This time last year… On a eu un bébé

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Tags: remy, may, 2007, 2008

Lovely May

We’ve been blessed with some lovely weather the last couple of weeks, although last night it was very stormy and very cool today. A good time for that, as May it full of public holidays with many companies giving employees a “pont” as this year they fall on a Thursday - so Friday is given as a day off too.

So Thumpah has had two long weekends, and has also taken this week off so we can decorate our bedroom. That’s turning out to be an intesive project as we’ve only got this week and part of the weekend, with Doctors and Dentists appointments thrown in for good measure. Rémy has been able to stay with his Mamie off and on, though, so we’ve had time on our own to get cracking. Today Rémy is with us, so we can at least get some painting done while he is asleep.

It was Angies funeral last Friday, so we were both thinking of her and Gary at that time. Gary plans on setting up the Angela Mary foundation in her memory with the objective of caring for and educating some of the worlds poorest children in her name. Once they have a site up and running I will post the link.

This afternoon I have a dentists appointment, but we’ll have tomorrow to crack on with things. The weekend too, hopefully, although we have a birthday party to go to on Saturday evening in Courcouronnes.

News from back home hasn’t been so good. Apparently my Mum’s nurse has decided that she doesn’t want to continue with her home-visits anymore. From what I know (as my Mum never tells me anything), she hasn’t been answering her door when the nurse visits on a number of occasions now. That could either be down to the fact my Mum is slightly deaf or the medication she takes which sometimes makes her sleep during the day. I know that occasionally she won’t answer my calls for this reason.

I’ve left a message with my Uncle, who emailed me about this, but he is yet to get back to me.

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Jobsworths, 2CV’s, May… For crying out loud and Flock…

Well these last few weeks have flown by - mainly with both of us feeling tired looking after Rémy or working on the garden during the recent spate of good weather we’ve been having. Mind you it has rained quite a lot and we even had some hail.

The garden work has mainly entailed bringing down a 4 metre high laurel hedge down to 2 metres - although on one Friday afternoon I covered about 6 metres of the 20 metre long hedge - the Saturday was spent taking all the cuttings down to the tip! 3 trips and some very awkward employees there made it difficult for us to get rid of just those cuttings. The jobsworths at the tip decided that they had to put a limit on us, at first because they hadn’t the drivers available to move the big bins there (they are more like large lorry containers without a top). Then by the last trip it was catagorically “no” we couldn’t leave our last load as they were full up. The main culprit was a young arab chap who seemed to enjoy just messing us about. In the end he said “Je vous donne une fleur” and let us through, only to find that the bin for the garden waste was EMPTY!

So we have the rest of the hedge to do, meantime the following day I mowed the lawns while the weather was holding up.

This last weekend, after the aforementioned hail and wotnot - Thumpah was on holiday. So we had from Thursday to Sunday together and frankly - Thursday, which was May Day in France we rested. Friday we saw the Doctor for Rémy, as he has had a bit of a cold, then in the afternoon we went for a walk to les marais (a conservation area) behind our village - and felt all the better for that.

Saturday we made one of our infrequent trips into Paris. My friend Pascal had told us a 2CV exhibition was on at parc des sciences next to Porte de la Villette to celebrate 60 years of that car. So as I’m a bit of a fan off we went to go and have a look. In the end it turned out to be a small exhibition - but the nice thing about the parc des sciences is that there are several other exhibitions on at the same time. We visited one next door to do with sound and then wandered around the grounds till it was time to go home. As we’d stopped to see Dominique in the 13th we didn’t get to the parc till around 4pm - this closed at 6pm and then we had some trouble trying to find access to the multistorey car park. Daft thing was, we could actually see our car from the outside.

Anyway the 2CV exhibition is on until November and well worth a visit, even if it was a bit small.

So May is now upon us - and Thumpah will be off for a week and a half as from Wednesday, when we will be redecorating our bedroom - we already have the paper etc, just a case of doing it. Lets hope that the weather stays nice and that we can commandeer my MIL to look after Rémy while we work.

On the PC side of things - I gave KDE 4 a try installed onto my existing Ubuntu set up. Although it’s a very impressive desktop it’s quite a dogs dinner. Getting things to work properly are hindered by the silly decision to include a beta version of Firefox 3 with the Ubuntu Hardy Heron distro. But with KDE 4 none of the Kipi Plugins nor Gwenrename work in Gwenview, added to that upon retro installing Firefox 2 non of the plug ins worked either!
In short what worked fine before now longer works at all.

So I went back to Gnome desktop, with pleasure. Although the mess with the Firefox versions has led me to install Flock which has been a blessing in disguise. Definately an improvement - due to all the functions, including a very useful photo upload menu and the fact I am typing this blog entry for WordPress within the Flock blog editor. Time will tell - but I’m so far quite pleased with it.

Well better bring this to a close - time to go and wake up the little monster, change him and get him fed.

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Tags: flock, 2CV, Citroën, jobsworths

Sad

I couldn’t sleep on Sunday evening, so at around 2am I do what I do usually when I can’t sleep: I go online. Checking my emails I had one from a friend who used to live in France. He had some very bad news for me. His wife had been murdered on the 7th April.

Well both Thumpah and I knew them as a couple, and saw them both from time to time when they lived here. Needless to say we were both in a lot of shock after hearing this terrible news, I really couldn’t sleep.

For the moment the whole thing is so surreal, it’s a feeling as if you don’t want to realise that what has happened is true. How someone could do such a thing to a person who was kindness itself really goes beyond belief.

I wrote with our condolences to our friend - feeling pretty useless and futile. I still feel useless, but what can you do? Of course, we have our young son to look after and that is one thing that dictates that life goes on. I’m almost sure that our friends wife would want things to be that way.

We will always remember her with great fondness - that I am sure of.

Where the hell is Spring?

I forgot to mention that we made a trip to Brantôme for a week mid-March, a town known as “le Venice du Périgord”. If you want to see how that looks, here’s some photos for you.

The last few weeks have been fairly busy ones. The local Mairie asked me to work on typsetting the village magazine, called “Le Blongios Nain”, it is surprisingly printed off in colour. Looking after “little monster” and working on that wasn’t very easy, particularly because I had to have a few meetings with the Maire and the two Maire Adjoints. Thumpah ended up taking two of her RTT days off so I could work and try and get the job out on time. As it turned out, I thought I’d be able to work a weekend to get to the deadline - but I was out of luck there.

Add to that lots of last minute changes, my PC going down (I had to borrow one from my BIL) later found to be due to viruses, and a problem getting the magazine printed off due to techincal problems; the magazine was finally distributed 2 days late.

Yesteday I was asked to attend a meeting at the Mairie for the “Commission de Communcation”. The subject on the adgenda was the new village website, although during the 2 hour discussion I had very little to contribute. Not being aware of how things operate in the “Conseil du Village” didn’t help a whole lot. But at least I did put forward a couple of observations at the end of the meeting. To be honest with you, I found the whole thing embarrassing.

We’ve at least had some nice weather in fits and starts - much like this weekend. Yesterday was really nice, unfortunately I was tied up with other things so wasn’t really able to take advantage. Then, earlier today, just as I prepared things to continue with lopping down our laurel hedge with an electric chain saw, it started raining. Here I am sitting in my old work clothes and unable to do any work outside. OK, I’m moaning… but the weekend really is the only time I can get jobs like this done, or not as the case may be…

As this is France, the month of May is jammed packed with long weekends. Thumpah is taking a week off too, so we’ll have some time to finally start decorating our bedroom. We bought everything we need to do it a few months back… wallpaper, lights, etc. We just need to buy some insulation material for one wall and a few bits of furniture.

Talking of expenditure… yesterday we bought Rémy his second new pair of boots. You won’t believe how expensive baby shoes are, and as we have to buy new ones every 3 months or so, I can see that this will break the bank alone!

Strange happenings in southern France

It has been announced in the Aveyron that the legendary lirpa loof has been sighted. A Dutch tourist having a picnic under the pont de Millau reported that his cool bag had gone missing and then nearby found strange foot-prints, which looked like those of the lirpa loof last seen in the 13th century on the cote d’Azur and thought extinct.

This is certain to start a media frenzy in this part of southern France, which will perhaps over-take the recent coverage of the Sarkozy-Bruni UK state visit and their stay at the Windsor Castle hotel. Although it is rumoured that their banquet, hosted by the Queen and Prince Philip, was a strange culinery delight… roasted lirpa loof garnished with roasted chestnuts.

English Speakers in France FREE Newsletter - Issue N°2 - April 2008

You can download our FREE APRIL 2008 newsletter here:
http://midtownbuses.free.fr/esfmags/esfapril2008.pdf
(Adobe Reader PDF format - 280kb)

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Chuck Pie

As promised here’s a photo of a creamy chicken & veg pie I made on Sunday. Admittedly the pastry was ready made feuillté, but the insides (the most important bit) was by me alone. Still not got the battery yet from Darty for my camera - so this was done on my mobile.

Funnily enough I felt like cooking tonight too and did a toad in the hole, although the sausage was of the French smoked variety from Leader Price, it wasn’t too bad. Yorkshire recipie was a Delia Smith one.

Served with mash (not from a packet) made with milk and butter as it should be, peas and Bisto onion gravy. I kept a bit back so Thumpah could blend some of the ingredients so Rémy can have some too for his meals. This’ll be the first time he eats something remotely “English”. Will be interesting to see if he likes it.

Talking of Rémy, after a bit of a naff weekend between us he was all smiles on Monday morning when I went to wake him up. I was dreading a week of him “rejecting” me, but it’s been OK so far. Reminds me of the film “Parenthood” where it was observed that being a parent was like a roller coaster ride. I can see what they mean now!

Over the last few days I’ve been working on my sites. An accomodation in France section added to my main site at http://www.essonneimage.co.uk with expansion envisaged in the “Visit the…” articles. An article will also be added about the appartments my FIL has for rent in Brantôme (24) - we’ll be going down there to stay in a couple of weeks.

It’s Thumpah’s birthday on the 10th and nothing has been decided yet for the celebration.