Saturday, April 27, 2013

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?

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

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

Thursday, April 04, 2013

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?