Saturday, 31st May 2014

Hello Readers. Today I’ve decided to give you all an update on my veggie patch (so exciting I know). Thankfully most of my plants are doing well. I’ve lost 2 corn plants but the other 7 are going strong. My tomato plants have just started to flower and my courgette plant is flowering and already has a couple of courgettes growing. My aubergine however is a very unhappy plant, I may have planted it out too early, but we shall see if it survives. Also the cucamelon’s which I have planted out are not very happy, I’ve still got a couple in the greenhouse which are fine, but they may be the only one’s that survive. Also I don’t know what I have done to my basil but it is almost dead. I’m going to move it to the green house to see if that helps (I think the nights are still too cold for it).

The week has been an interesting one, we finally got our French number plates for the car, so the car is all fully insured and registered in France. It’s fantastic that we (well Pat) have got that all sorted. Along with that we had visitors over the weekend. It was really good to see Teresa and Robert, they were celebrating their 10th anniversary together. Unfortunately we didn’t have the best weather while they were here, but being British, they didn’t mind doing things in the rain. On Friday morning we finally got to go to the local markets, it was good to do and I will be going back (hopefully on a dryer day). In the afternoon Robert and Pat attacked the bathroom door to turn it around. A necessity as the bath does take up a lot of space. This they did wonderfully well and finished before dinner. We had a lovely dinner out on Friday night. Saturday we drove over to Cognac as both Teresa and Robert love a drop of Brandy (Cognac). We found a free parking spot (yah) and then proceeded to walk through the town to find the Tourist Centre. Unfortunately for us, it decided that this was the best time to rain and rain heavily. Pat had not bought his waterproof jacket (despite his wife – aka me – asking him if he wanted to bring it with him) and was soaked to the skin! After finding the Tourist information and retiring to a café for a cup of coffee we sorted out what we wanted to do for the rest of the day. Teresa and Robert were up for a tour of one of the Cognac houses, while Pat and I decided to do a walk and visit the Cognac information museum, Cognac actually started as a town producing salt! Thankfully the afternoon did fine up and we all got some sunshine, which was really nice. Sunday we walked over to a nearby village which was having a “day in the country” it was interesting, and the day stayed dry, for the afternoon we did absolutely nothing except relax (and read books), though Robert decided that our lawn needed mowing, so he rather nicely did that for us. Monday we decided on a walk around one of the local lakes (in the rain of course). We discovered that the lake had been hit quite hard by the storm we had last week. They were still in the process of clearing up the trees that had come down. The strength of the wind was such that some of the trees hadn’t actually been uprooted, but their trunks snapped. It made us realise how fortunate we had been that there wasn’t more damage around here. On Tuesday we had to bid farewell to our friends. Pat and I were fortunate enough to be able to make our French class on Tuesday morning.

The rest of our week has been rather quiet, we haven’t really done much, however I did get a chance to attend an art class/group. It was great to sit down and just think about drawing and to get direction to do something I would not normally have done. We looked at patterns and the creating of a two dimensional image rather than trying to create the depth and three dimensions one usually tires to imbue a piece of work with. We are thinking of turning these images into a lino print, I want to play with mine a bit more before I create a lino print, it still needs some simplification. So I’m looking forward to next week’s class.

Today we have cleaned the house today in anticipation of our next set of guests – my aunt and uncle from Australia. They will be heading up to Paris on Tuesday for the last bit of their holiday before heading home. It has been a while since I have seen them so it will be good to catch up with them.

PS. We’ve still not had many suggestions for naming our house, I’m for Maison du Wisteria (Wisteria House) Pat thinks something along the lines of Le coquelicot (wild poppy). However, they are both a bit twee, so any suggestions gladly taken…

The bridge in Cognac

The bridge in Cognac

Tractor display at the "day in the country"

Tractor display at the “day in the country”

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