Welcome back to Frog Blog. First, the sad news. Chuck’s partner Marilyn died on Thursday last week, at the age of 86. She’d had a few health issues in recent years, including cancer. This was a few years ago and she’d got the all-clear, but the chemotherapy took a lot out of her and pretty much ruined her sense of taste. Matt saw her when he was last over and commented that she looked even thinner than usual and seemed very quiet. This is in contrast to how she was the few times I met her – very outgoing, vivacious and energetic. Chuck and her were together for over 35 years so we’re thinking of him at this difficult time.
The other part of the title refers to our recent decision to stop smoking (“clope” being a french slang word for cigarette). At this point, we are five days in and according to the internet, our bodies are 100% nicotine-free, our senses of smell and taste are normal, breathing is easier and we have passed the peak of withdrawal cravings. I am not too sure about that last one, but I can confirm I’m already feeling better in general. We’re still smoking the other stuff, but now we’re using the dried leaves as a tobacco substitute, and that’s mostly working out OK.
It also helps that we’re both still very busy with work. I have officially broken my record for best quarter ever in terms of earnings, and the way things are going I may do so next quarter as well. It feels like as soon as I finish a website, we get a new enquiry come in, so there’s no end in sight either. My main focus has been the art gallery website, which is nearly done now. It might just be the best site I’ve ever made. More importantly, the client really likes it too. I’ve another one or maybe two after that one and then we both have a very large project that will keep us busy for months: Aquitaine Lifestyle Solutions. This is for a group of people offering a range of services under one roof: financial planning, real estate and holiday rentals. The idea is for an umbrella website to promote all of them, followed by separate sites for each business area. The umbrella site will be easy enough, but each of the others will have complicated functionality so will be quite involved. It’s essentially 3 or 4 big projects rolled into one. For Matt, he’s got an existing client’s site to redesign once he’s finished his big project for Abby, and then he’ll hopefully be free to work with me on ALS.
In other news, our veggie plot has been turned over in readiness for the spring, thanks as always to Lucien. We’ve also placed an order for some seeds from Amsterdam – guaranteed females – so all we need now is for the weather to get its act back together. We had an amazing week of sunshine that peaked at 22 degrees on the Friday. Sadly, it has since crashed down to 12 degrees and is going to stay grey and overcast all this week. Matt took advantage of the blue skies to give the lawn its first mow of the year and to do some pruning so it’s all looking nice and tidy outside (although I think Lucien was a bit aggressive in his tree trimming).
In contrast to the previous week’s very busy one, we had a totally planless weekend. As most people we know smoke, this was perhaps not a bad thing in any event. Hopefully we’ll be ready to be around smokers by the coming weekend – not that we have any plans for that either thinking about it. Right, I think that’s all the news from Mazeroux. A la prochaine.