Starting off this month with some happy photos ! At the top, when Rosie met Harry, this happened last year and they are inseparable. Underneath we have Olly who is proving to be an absolute star – you can’t go wrong with a Brittany I say ! We love it when dogs keep in touch and let us peek into their new lives ! What we like less is when people ask us to help home a dog, then don’t bother to let us know when the dog is adopted, making me look a fool when I receive enquiries about said dog !
We’ve been quite busy recently on the entertaining side, love having friends round, Ernst is a host par excellence, but hate the cooking (and house cleaning !) beforehand. Those of you who know me, know I will do my best, but preparing food is not on the top of my ‘love to do’ list. I have mentioned my cooker, Betsy, before and it is really down to her whether or not a meal is passable or a disaster ! If she is in a good mood, we get by, but get her on a bad day and oh boy, get the indigestion remedy ready. I do feel sorry for her though, we ordered her from England because a similar model here cost twice as much, even including delivery. Betsy probably got terribly excited about coming to France, imagining that she would be at the beck and call of a culinary French domestic goddess. She landed with me, quelle disappointment ! She has a fan oven which blows all the electricity in the house if it is switched on, a grill which doesn’t get hot enough to ….. grill, and an ordinary oven which is the only thing I can use, apart from the gas hob.
We had friends round last evening, one of whom is a chef ! Luckily, bless him, he likes plain food when invited out. However, he was recently very ill with blocked arteries, so having experienced one ‘near death’ experience, I thought it very brave of him to chance another dining here ! Luckily all went well and I’ve not had any worrying feedback !
Today (Monday 2nd) the weather has been atrocious, blowing a gale with horizontal rain /hail. So I shut myself up in the shed – along with five of the (very wet) dogs and got stuck in to book and dvd sorting. I do actually love it but always exit with an armful of books /dvds which I have to read /watch before the 4th April ! It is such a joy when a book or dvd I have been hoping to get hold of, suddenly turns up, also to find a book which looks really good and which thereby introduces me to an author I haven’t read before. The car is now absolutely full to the brim of books to dispose of which breaks my heart, most of them are not even in bad condition, but they are titles that are in every book sale time after time after time and which everyone has read by now.
A couple of weeks ago I received news that an elderly second cousin had died on the Isle of Wight. I’m sorry to say that I had never even heard of her and that not only made me sad, but gave me a spooky preview of a conversation in the – hopefully far distant – future between great nieces and nephews (neither Ernst nor I have any children) :-
“Hey did you hear that Great Aunt Susan has died ?”
“Who’s she ?”
“Some weird old relative who lived in rural France with a load of abandoned dogs.”
“Oh, should we do anything ?”
“Nah, we’ll bung a few quid to Dogs’ Trust, that should do.”
Ho hum !
Sue xx