Please forgive us, dear readers, for the long wait between posts. My only excuse is that work got in the way of my blogging duties. I will take you up through the middle of last week, and Will will take over from there.
We did very little else the weekend after Will’s entry. He started the hedge trimming on Friday and it took him a few hours to do the majority of the work. It took him a few days to recover and then he finished the rest on Tuesday. They are now nicely trimmed and thankfully, Jenni’s hedge trimmer worked much better than Sharon’s so it wasn’t nearly as frustrating as last year.
I mowed the lawn on the Sunday and it needs to be done every week this time of year. I missed doing it last weekend and I’m not looking forward to doing it later today since the grass is now knee-high. In addition, we’ve got a very aggressive mole in the back and front garden who is creating mountains wherever he goes. Bryan has some traps and I may investigate using those since it’s becoming a real menace to the lawn. The garden is coming along nicely with beautiful neat rows of onions and garlic all growing nicely (thanks to Andrew). Our seedlings are also pushing up and will be ready to go into the garden soon. Lucien told us yesterday that we can be planting tomatoes so we’ll get some plants in the coming days.
On the work front, we’ve had a role-reversal here at Port 80 where I’ve been working full time and Will hasn’t had much to do. The majority of my time has been spent converting the Buszy and Mad UK sites. They both had to be live by May 1st and I’m happy to say I achieved my goal. I have one or two small bugs to iron out on the Buszy which is an on-line shop and therefore, more complicated but I should have them sorted by tomorrow. I estimated it would take 7.5 days to do both sites and in the end, it was more like 11 but the quote was aggressive to win the business so I’m not surprised.
Apart from that, I had a meeting with Vortex to talk about their current business operations. I am due to send them a proposal for getting those processes on-line so I’ve got to work on that. I also have some contract work for an ex-Channel 4 colleague who now works at a UK charity. She was left in the lurch by another developer so I’ll be picking up on someone else’s work which is never fun but at least it’s work. Also, Will has been doing a revision to his dad’s site and it requires some of my time so I will try to get that done in the next day or so.
Apart from work, we’ve managed to fit in some socialising as well. On Friday, Lee & Richard came over for dinner. They’ve been hard at work on their house, getting it ready for visitor season which was starting the next day. It sounds like they’ve made great progress although in their eyes, they still have a long way to go. I made a roast chicken, served with sweet potato fries and peas and strawberry tart for dessert.
They had to be home at 9 the next morning so originally planned to leave that evening but decided to stay over in the end. Despite their early start, we still managed to pack away a couple litres of vodka and I was the first to pass out, sometime around 1am. Despite my hangover the next day, I was back at work by 10 that morning and worked throughout the day. That evening, we were invited over to some neighbours who live in La Jaunie, just 1K down the road. We had previously made plans to see a concert with Françoise but her friends asked her over to dinner and invited us along too.
They are called Manuel and Matilde and they have four daughters between the ages of 4 and 15. Manuel was born exactly one day after me and Matilde is slightly younger. They have lived in the area for a long while, although I didn’t get the full story of their origins. The other guests were Françoise and Phillipe, and Pascal and Claire, friends of the hosts. We had champagne and wine for aperitifs, then moved on to dinner around 10pm. Manuel is the chef and he made a chicken tagine, served with couscous. Before that, we had a salad of white asparagus with lardons. This was followed by cheese and a dessert of homemade chocolate ice-cream, flavoured with cinnamon and ginger along with a pear compote.
After dinner, Manuel rolled a joint of his homegrown and we had a few of those before realising it was 2:30am and we all made a move home. It’s really nice to meet more people in the area, especially since they are lovely and appear to have similar interests. It looks like Françoise will go back to Australia in the coming months so hopefully, we’ll keep in touch with our new friends.
I worked again on Sunday, despite the late start to the day and hangover. It was a quiet day apart from that. On Monday, I had a dentist appoint. I’m embarrassed to say it was my first in four years, the longest I’ve ever gone without one. Despite this, my teeth got a clean bill of health and the dentist was very good. True to the French health care system, the check-up and clean costed €29, 20 of which I can claim back.
That evening, we had Jenni and her son Matias over for dinner. It’s very hard for her to find time to socialise so we were happy to get a chance to see her. A horse had escaped that afternoon and so she was delayed in getting home from work and didn’t arrive here until well after 8pm. She was meant to find a sitter for Matias but that didn’t work either so he joined us for dinner. He is 5 years old and very well behaved, despite the late hour. For dinner, I made Iain’s pork loin filet and served it with bleu cheese potato gratin, the dish that destroyed my thumb. This time, I only cut 2/3 of the potato so that there was no danger of including a bit of thumb-tip in the dish. We had left-over tart for dessert and that went down well. She left around 11, taking a sleeping Matias with her.
Ok, my work here is done. Will is writing another entry as I write this, so you’re about to get a double-shot of Frog Blog, if you can handle it.