The 27 degree sunshine and blue skies of Cap Verde feel very far away now. It’s been largely unpleasant here since our return with a quantity of rain that has been impressive even by Dordogne standards. We’ve had the odd reprieve but on the whole its been very tedious. We’ve had gales, hail and cold temperatures. We’ve gone through significantly more wood than usual this winter and it looks like April is shaping up to give us more of the same. We had quite a big storm last night. It wasn’t too dramatic but what was noteworthy was that it was everywhere at once : to the north, south, east and west. According to the weathermen, it covered virtually the whole of France. It faded overnight but not before taking out our power. Today is still very unsettled with 70k winds battering the house.
On with the recap : we hit the ground running on Monday with both of us working to clear our backlogs. In the afternoon an existing client came over for a meeting to discuss changes to his site. That out of the way, we both had some finishing touches to apply to the Garden Tomb website, which went live the following morning. It came out well and the client’s pleased with it. In fact, they rang today to discuss some « phase 2 » changes they want making.
As well as that, I am adding a Chinese language version to the Vineyards site, and have a gite website that is getting close to finished. Matt meanwhile is working on adding the feed of properties for sale to the vineyards site, a large project that will take him some time.
Work aside, there’s little to recount for our week. Matt had a hospital appointment on Thursday to see a specialist about his hernia. They say he’s probably had it for years even though it’s only recently started bothering him. They agree that it will need surgery, so he’s got an operation booked in. This unfortunately isn’t until the end of May so he’ll have to cope with it until then.
Onto the weekend : we did nothing on Friday night, knowing the rest of the weekend would be busy. In fact, it was largely given over to our two local associations. We worked on Saturday morning then in the afternoon, our anti-windfarm association VIAPL held its annual AGM. We’d agreed to go as Christian was worried attendance would be bad. In the end they got around 50 people so his fears were unfounded. Unfortunately, various question and answer sessions that should have been kept back to the end kept descending into chaos. The highlight for me was whe one idiotic xenophobe tried to blame the wind-farms on Angela Merkel (or Mrs Hitler as he charmingly called her). With all these interruptions, the meeting lasted three hours which neatly killed our afternoon.
We hurried home as soon as it ended to get ready for the evening’s activity, which was dinner at ours with our friends Emmanuel & Olivier. We’d not seen them since before the wedding (which they weren’t able to attend), so we had a lot of catching up to do, and it was a very enjoyable evening. For posterity, the meal was a repeat of the meal Matt made for my birthday weekend, ie : fried pork with roasted sweet potatoes, apple and fennel. The boys brought dessert : a purchased cake from their local baker. They left at around 11pm, so we had a relatively early night.
Sunday was a day of chores. We had to cut wood in the morning, then we had a few hours to chill before we headed down to Milhac for its annual Easter event, our second association-related chore in as many days. There’d been a meal the night before but as we had guests we gave it a miss. On the Sunday, there were the usual fairground rides and our wee buvette (drinks stand), which we manned from 6pm until late.
Last year, it was freezing cold, it rained, there was nothing to eat, everyone got utterly pissed (except us), and we could barely see to serve the drinks. The memory of all this meant I approached the evening with quiet dread, but in the end it was a big improvement. The association no longer has a licence to sell spirits, so all we had was wine, beer and soft drinks. This meant that a) manning the bar was easier and b) people didn’t get as drunk and obnoxious. The weather was also better, although it still got quite cold after sundown. The best change was that Benoit & Virginie were there too, taking care of food. Virginie was on chip duty (that’s fries for our American readers) and Benoit made up either duck or ham sandwiches, using some lovely baps that Fred the baker had made especially.
We kept serving until 1am by which time there were only a few hard-core stragglers remaining. They finally took the hint when we turned out the lights and we made our weary way home. And that was the story of that.