I’m writing this under a threatening sky as gales, lashing rain and cracks of thunder hammer down. I have to say I’m very unimpressed with the month of April so far – it’s been a near-total wash out and there’s no end in sight. I sincerely hope that all the forecasters’ predictions of another scorching summer this year hold true: I’m more than ready for some of that at this point.
Seeing as Matt was late with his last post, I don’t have as many days to cover. I’ll pick up the story with a quick work recap. Matt’s new project is now well underway and is going mostly OK. For me, I’ve had Matt’s uncle’s site to work on. He’s just given the design proposal the thumbs-up, so that is now under construction. I’m doing another one for a photographer who has also just approved my design. Once these are done, I’ve a new one to do for a furniture supplier who seems to have champagne tastes (and probably beer money too knowing my luck) so that will be a challenge.
We also met with some friends of Jenny’s last night who want a website – and luckily, aren’t in an immediate hurry. They own a drone and are planning on offering a range of aerial-photography services. Should be an interesting one.
Ok, enough work. We were invited to Benoit and Virginie’s at the weekend to celebrate Benoit’s birthday. Unfortunately for us though, it was on the Friday. As this clashed with our rehearsal, we had to make our apologies. We would have skipped the practise but it was a special session at which we recorded several songs. This is for a June gig at which a local dance school will be performing routines to which we’ll provide the soundtrack. Musique en Herbe did this once before and it was by all accounts a disaster. Their interpretations of the songs in question were too different from the original songs for the dancers to pull of their acts and chaos ensued. You’d think that would put them off doing it again, but apparently not.
So to avoid a repeat of the previous fiasco, the dancers can now practise to our recordings. The fact that there’s no guarantee we’ll play the songs in the same way or at the same speed on the actual night seems to have passed them by. There were only 6 tracks but it took virtually all evening to get them, so it was a tedious session.
We were back there the following afternoon to rehearse for the gig we’re doing at Ghislaine’s and this at least was a more pleasing and productive experience. That evening, we had a big social gathering planned. We’d invited Lee & Richard, Nat & Gill and Bryan & Carol over for dinner. Meal-planning for this was made a little complicated as 1) Richard has abruptly become a born-again veggie and 2) Jill asked that we eat on the early side or else she gets indigestion, and we were out all afternoon at rehearsal.
In the interim, poor Lee came down with an infection that saw him rushed to hospital. He got out later that day and is on a course of antibiotics so is already on the mend, but this of course meant they couldn’t make it. Our big social evening suffered another blow that morning when Nat and Jill cancelled too at the last minute. Having learnt about Lee, they suggested a rain-check. We said come anyway, but they decided to give it a miss all the same. This was a bit vexing as they didn’t seem to have any good reason, and in any case we’d not seen them in ages.
Bryan and Carol were still around and in the end we had a lovely time with just the four of us. We had a vegetarian lasagne that underwent an emergency de-vegetarianisation with a pack of lardons added to it. This was followed by Matt’s second attempt at a carrot cake, and both were very successful. This is a good thing as we’ve had rather a lot of leftovers to get through…
Right, I think I’ve more or less covered everything, albeit in a very meandering way, so au revoir.