Sunday, February 23, 2014

Diary Update February 2014

Visitors

We’re delighted to have a number of visitors already firmly booked in for this year, in March, April, May and June and more possibilities yet to finalise. However this still leaves plenty of room all year especially in the main summer period. The two guest bedrooms in the house are completed each with its own bath- or shower-room, plus the apartment is available as well.

Our cat

Dusty - Isabelle continues to grow bigger and more adventurous every day. She’s going outdoors several times each day for increasingly longer times and she’s keen to extend her times out, but she doesn’t seem to have got the idea about toilet – she sometimes dashes back into the house to use her litter tray rather than going while she’s outside.  Not sure how we’ll train her to do that. We had her sterilised last week and are due to take her back to the vet’s tomorrow, but she’s already removed the huge and very sticky plaster and most of the stitches herself. She particularly enjoys roaming about the top floor of the hangar and we had our hearts in our mouths when she climbed right up to the top of the roof beams, and had some difficulty getting back down again.  Her main indoor home is in the former kitchen that we’ve done up as an office / spare room and we’ll fit a cat-flap to one of the outside doors shortly.

The seasons

The weather’s been milder but much wetter than usual so far this year, so we haven’t got much done outside despite Jeanne’ sterling efforts on the old grange, but that leaves plenty to do for working visitors when, hopefully, it dries up a bit. The signs are promising (touch wood!) with several warm sunny days recently and we heard from friends that the cranes are already flying north from Spain to Scandinavia – we usually get a few flocks over us, making a terrific din, but we’ve not heard them yet. The French say that as soon as the cranes fly north, winter is over.

The house

We have now finished the ‘bureau’, converted from the old kitchen, and installed all the office stuff in there as well as it becoming the cat’s night-time home.  Also in the house, Rhys finished installing the ‘hotte’ – the extractor fan – in the kitchen over the range, and he’s nearly finished a new linen cupboard on the landing – we found a set of oak double doors, floor to ceiling, at one of the bricos at a substantial reduction and they are installed now – just a bit of finishing off to do there.

TROC

This being an old traditional French style house we came to the conclusion we needed some old traditional French style furniture to set various rooms off now they are complete. We were pointed towards TROC which is a chain of second-hand furniture stores with some quite brilliant pieces amongst some amazing junk. We took our first delivery last week which is a magnificent Louis XV bookcase which we got at a bargain price. Most of the locals move into much smaller houses these days which cannot accommodate these wonderful old pieces which is why they sell them. However we were surprised by what some people will buy, there was a fairly dreadful set of furniture in dark green laminate that had a sold sticker on it. We can’t wait to take our visitors to see our local store!!

Rhys’ health.


We think that pretty much everyone knows now that Rhys was diagnosed with prostate cancer over a year ago and has been receiving treatment for several months. His treatment moved into a new phase this month. He’s been having radiation therapy for the last three weeks, which will run for a couple of months with a short break in the middle. Hopefully that together with the hormone therapy he’s been on since last May will sort it. Thank you to everyone who has sent supportive messages. We’re trying to be positive about it all and are experimenting with some well researched new approaches to nutrition to reduce or eliminate the possibility of it spreading or recurring. Lots of turmeric and green tea, even more fruit and veg and less red meat and dairy etc.  Since this happened Rhys is astonished to find out that almost everyone of similar age he’s in touch with either has the same condition actively or had a very close scare. It’s an epidemic.  He found it a bit depressing that almost all his birthday cards from the UK were postmarked with an advert for Prostate Cancer UK. Unfortunately the side effects from the radiation have forced a compromise on the anti-cancer diet but, in a silver lining, we have enjoyed having a few more steaks etc.