Semaine Cinq

Sunday night and I am cuddled up with Will in the van - it’s been raining most of today which is kind of nice as it will keep everything green and lovely although the temperature has been low along with it.  It feels very much like a wintery day in West Aus!  We have had a few developments this week - I finally have got a car - yay - I have ended up with a Peugeot 3008 that has a diesel engine that will be cheap to run according to Paul -it has everything you could possibly need including an inbuilt navman and lights that go round the corner before you do so it’s rather lovely.  Mind you they have given it to us sans any books of any sort including any service history - and since it is a year old I really need to have them I would think especially for the warranty, so I am going to need to contact the car yard somehow - painful but we didn’t notice until we got it home.
We picked the boys up from the airport at Paris on the Tuesday morning - not sure if they recognized us straight away as they were too busy being freaked out from being delivered by a tooting forklift driver - poor lil guys!  However they were very quiet and slept for much of the 6 hour drive home and then had a great time exploring the barn on their first night.  Check out the photo of them looking out from the one window we can’t close off - luckily it is too high for them to think about escaping from!

  They have settled in very well although since we have let them outside we have had trouble keeping Will in at night and he has been having a very noisy, on going scrap with one of the nieghbors cats - hopefully they will sort it out sooner rather than later.  Harry is more than happy just staying in with us in the van although he is prone to launching himself at Paul in the middle of the night which hasn’t gone down too well!  It really is pussy cat heaven here though with lots of places to explore and hide in and it is lovely to have them here to entertain us!
We have also finally managed to locate the phone line after Paul has spent many hours digging several holes in very hard dirt looking for where our phone line enters our property.  One of our neighbors suggested to Paul that he should perhaps try pouring water down the conduit - mmm what a good idea - within an hour or two we had finally found it - only about 30 centimetres from one of the holes Paul had dug but at least we now have been able to re book a time for the phone company to come and connect us to the world so to speak.   They are now coming on Wednesday afternoon so hopefully there won’t be any more problems this time!

"one of these things is not like the other!"

Bastille Day Fete at Rampoux

Last Thursday was Bastille Day which quite frankly I don’t know a lot about but I am pretty sure it has something to do with the peasants uprising against the royals - something on my to do list once the internet has been connected - some French history study! Anyway that night we went to a really interesting social event in a nearby village.  It is a big party - there was over 600 people there - they have long tressles set up and the local teenagers serve you a 5 course meal.  It was a good night even if the food was a bit dodgy and the kids actually throw your  bread at you haha - I drove us there along with some people that were staying in on of our friends little gite (like an apartment at there house they rent out during the summer) - they ended up getting a bit tipsy due to the unlimited table wine and the obligatory apero at the end of the meal which was a locally made plum “wine” which really just looks like methylated spirits and tasted a bit like it too!  We sat with all our English neighbors but I was at the end so had a French lady next to me.  I ended up having a bit of a chat to her and she turned out to be from Degagnac so not far from us.  It was good French practice for me as she was very patient and was nice about correcting me when I had got the words wrong!

Wine still now is the base for the driveway

The past four days Paul and I have been working pretty well all day on the house. Well I say this but several mornings we have started quite late as we have been sleeping in - especially on the mornings like today which are overcast - as the van is inside the barn it really is like a little cave that gets very little natural light - normally both of us are up and about at seven or so at the latest but today for example we woke up at 9.45 - Whoops! Oh well never mind - since the sun doesn’t go down until well after 9 at night we tend to be eating dinner pretty late so not going to bed much later then normal too..  We have finally got to the bottom of a pile of building rubble that Chelsea had worked on before she left.  This meant separating reusable rocks from old concrete and tiles etc - unfortunately there is several more of such piles around the house so isn’t the end of it.  Paul has finally got the wine still out of the living room - what a job that ended up being!  I have now spent the last two days chipping off the clay plaster from the rock walls in that same room.  I now have what feels like arthritis in my hands and wrists - hopefully I will harden up eventually and not have to pop so many anti inflammatory drugs just to get through the day!  Paul had his own little ‘Time Team’ dig in our kitchen yesterday - he has dug up a heap of pearl shell buttons, a silver earring a coin dated 1932 and a few other bits and pieces but nothing too exciting.  Well no Roman gold coins or anything like that haha. 

Digging for treasures...

Well I am off to sleep - hopefully it will be too cold for the mozzies to invade us tonight - we tried looking for bug spray today at the market but couldn’t quite work it out - I ended up with something that says Natural on it a lot - hopefully this doesn’t mean it makes you feel good but doesn’t do jack for mosquitoes!!