we had our monthly curry feast on the Friday, which we hosted.
We invited Sophie and Dom from Villars, as well as the obligatory Philippe. Luckily for us, the latter was on good form, didn’t stay too late and largely steered clear of his usual drunken topics of politics and war. That said, he still managed to demolish our vodka supply. The guests left around 1ish, and we stayed up for a nightcap and a film, so didn’t get to bed till 3. The following morning there was a fishing competition just over the road from us that a number of people we knew were going to watch. We missed the fishing itself, having gotten up late, but arrived in time for lunch and a drink or 2. In fact, I think we had 6 pastis each (none of which we paid for) so were quite well oiled indeed by the time we left. We came back home and chilled out/sobered up and then headed over to Rigit’s that evening for our delayed meal.
Rich served us up a meal of new recipes: the main was a veggie curry that rather than being tomato based, used watermelon. It was unique and very tasty. To follow was a polenta-based cake with lemon sauce which too was very yummy. As the guys are out for 2 weeks, we aim to have them over here to dinner this week. And that, I think, is the only confirmed social activity so far. We were supposed to pop out to Miallet this afternoon as there’s stuff going on to mark Bastille Day. Unfortunately, we’ve had to wait in for a chap who’s buying some DVDs and has gotten lost en route. We may still try and pop over once he’s gone as part of the entertainment includes a 30-person, Welsh Samba band. Things as strange as this are very rare out here in rural nowhere so it’s gotta be worth a look!
A la prochaine…