Welcome back to Frog Blog for all the latest news from Mazeroux. The first and most important thing to mention is the weather, which after weeks of dreary grey monotony, is suddenly spectacular. It’s 25 degrees out today and at 27, tomorrow promises to be the hottest so far of 2015. We’ve even managed a few nights without the fire.
Quick work round-up: we’ve recently put live 4 websites: HealthCycle, Le Manoir du Bois Mignon, Finesse Cuisine Catering and West Removals and Transport. I’m especially relieved to have the insane wedding caterer out of the way as he was taking up far too much of my time and was fast climbing to the top of my list of personae non gratae.
I have 2 other sites to do now, one for a photographer that is well underway, and the other for a canoe/kayak business down in the southern Dordogne. These should be quite easy and I will be able to get on with them alongside our huge language school project. On that, we’ve just submitted a couple different design ideas for them to review and are now waiting for feedback before we can progres things. Matt’s had a few projects to keep him occupied too, including adding a booking system to the Manoir site, and also migrating an online shop over to our server, which went surprisingly smoothly.
Enough of boring work. As Matt mentioned in his last entry, the Beaufils made contact recently. They came around when Matt was over at the new neighbours’ house, and this served as a good opener to discuss them a bit. We’d been worried we were being ostracised for fraternising with the enemy, but they made it clear that is not at all the case. Lucien has since been around – a few times in fact – with his tractor, so veggie plot 2015 is going ahead after all. It’s about 1/4 of the size, so should be much easier to manage, even if it means there’s now more lawn for Matt to mow.
I went to see the doctor on Wednesday with ear issues. Basically, I have intermittent blocked ears and swollen lymph nodes. Sometimes also I get a sore throat, and sometimes toothache. I had the same thing this time last year and none of the meds I was given helped. This time, the doc reckoned it might be sinus related rather than ear related, so he packed me off with 3 different prescriptions for sinusitis. I’m close to done with the meds now and there’s no change so I think it must be something else. It’s possible it’s all due to my pesky wisdom teeth, but then I also saw a dentist at the start of the year and he reckoned all my teeth were fine, so I’m not sure exactly what’s up. I shall go back to the docs in a few days and see what else he has to say.
Right, on to the weekend. On Friday, it was the opening night of an art exhibition in Périgueux. All of the paintings on display are by our friend Jean-Claude from down the road. His current series is called ‘Paysages Intérieures’, or Internal Landscapes. They’re fairly sombre and abstract but very good. There were probably 30 people there, but we were the only ones to have made the trip from our area, so JC was particularly grateful to us for being there. That evening was also our monthly curry night but because we knew we were going to the exhibition we hadn’t made plans to see anyone, so the 2 of us tucked in by ourselves.
We didn’t get up to much the next day but Sunday was a day of doing some non-work chores. Matt dealt with the fence around the new mini-veggie plot and I repotted several house plants and moved them outdoors for the summer. I also did my annual lounge ceiling cobweb removal: a tricky feat involving several lengths of bamboo and lots of scellotape. Later that afternoon, Jenny called around for an apéritif. We were low on vodka but as luck would have it, we had just the right amount of the ingredients needed for a round of margaritas. It was our first batch of 2015 and our first outdoor apéritif too. It was so pleasant out that we were even in shorts.
Jenny’s mostly well, but she’s stressed at work and, as she has no volunteers helping her this season, she’s having to do it all alone. We’re due to find out soon about her annual fete. It will either be 27 June and just be us, or it will be the following weekend and we’ll be playing with another band. Either way, we should really start to find the time to rehearse…
Right, I think that’s all I have to say. Until next time.