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.
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