First off, Happy New Year to all you faithful Frog Bloggers! Hope you all enjoyed the festive break and are coping OK with the inevitable return to work. Today is my mum’s birthday, so happy birthday to you, Mum! She’s not only having to work today, but she’s also got an extra-long shift, so I hope her days improves once she gets home. To resume the narrative, we had a couple quiet days upon getting back to Mazeroux that I shall gloss over.
For New Year’s Eve, we were invited round to Manu & Mathilde’s who live a 5 minute drive away. Matt spent the day preparing his contribution to the menu: he made 2 kinds of tortilla wraps, one filled with cream cheese, spinach and bacon and the other with a chicken mayonnaise. These were sliced into bite-sized pieces and were very yummy. Along with us and the hosts, we were also joined by Philippe, Olivier and his wife Sylvie, and another couple, Catherine and Jeremy. They’re all lovely people that we don’t see enough of. A hoard of kids was mainly installed upstairs but did come down at midnight to see in the New Year with the oldies. At one point, Manu & Mathilde’s youngest, Garance, had us all in stiches when she took over DJing and, rather than the cheesy pop you’d expect a 6 year old to like, she played us some hardcore pounding dance music. She’s definitely her father’s daughter. We proceeded to drink steadily as the New Year approached. In fact, both of us hit a point some time after midnight where we were finding French speaking to be a bit beyond us. I blame the champagne personally. I think we stayed till some time past 3 before coming home and passing out.
One newsworthy item concerns the wind farm proposal for our Commune. Philippe and the other counsellors had a vote at the end of the year and the result was that the project is now on hold for a year while more information is sought. The consensus seems to be that the whole thing sounds a bit fishy, with uncertain financial gain for Milhac so we’re cautiously optimistic that this will all quietly go away.
Unusually for us, we weren’t in too much pain on 01 Jan, but we still took it easy, apart from a brief bit of prep for our first work commitment of the year. This was a meeting on 02 Jan for one of my French clients who run a Château in Charente. They wanted a simple booking system adding to their site and Matt had already done the work, so the meeting was to show them how it works and make sure it meets their needs.
In fact, work has very much been the theme so far this year. Including the new projects I’ve inherited from Colleen, I now have 5 websites to build (all, of course urgent, and also, of course, all at the dreaded “waiting for the client” stage). We’ve also been getting to grips with the system Colleen used to manage her clients’ sites. A dozen or so of these come up for renewal this month, so I’ve been sending out renewal invoices. This part I like: it feels like money for nothing. That said, I’ve been, perhaps unwisely, using the opportunity to introduce ourselves and to ask if anyone had any needs. So far, this has generated a number of extra little bits and bobs that are keeping us occupied.
The work continues tomorrow when we have a client meeting in Perigueux, which is unfortunately scheduled for 10am so it will be an earlier start than we’d like. We don’t know too much about this project yet, except that it is for the “Franco-British Chamber of Commerce” and will entail producing some form of e-book, PDF, or possibly website with information and useful contacts for expats out here trying to set up a business. The only thing we do know for sure about it is that it is a pro-bono job. I think the idea is that we’ll be credited in the document so it will be a good marketing tool as the publication is intended for exactly our target market. More on that one when we know what’s involved.
Work aside, we briefly saw Nadine, who was having a PC issue that Matt was able to sort out very quickly, and to her great relief. Like us, Nadine is having a very busy period and needed to get through a backlog. She’s invited us to dinner round theirs on Thursday, and it will be Jean-Claude cooking for the first time as she’s very busy and he’s not. We also saw Lucien and Mauricette the other day when they called round to drop off a Christmas present for us (a set of tall glasses) and for a chat. They invited us over to theirs yesterday evening to help celebrate Lucien’s birthday. He’s never done anything for his birthdays before so we worked out that it must be a big one, and indeed he has just turned 70. He’s not too impressed about it either, to Mauricette’s amusement. Along with us were Bryan and Carol, Danielle and Odille and another French couple who live a couple mins down the road in Mortegoutte. We assumed it would be a brief affair, but the table was all laid out when we arrived and we ended up staying for about 5 hours. Lucien’s drinks cabinet is always well stocked with various exotic beverages, mostly homemade, and last night we managed to sample widely from it. Vodka to start, then wine, then chartreuse, and finally champagne.
We saw him again today in fact, as he sold us another load of wood that we’ve just finished cramming into our log shed. Barring a catastrophic winter/spring, we should have more than enough for the foreseeable now. The forecast here is for damp grey – daggly basically – but very mild. It’s about 8 in the day and 3 at night, which is not bad at all for January.
Right, that’s all from me. More news from us soon!