Summer

Not sure what is going on here but we seem to have skipped a whole season. Our normally hot dry summer arrived for a couple of days then disappeared and has not returned yet and it's only a couple of weeks until Autumn! We have had rain most weeks - and very mild temperatures generally. Not good for the masses of Europeans who have arrived in hordes to tan themselves at their holiday homes. Normally it looks pretty dry here this time of year but it is still very green and lush - it's also good for us doing work outside. It has meant that the front of our house now looks like this..

Such an improvement. We have now got two full sides of the house done and the little cellar room 90% done. Which is pretty good since we have had a constant stream of guests since the middle of June. Some of them we did put to work but generally it's a time for a bit of getting out and about. We even took a week off and went with our friend Alan down to Collioure then Barcelona before going to Ibiza to catch up with Gabbi. Love most things about Spain - the food is generally great - although my personal opinion is that Paella is a very over rated dish - Paul strongly disagrees with this and would happily order it at most meals! I love tapas and having lots of different flavors to try. Anyway here is some pics of our trip.

We even did a dive at Ibiza - this was not a great idea and after having dived in Greece we should have remembered that we are spoilt West Aussies who actually enjoy seeing some good size fish and corals etc. Suffice to say the dive was pretty uninteresting - however it keeps Paul and my skills up to date for when we can get some real dives in.

At the end of July my friend Sherrylee dropped in for a couple of days - this was awesome as we hadn't caught up for probably over twenty years after having been room mates back in boarding school. As I had expected she hadn't changed a bit and we had a lovely time reminiscing and generally catching up. Since then Gabs has been here with a couple of her friends from Aus, which was great other then one of them ending up in hospital here in Gourdon with a rather nasty infection. Consequently their flights home had to be changed but they are now all back safely in WA. Unfortunately for Gabbi, who would have loved to stay in the UK and or Europe, but alas her visa has now expired and so she didn't have much option. It was nice that she had company for the long flight back though. Definitely going to miss having her always being only a short flight away. One day hopefully us and our girls can actually all live on the same continent again!

Paul has been very busy the past couple of weeks with raising a wall on the "porcherie" or pig sty and replacing the roof. This will mean it actually is a more usuable space. At the moment is has just been a dumping ground for firewood and wasn't somewhere you would hang about in, as the roof was very precariously balanced on some old rotten timber. He is currently putting back the tiles after pressure washing them - then it will be time to crepi the walls and it will be another big job done.

And here is a shot of Paul having a chat to one of the donkeys he drops in to see every now and again on the way into Gourdon.

I am back riding Tolsan most days after his feet and stomach issues - just mostly some casual hacks out. Here he is looking at the sunflower crop in the valley behind our house on one of his favourite routes.

The sad thing this year is since it is likely he is quite sensitive to sugar he's not allowed to have his usual snacks from the fruit trees on our walks. Dieting is just no fun for anyone! But neither is having very sore feet I guess..

Mon cheval malade...

So the good news is I may have found what has been the problem with my horse Tolsan - the bad news is finding what was wrong resulted in laminitis which could have been disastrous (for those that don't know laminitis is the early days of foundering!) My poor guy is now in a 'dry lot' or more correctly known right now as a 'mud lot' being fed only soaked hay and he has been banned from anything with sugar in it especially grass. This is particularly cruel as he is surrounded by green lush fields at the moment. Rather ironically it was potentially my 'track' system that I put in to avoid the grass that maybe did him in, as he got home from three days at the vets after being fasted for a ulcer scope and put on the track, which had loads of very short lawn like grass on it - and a few days later I come out to find a very uncomfortable horse who found it too painful to walk! So I have now sprayed all the grass on the track and am keeping them off it until there is just dirt pretty much. And yes - he did have a large ulcer, so I am treating him for that too. So - we may take a little longer to finish this place as I have spent all the money on vets and meds for him ha. He is walking fine now and I am thinking will probably be ok to get back to work in another week or so as its unlikely he's done any damage to his feet - I have been exercising him in hand a couple of times a day and he seems ok but under vet instructions he has one more week of 'confinement' to go. So currently my day has been consisting of getting up at 6 to feed him his first little breakfast - put a net of hay in to soak - back inside for a coffee - hour later feed him his proper breakfast along with his meds - pick up the poop from the night before - exercise him - get the next bag of hay in the soaker - maybe do something else for an hour - hang next bag and so on until the last bag goes up at 10pm at night when Ambre goes in with him to keep him company. So not surprisingly I don't get a heck of a lot else done at the moment!

But in other news we recently had our Dutch friends Anoushka and Esme come to visit for a couple of weeks. Esme is a very nice rider so she rode my horses a few times and they both wanted to do some outside stuff so we put them to work ha. Here is Es chipping away at the back of the house.

Some of this stuff is rock hard concrete - we will have to get the big guns out to get that off - ie Paul with a hammer drill! While they were here we took them for lunch at our favourite little Auberge in Nabirat. This place is amazing - just a husband and wife team (like most Auberges around here) they do a five course lunch for 13 euros including coffee and house wine - the price isn't so surprising but the food sure is! They make everything fresh using seasonal local food and I have to say this last meal was one of the best yet. Starts with soup - forgot to get photo but its a light vegie broth pretty much but seasoned really nicely. Next course she called a spinach pizza but was more of a tart and it had a really nice salad with it. I wanted to ask if I could just have seconds of this instead of the main - so good. Then it was a platter of roast pork and potatoes - followed by obligatory local cheese then the most delicious strawberry clafoutis with sorbet - this was the weekend before their village 'fete des fraises' - translates to Strawberry Fair - as there is a lot grown locally. Anyway here is some pics of the food.

As I write this Paul is in Monaco with a bunch of Belgian guys living it up in a mansion with a view over Monaco and the bay. It's a tough life for some! He rode down there on his old BMW with another friend who is into the same bikes - they took it pretty easy - According to Kurt's GpS they only averaged 50 km an hour for the trip which doesn't sound right but probably included coffee breaks ha. Here's a pic of him all packed up and dressed up about to leave.

Most of them went down to watch the Grand Prix but Paul's not that interested and went mainly for the ride down and back - they have also done a couple of rides in that area - up into the mountains and across to the Italian coast too. He's reporting back that its all a bit too touristy for his liking although he loved it up in the Alps.


Paul has not got a lot done on the outdoor area - although a few beams are up - instead of building work he has spent weeks pulling out the gearbox and transfer case of the Landy and replacing it with a higher ratio one or something. All I know is it now goes like a rocket or nearly ha - the difference is truly amazing. But anyway here is the 'gazebo' or whatever you want to call it as it is right now.

I am not sure how he managed to wrangle these things into place on his own without doing himself some major damage but he did. Here is a view with my fledgling vegie patch in the foreground. I currently have pototoes, onions, capsicum, spinach, lettuce and eggplant all in various stages of growth - I think I will be in trouble if they all make it to maturity - not sure there will be room for it all!

And here is a pic for my mum - when she was here a couple of years ago we made a flower bed and put in some very rough stone drywalls to outline it. Well Paul had been stealing taking some of the nicer stone out of it and it was looking pretty sad - but he has now started to build a proper one which is looking good. Hopefully he can find enough stone to finish it!

Well I need to go and finish polishing my car - hopefully I have sold it - I am meeting someone from the Paris train at lunchtime who has a bank chq with him for it, so fingers crossed it will meet his expectations. I had been using Pauls Landy all the time so I decided I might as well sell my car and put the money to a little project I have in mind.. its horse related of course ha.

I just checked the forecast and it looks like we are in for more storms and rain - I really would like the sun to come back now. And Paul needs a dry day to get back from down South without getting too wet but it's not looking good for him at this stage. Oh well c'est la vie!

Paddock Paradise in paradise!

So we are having the most amazing Spring weather this year. The past two that we have experienced it did nothing but rain and not a lot of sunshine. This one in comparison has been lovely, lots of sun - occasional rain to keep things growing and mild temperatures that are a pleasure to be out and about in. As a result everything is madly growing - including the grass in the horses paddocks. This unfortunately brings with it some challenges on the weight management department for the horses - not so much Ambre who is still very much growing into her long legs but Tolsan only has to smell grass and blows up like a balloon. He must take after me! Well I decided that I wanted to create the "paddock paradise" system here - which basically means fencing off the perimetre of your land and running the horses in this track leaving the interior to grow and hopefully make hay with. This means feeding them hay which is much better for them for many reasons including the reduction of the problems too much sugary grass can create, including laminitis etc etc. Anyway we went to the saw mill and bought as many of the chestnut posts they had in stock and some electric string and the plan was I was going to install it. Anyway fencing is really one of Pauls favourite things to do and after he saw my feeble attempt to use the fence post digger he basically shoved me out the way and went to work - a day or so later and voila - its pretty much done. We ran out of posts so have left the small paddock they have their shelter in open to the track but so far it is working well. It is designed to encourage movement so the idea is to put out the hay at different places on the track so they don't just stand over a feeder bin all day only leaving to get water - which is pretty much how Tolsan spent his winter to be fair!

This is them cruising on the track - it will eventually have no grass on it at all so the electric fencing is definitely going to have to stay on with all the nice green grass just on the other side! It certainly makes the twice daily poo collection easier! And the best thing is Tolsan no longer has to have his dreaded muzzle on - he and I are both happy about that - I hated putting it on him as he would spend an hour or so sulking before starting to eat with it. Here is the view of it from our bedroom window.

In other news Paul has been making steady progress on his walls and stonework. He is really doing a lovely job of it - his back however has decided in the past few days that he has pushed it a bit too far - hopefully it is just muscular and nothing too serious. Here are some progress pics.

And here is a picture of possibly why nothing gets done in a huge hurry around here. This is Pauls mate Vic who comes to visit most days and since they both very much enjoy a cup of tea or a beer whilst solving the worlds problems, often I have to remind them it would be much nicer to be having said drinks under the shelter of the building he is meant to be working on! All good - part of the fun of semi retirement and since I spend the majority of my days playing with the horses I really can't complain too much. Or maybe I should say I shouldn't complain too much haha.

Anyway this is the courtyard as of today - no wonder Paul has a sore back you can see there is now no stone where there was once a very high mound of it!

Next job is getting the concrete slab laid - lucky we have our huge cement mixer - it's a reasonably large area. We are still trying to locate a couple of oak beams for the roof - we have plenty of shorter ones but finding a couple that are over four metres is a bit tougher. It would be so much easier for Paul to use new sawn straight wood but we both love the look of the older timber - and it's always nicer to upcycle!

I'm back!

So - Paul has recently spent a month in Australia doing some maintenance on our house there and he found himself getting harassed by everyone he met about the lack of blog entries! And I thought no one cared haha. No - like any long term commitment it gets difficult to stay motivated and find interesting things to say about our life here, which is really very simple and mundane for the most part! But thanks to popular demand I am going to try very hard to regularly update the blog from now on.

Since I last blogged Paul spent many weeks prior to winter getting the heating system plumbed in. I had spent a lot of time researching the best way to keep warm without spending a fortune both on the system itself and then on running it. Most people here spend at least a couple of thousand Euros a year on oil or gas as well as having wood fires. We didn't like the sound of that much! Anyway what we decided on doing was having a thermal store that can take multiple fuel sources which then can run the underfloor heating downstairs and some radiators upstairs. One of the fuel sources can be a wood boiler which is currently the only source we use. It is quite a complicated system with lots of electronic safety valves etc and is a system more common in the UK then here, so we had lots of fun trying to work how to install it. But the final result after lots of work by Paul is a very efficient system that doesn't cost much to run and keeps the house nice and warm. Result! And we are both closet pyromaniacs and like starting and keeping the fire going so it suits us perfectly! Here he is up on the roof installing the flu liner.

We spent four weeks over Xmas with Chels and Hunter in Chicago doing some work with them on their apartment. Poor Paul really can't escape renovation work! We were there during the cold snap North America experienced in Jan - several days of sub minus 20 Celcius. We didn't leave the apartment much to be fair! But we had a great time with them and can't wait to go back again maybe when the weather is a bit kinder!

Our house is looking pretty good - only some fiddly snagging things to do really. Things like curtains, light fittings and some furniture are still to be sourced. But we are in no rush and with the Aussie dollar dropping about 20% against the Euro in the last six months or so I am trying to be as frugal as possible. I also prefer to find something unique and possibly cheaper at one of the second hand places here then just buy something new. Much more fun too I think. The weekend Vide Greniers will be getting going again soon so we will be keeping an eye out for what we need then. Paul has built me a hall way divider with boot box and coat rack which makes the entry and living room more functional and I think looks great too. This is one room that still needs some furniture and some finishing off but it will get there.

Here's the entry wall with boot box.

And our living room with our great wood boiler.

We have had a very mild but wet winter. One of the French guys told Paul when he was at the museum yesterday that it has been the wettest winter for forty years. We only got one lot of snow and that was in November. And the spring has been lovely so far apart from a week or two here and there of rain and wind. My spring bulbs are all out looking lovely and some wild violets that mum and I transplanted from the forest a couple of years ago have really taken off. I am currently loading up the veggie patch with some lovely horse poo mulch which we have a small mountain of thanks to my very productive grass converters.

Paul has happily got himself back into a Landy too although I often have my horse trailer hitched up to it which doesn't impress him much.
Here he is in his "Bordeaux Burgundy" or pink ha little 90.

So at the minute Paul is getting back into building the stone walls in what will be our outdoor kitchen/entertainment area. He started this job about 18 months ago but I decided we needed a kitchen first so I took him away from it. Will be great to have somewhere to sit and eat outside though. I will be getting back to chipping off the crepi or old cement render from the house and uncovering the stonework. This is a big job but will make a massive difference to how the house looks.

You can see from this picture the various stages of the job. The far left is the stone that has been cleaned and pressure washed ready to be jointed out. The wall under the kitchen window is the new one which has been finished. The whole house should look like this eventually!