A week of accomplishments...

We have this week, with J and T's help (once again thank you so much!)
1: put in 3 veluxs,
2: weeded the veg garden and relocated the cabbages,
3: fished out large bits of wood from the lake,
4: fixed the mowing attachment for the tractor
5: ripped out more of the kitchen of the gite
6: cleaned nearly all the radiators
7: P has nearly finished his shelter for the equipment
8: treated the peach trees.
9: visited numerous DIY stores!

Also drunk a fair bit, run and swum lots and generally had a good time.

Here's some proof....

Blind Tasting

Tonight we had a blind tasting, dressing 5 bottles of wine in my socks (and a leg-warmer!) and tried to guess correctly which they were!

P got 3 out of 5 and the rest of us managed 1 each. J can come again having decided that our own home-brew was the expensive St-Emillion.

All a lot of fun but a little dispiriting, but definitely one for future guests... possibly with a more sophisticated disguise for the bottles..

The vendage is finished... whoop whoop.

Which means we can concentrate on the gitê at last. I've started, with K's help this week, to strip the old cast iron radiators and its taking quite a while but I am enjoying it.

We just need to pick a colour to re-do them in...

Any suggestions?

It's pretty here in the morning...

Exercise and the whys and wherefores

We've had C and K with us this week and I think they are trying to kill us off. I've been running twice this week, which is two times more than the last ten years and have swam (much more acceptable) every other day. We've also discovered a sort of fitness/ obstacle/ assult course around the lake which K and I partook of last night with a lot of giggling and falling off monkey bars.

I'm exhausted, mind you, I have so far  have managed to avoid the threatened "pyramid of pain"... we do know how to have fun in these parts....

Jean-Jean Le Gendarme

I'm exhausted, I spent a large part of yesterday making madeleines for the Moto-fete and set off at, what can only be described, as sparrow-fart this morning.

I've spent all day hoping no one asked me anything more taxing than "Un verre de vin Rouge" and instead got embroiled in a long and some what convaluted conversation with a 6ft 7 Gendarme whose name for reasons which escaped me, is, Jean-Jean.

The high point of the day though, at the extremely matcho bike-fair, was watching the same said policeman, complete with firearm, persuade the owner of a ridicuolusly small Papillon dog, to pose it on the petrol tank of his enormous Police bike, so he could take a photo of it!

Its astonishing to me now how much I took being able to understand and converse without concentrating for granted... roll on that stage in French, which is sadly still a long way off.

Someone's been stealing my mushrooms

I don't even know why I care as I  detest the things, but I do.

We were told when we brought the place that we had Cep mushrooms in our woods, we were also told that the problem was that everyone knew we had them.

Yesterday when off for a walk J spotted people in our woods, when asked what they were doing they looked shifty but carried on helping themselves!

I went into the woods later and gathered a variety of different sorts and sauntered off to the pharmacy where Serge and his Big Book of Mushrooms reliably informed me they were all "pas bon, pas commestible." Excellent, someone else has run off with all our highly prized mushrooms which are currently  €7/ kilo in the market. That's rather dependent on my being able to find them mind you..

Maybe I'll let P have a shotgun after all....