Tooth-hurty

This week I went to the dentists for a checkup and one of my teeth has been aching again. The same one that hurt 7 months ago when I last went. As before; it’s not the tooth it’s the gum. I’m taking antibiotics at the moment and using mouth wash three times a day. The pharmacist advised me not to drink alcohol at all, as even a tiny amount of wine will feel like the whole bottle.

Why tooth-hurty? That was the time of my appointment. The next one in a couple of weeks will be at tooth-hurty too (oops, not 2.32 - two thirty)

Recipe for disaster

I don’t usually make pudding/desserts. There are normally plenty of pots of yoghurt and the like in the fridge. They really are the best way to control portion size in my book.

When Dom and J-M came to visit at the beginning of April, I thought that I’d give my favourite dessert, Lemon Meringue Pie, a go...

 First off; I was too lazy to look for the Royal Worcester Evesham design flan dish which would have been perfect for the job. I used a non stick cake tin instead. Unfortunately, I had to bake the pastry blind, so a high sided cake tin was not a good idea, the pastry ‘sides’ just slid down to the bottom. Before I put the pastry into the oven I’d placed a piece of greaseproof paper sprinkled with rice (no baking beans) on the base. When I came to take off the paper with the rice on it, some quite a lot of the rice got stuck to the half cooked pastry. I managed to pick most of the rice out and burnt my fingers.

The lemon part was tricky too, my grater for grating the zest from the lemons has seen better days, so there was a lot of hard work for little result. It smelt nice though. Next came the corn flour. I should have sieved it, but I thought the thing about corn flour was that it didn’t go lumpy. I ended up with a mix that looked as if it had polystyrene bits in it. It took ages to strain through a tea strainer.

 The egg whites whipped up beautifully (I know what you were thinking).

Everyone was very brave and ate some: It tasted fine, just looked a bit odd and we had a good laugh about it. For the first time ever there was a left over piece of pie – can’t think why.

Image taken from Wikipedia

My very first post

Ten years ago!  You'll see that I hadn't quite got the hang of it.  I've arrived in blog land.

Doesn't the time go quickly when you're enjoying yourself!

Weather

The weather here has been cold and wet. When we came back from the UK we needed to put the heating on again. It’s still on as I write. Hopefully this weekend we’ll be able to close it down until next winter.

 

At the beginning of the week we went for an evening walk as the sun was setting.The colour was amazing so I asked Rob to take a picture.

There and back again

I haven’t been blogging or visiting blogs much these past two weeks as we went for a week in the UK. It was our first visit home for 8 years. We flew to and came back from East Midland’s airport. It only took around one and a half hours. We tried out acupuncture bracelets for travel sickness; we highly recommend them. I also put in ear plugs as I really suffered with pain as the air pressure changed last time we flew. I put them in for takeoff and landing and I had no problems whatsoever!

 We stayed for a couple of nights with our eldest son C and J. It’s 10 years since C moved to the UK. It’s quite strange being looked after by your children. We were taken out for two lovely meals and treated to homemade Paella too. I don’t know how I only managed to put on 1 kilo. They also put us up for the night before we left.

We hired a car and headed for Rob’s mother’s house and stayed with her for the middle part of our visit. She’s 90 now and we hadn’t seen her for a few years. She looks surprisingly well and gets around very slowly using a frame and various bars around the house. We took her out for a walk in her wheelchair and did simple things like eating fish and chips which we all enjoyed. I visited my mum and went to see my sister in her ‘new’ house at long last.

While I was cooking something tempting for MIL I spilt boiling water on my hand, which I put under the cold tap straight away. MIL told me to break off a piece of her Aloe Vera plant and apply the gel to the burn. I had no pain, swelling or redness. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself; I’m going to get myself a plant!

It was strange being home again. The spring is advanced by a couple of weeks here. Though we had sunny weather in the UK, we came home to good weather had two very hot days. Yesterday and today have been quite cold, cold enough to consider putting the heating on again. There was some sunshine in the middle of the day. I didn’t a bit of gardening and planted lettuce, parsley and rocket seeds as well as a Cosmos mixture and some sunflower seeds. When I finished the rain kindly watered them – how organized is that?

Shiny new bridge

When Olivier came out to lunch with us in Bordeaux a couple of weeks ago, he told us that he hadn’t explored that part of town. That weekend he went for a stroll along the quays with some friends and he took this picture of the rainbow over the brand new bridge. He did take other pictures and some captured two rainbows, but this is the best one. As you can see he wasn’t the only one. The platform lifts up to let shipping pass underneath:

This weekend we had Dom and J-M, as well as Olivier home (although Olivier goes out most of the time with his friends). Dom bought me a pile of books by John Irving including the English version of Last Night at Twisted River which I read recently in French. If you know John Irving books at all, you’ll know that it is a hefty pile. I will be occupied for months to come.

As usual she sorted out my computer so that I can get at the pictures on my phone at long last. We had a lovely weekend which went much too quickly.

Olivier went back to Bordeaux at lunchtime; the house is very quiet

Help!!

This post also appears on my Affiliate blog:


In the last couple of days when we’ve been rolling over our announcements on eBay and also creating new announcements we’ve been getting the message (more or less this as it is in French):
Javascript Unescape/FromCharCode …and HTML refresh are refused

 It took 40 minutes to roll over 25 postcards this morning. I’ve checked that we’re not knowingly using forbidden scripts and any links we have are inside our personal part of our announcements. They only lead to other parts of our store anyway.

My theory:

 This seems to be happening randomly and I wondered if it was something to do with the ads that eBay places onto our announcements. I understand that JavaScript is to do with movement. Could this be happening when an ad that moves or refreshes comes up on our page?

 We have written to eBay – two days ago. No reply as I write this. Could this mean they are having problems too?

Have you ever had this problem? Any ideas as to how to solve this?

They've got my number

A couple of weeks ago I started getting calls and messages on my phone from a number I didn’t know. The messages were in French teenage-speak asking me who I was. I don’t answer calls from anyone I don’t know. Anyway, I took advantage of my big tall strong son with a deep voice being home and asked him to answer the phone.

 It turned out that my phone number was on the toilet wall at a school somewhere we’ve never heard of in France. After talking to Olivier they stopped phoning and sending messages. Hopefully I’ve been scribbled out.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter to everyone, whether your eggs are delivered by a giant rabbit, Snoopy or the bells; I hope that you receive the ones you want.

Time keeps on slipping into the future...

That’s how I feel at the moment. I don’t seem to get a minute to myself.

Last Friday we went to Bordeaux to an auction which I love, but is a very long tiring day. The nice part was that Olivier met up with us for lunch. We also saw the new bridge that lifts up to let the boats through. We came home with some excellent postcards.

Olivier has also been home for a few days, so I’ve been washing and ironing and preparing meals. We don’t have a bus service to this village so I ferried him to the nearest bus stop a couple of times – as well as just passing time talking.

The weather has been sunny but cold – nothing to do with the end of March here. We’ve still got the heating on and the clocks go forward this weekend!

Dom and J-m are coming to stay next weekend as J-M is in a play this weekend by Steve Gooch; Female Transport, about 6 women convicts sent off to Australia. Dom will be giving her first lecture in an amphitheater during the month of April. She’s looking forward to it! – Brave girl. She knows her subject well so there should be no problems.