I am afraid I have been rather ‘deleterious’ (a fabulous malapropism I heard recently – the offender believes it means ‘tardy’) with my blog entries of late – sorry about that. Here is what I have been up to while Matt was away in the States. Virtually bugger all essentially, so this won’t take long. Matt left right at the end of the bitter cold snap, so the first day, Wednesday, I remained holed up in the house, heating on and fire blazing. There were leftovers in the fridge from the night before, so I had a very lazy evening in front of the TV, much to the pleasure of the pusses. Fortunately, the following day we finally got well above freezing and all the snow melted so things began to improve. I look the car to Nontron and did a big food shop at the Super U. That evening, I cooked, then opened some wine and enjoyed a film or two before turning in.
On Friday, I did our second weekly news round-up on the DVN (a free online expat network for Brits in the area). This is all part of our Port 80 Services venture: our plan being to build up a name for ourselves as a useful source of information rather than just plugging our services week after week. Within an hour of the post going live, I had a phone call from a really lovely lady by the name of Suzanne Pryor, who has been having a 2-year long fight with a mobile phone provider called SFR. In brief, despite having cancelled her contract, she was still getting debited €6.90 a month every month and she had no idea why – and as her French is not good enough to deal with their Customer Service teams, she wanted my help. I was really hoping to be able to get her a refund for all this money she had been paying, but when I looked into it, it turns out that she had actually had 2 lines with them all along and had forgotten about one of them – and had even lost the phone quite some time ago. So, I couldnt get the money refunded, but I did manage to cancel the 2nd contract so she has nothing more to pay to them any more, and was extremely pleased with the service, giving us some glowing feedback. Ok, so it amounted to €12 of work, but at least she was satisifed and promises to tell all her friends.
Later that afternoon, I called in for ‘coffee’ round Bryan and Carol’s in the village. This in fact metamorphosed into 2 beers and an amaretto rather than a coffee, but that was most welcome. We chatted for about 3 hours before I came home to make a late and slightly tipsy start on dinner. The cats were unimpressed by my absence and were even more clingy than before, if that’s even possible. Still, I gave them a few hours of lap time and then they both spent all night on the bed with me, so I think I was forgiven.
Saturday was a really amazing day weather-wise, so I spent the morning cleaning the house and then in the afternoon, popped out in the car and headed to Brantôme for a stroll in the sunshine. Back home, I finally got round to picking up my neglected guitar and played for hours until my once very-calloused fingers started to hurt too much. I have acquired a bit of a You Tube stalker fan – someone who is at least as a big a Blur fan as I am and has been requesting help learning various b-sides, so I indulged him by sending him some guitar tab for a track he couldnt work out, and by recording his fave b-side and posting it to my You Tube page. Sunday was more or less a repeat – I finished my major house-clean, nipped to St Pardoux for a mini-shop, then played a lot of guitar. I dont think anything else happened of note before Matt got back on Tuesday, apart from me managing to make some progress on the foie gras shop’s website.
Since Matt’s return, we’ve not had too much on, but a few work nibbles to report. The first is a Sites for Homes client – an English lady who contacted us on behalf of a French friend of hers. He doesn’t have a house for sale per say – its actually a rather vast stretch of land – about 92 hectaires (920 000 m2) of it! Some of the land is constructable, but most of it is best suited as hunting land – forests, lakes, fields etc. There is also a large building on the grounds but it is a shell in need of a lot of renovation work. Anyway, he saw an agent and they valued it at about half what he wants, so he stormed out in disgust and now wants a nice website from us to advertise the plot directly. We met with them last Wednesday and they seem very nice and very keen to use our services, which is a bonus. This is obviously a departure for us -we know how to reach individual sellers, but the market for a plot like this will be corporate so we need to work out how to reach it. Will be interesting!
In further work news, I think Matt mentioned that while I was away, he found an English couple (they live v close to Sharon) who do a curry takeaway service. When he ordered from them, Matt said ‘by the way, I see you don’t yet have a website’ and just a couple days ago, they came back and said they would like to meet us, so we are calling by on our way for another of our business dinners with Sharon ce soir. Will be interesting to see what we can do for them.
Finally on the work front, poor Matt is currently feeling rather nervous as tomorrow he as, of all things, a job interview! I have recently been trawling the French job centre website looking for work for us and some time back, I was staggered to see a request for a web developper with iPhone app exerience needed…. in St Pardoux! Baffling. Anyway, we put together an application for Matt and several weeks later, had heard nothing back so forgot all about it. Well, they rang the day before Matt went back to the States saying they’d like to interview him. I took the call and said he wasn’t availble for a week and the lady sounded quite put off, so we assumed that would be the end of it… until she rang on Monday! Matt answered this time and despite the impressive hangover (see below – I seem to be having trouble being chronological today), he took the call and arranged to come for an interiew this Thursday. The job is full-time work and not really what he wants to do, but the plan is to see if they’d consider using his skills in some sort of freelance or consultancy capacity. In the meantime, we plan on a crash-course in business French for Thursday morning!
With the weather being so fantastic at the moment, our thoughts are turning more towards the garden – turning the soil in the veggie plot, mowing the grass and pruning the roses etc… Well, we made a bit of a start on outdoor chores on Sunday morning. One of our exterior walls had stains all over it – presumably caused by years worth of rainwater running over the red roof tiles and spilling down the wall, staining them on its way. It looked really awful, and all attempts at scrubbing these stains off had failed, so a number of months ago, I ordered some paint from Lee and Richard to try and cover them over. Well, it took me long enough to get round to it, but that was my Sunday morning project and I have to say I am extremely chuffed with the result – the wall looks 100 times better, even if it took me hours and I got literally covered from head to toe in paint.
In other news, and entirely against my wishes, I recently got older. The day itself was yesterday, but we celebrated on Sunday with Lee, Nat & Jill and Bryan and Carol. We had them all over that evening for a mexican-themed dinner of fajitas, yellow rice, guacamole, salsa, and (bien sur) Margaritas. It was a really fantastic evening, if a little heavy on the booze, that went on to the wee small hours – rendering the following monday a bit of a no-go. I just want to thank them all again for coming and easing the pain of another birthday, and for the lovely pressies they got me. So good to finally feel like we are building up a circle of nice friends out here.
For the day itself, Matt and I took it easy at home in the morning, then popped to Brantôme for an afternoon meander through town and a cheeky beer in the sun. In the evening, we went to St Pardoux for a meal at our fave local restaurant, the Hotel de France – our first time eating out since October of last year, and a real treat. We are both still ridiculously stuffed but pleased that the quality there remains unchanged. I had a goats’ cheese salad with fruit for starter, duck breast for the main, and a fantastic stuffed crêpe with homemade rum and raisin ice cream for dessert. Matt started with foie gras, then scallops served with a mushroom risotto, followed by veal for the main (he loses points for choosing 2 cruel-to-animals dishes, but he avows it was well worth it). His dessert was a trio of butterscotch mousse, a cherry and chocolate layered cake and a passion fruit and vanilla mousse. Far too much food but exquisite, all of it.
Ok, that is all for this disorganised entry, I think.. except to note quickly that it was 17 degrees yesterday, 17 today and will be 19 tomorrow. I am liking Feb a lot more these days! A bientôt!