My mission this week, should I choose to accept it is completing the insanity that I started at the beginning of January and try to finish my 50,000 word novel over the next week. Now for those of you who have seen my Facebook page you will know that I’ve reached the 25,000 mark this week – I’m half way through – which is significantly further than I thought I would get, however I still have 24,951 words to write in 9 days – 2,772.3 words per day, not exactly sure how one gets .3 of a word but hey maths and language don’t always match up. So hopefully doable but I will try to spend today and tomorrow getting a lot more written per day than I have so far – and maybe even break the 30,000 barrier.
The past couple of weeks have quiet. The joy of rural France in winter is that not much happens. A lot of places close for winter. We are however heading over to friends tonight for dinner which I am looking forward to. They are dog people who love us bringing Siena (despite her atrocious behaviour last time we went) I’ve decided she is going to need a good walk this afternoon before we go, to help remove some of the energy. Hunting season is still on-going and we had the joys of hunters close to the house yesterday which sent Siena into a barking frenzy as the hunting dogs howled and pursued some poor hapless creature. I did arrive home from art class to find two pheasants – a male & female sitting on the wall opposite our house. I guess they figured it was safer there than out in the wild.
I have been continuing with art class. And I really love the picture that I completed yesterday. This shell is to go with my sea dragon and a further picture (as yet undecided) as part of a tryptic that will go into the bathroom. I’ve decided that once I finish my novel – I will make sure that I get more art work done. I was actually thinking of taking a break from the water colour class as I’ve wanted to do other art work. But I think I will just find a way to slot more art into my life rather than stop with the water colour as I think I’m finally getting the hang of it.
 The shell I completed yesterday. |
 Sea Dragon |
Last weekend, as we had some sunshine (it was cold but the sun was out) I got out and did some pruning of the honeysuckle – which was somewhat over-grown and needed a haircut. This has been done and now I need to move on to the Wisteria. But I did discover some interesting things in my garden – one, a lot of plants think it is spring as the weather has been so mild (despite one snow fall this week); two, said plants have buds on them – which is a pain as I’m planning on moving a large number of these plants at the start of spring; three, 2 blue tit’s (they are birds all you sniggering children) have decided that it is time to start nesting and have started to build a nest in the bird box on the wall – thankfully the wall is against a wall that backs onto our neighbours wood fired heating system – so the wall does stay warmish. We will have to see what happens over the next couple of months. However, in pruning the Honeysuckle I discovered two things – one, that there is another bird box on the arbour which was hidden by all the old Honeysuckle and that Honeysuckle in French is called Chèvrefeuille which literally translates as goats leaf! Not the most romantic of names for such a lovely plant.
I’ve had a lot of friends and family have birthdays over the past two weeks, so happy birthday to you all. However one friend has had her 40th birthday – so Happy Birthday B – as a celebration she is heading off to Iceland next month – a trip that I had originally hoped to be on, but unfortunately can’t do. However in anticipation of her trip I painted her a picture last year. I didn’t put a picture of it up on my blog at the time that I completed it as I wanted it to be a surprise for her birthday – unfortunately I didn’t get my act together and still have the painting upstairs (it is however now bubble wrapped and packaged and ready to be posted – I even left for art class early yesterday to go to the post office to post it, and discovered that I had left it behind on my desk!).
This is the painting – I’m quite chuffed with this one as well. Don’t worry – B has seen this image before this post.
The Northern Lights
And the last big Happy Birthday for this week is to my mum – happy birthday mum. Have a lovely lunch time celebration with everyone.
I will see you in two weeks and remember Pats blog next week – http://patblog.patbell.co.uk
(He is currently out in the garage building me something!)