Welcome back to Frog Blog. We’ve had a number of activities to keep us busy, but little-to-none of them have been work-related. Having had a steady start to the year workwise, things have very abruptly gone quiet for me. I have numerous sites on the go, but for all of them, the clients have become unresponsive. I suppose normal people tend to take time off over Easter, so maybe that’s why. It often seems that only one of us is busy at a time, and as Matt has a new project to start for Abby soon, maybe that means a tail-off is on the cards for me.
But we’ve not been idle here at Port 80. We’ve been using our time to get serious about planning our June gig at Jenny’s. As Matt mentioned in his last post, we’ve enlisted 2 additional singers. These are Celine and Roxanne, 2 highly disillusioned ex-members of Musique en Herbe. They both sing very well, but like us, can’t cope with all the chaos of the Friday evening sessions so they’ve stopped coming. We’ve been talking about trying to get something going with the 2 of them for some time so decided to use the opportunity of our gig as a test case.
They were more than up for it and we met on Saturday to put together a preliminary list. It was very productive and we’re all very keen to get started. They’ve given us a dozen or so new songs to learn – mostly french and all apparently well-known. This means we’re able to retire some of our regular songs that were getting stale and now have an entirely new setlist. Regrettably this means we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and not tons of time in which to do it. We’ve arranged to practise every saturday afternoon and ideally also on wednesdays, assuming the ladies are free. It would all be a lot more feasible if this were our only gig, but along with all we’re doing with Musique en Herbe too it’s a lot. Perhaps it’s just as well work’s quiet at the moment!
On the subject of gigs, we’ve been approached to do yet another gig this summer, in early July. There’s a paella night happening at the nearby village of St Front and the organiser saw us in Milhac and wondered if we were free to do the same. We really enjoyed that gig and so in theory are up for it, but having given it some thought we’re just not sure we have the time to fit it in.
Not much else to report for the week barring our usual activities – choir and conversation class for Matt and our regular English lesson with Jenny’s son Mathias on wednesday. The latter went well, but our pupil was bursting with energy so as it was a sunny day, we spent most of the lesson outside. We taught him directions – turn left, go straight on etc – and let him run around the place.
The sunny weather lasted until the friday when it reverted to grey and wet – just in time for the long easter weekend. That evening was Musique en Herbe and I’m relieved to report it was an improvement over last week, which was a veritable nadir. On a personal note, I recently had an epiphany about why my guitar sound there is so bad. I won’t bore you with the technical reason, but in summary I shelled out on a small cheap bit of kit and that has made a big difference, so that’s one annoyance less to deal with at least.
On Saturday, we took delivery of our new dishwasher. I think we were only without one for 3 weeks but that was more than long enough to make us appreciate how indispensable an item it is! The delivery unfortunately clashed with our anti-wind farm association’s AGM, so I went off to that while Matt waited in. The meeting went fine but dragged on, so I was relieved to have a good excuse to leave early as we had our meeting with the singers that afternoon. We’re both well chuffed with the new dishwasher. It’s had a perfect score so far on 2 loads, and is far quieter than the old one too.
After a quiet day on Sunday during which we both spent time getting to grips with our new songs, we had an evening activity. Every year at Easter, Milhac has a fair. This is normally under the rain, and as such, sparsely attended. We were counting on this being the case this time round too as we’d been roped into running the buvette (drinks stand). We arrived at 9pm and were initially reassured as it seemed fairly quiet. However, the crowd that was present was a very thirsty one and we had several big rushes, directly before and after the fireworks. In the end, we went through our entire stock of booze and then some. By the end of the night, even the cans of english beer – a beverage universally reviled by the french – sold out. This was around 2am by which point we were keen to leave.
Yesterday was a quiet one but we did squeeze in a little rehearsal despite hangovers. It was officially back to work today. We had a meeting here this afternoon with a client whose site went live a few weeks ago. We needed to go over a couple last things and, more importantly, get paid. Right, that’s all the news I have and my guitar beckons. Au revoir.