2014 Tiptoes in...

Gosh, it’s over a month since I’ve written anything here. As I said in my last post, I’ve been really busy. M-I-L was let out of hospital after about a week. She enjoyed her Christmas and New Year. It gave her a change from her usual routine.

We had a very quiet Christmas and New Year. Olivier was the only one with us this year. We drove him to his new apartment on New Year’s Day as he was starting work on 2nd January. His apartment is amazing. In an old building which has recently been renovated. He has a fantastic kitchen area and a washing machine to die for! It’s so much nicer than the gloomy place he had in Bordeaux. He lives about two and a half hours drive from here. Our journey back was awful, lots of rain and wind and it was dark. Fortunately there wasn’t much else on the road and no trucks as it was a holiday. We stopped at a McDonald’s for something to eat and had the place to ourselves, the roads were so quiet. Unfortunately the music was turned up rather loud which spoilt the effect.

Olivier now knows how to tie a tie.

Dom is now in Glasgow for a month – at this time of year! She arrived yesterday and e-mailed to say that it was wet and windy (surprise, surprise!) and that her room is cosy. I had a look at the part of the University where she will be working using Google Earth. It looks very impressive.

Thank you to everyone who continued to visit despite not having anything to read. I couldn’t even face looking at my blog list at one point so I trimmed it down from 100 to 85 blogs. I will try to make an effort to start visiting again.

Now I’ll wish you all Happy New Year à la française, as here we have until the end of January to wish everyone Happy New Year.

 Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

"Happy new year and lots of little children" I only wish you those if you really want them.  Have a safe and happy new year's eve.

Bye, bye 2010

On the whole I think that it’s a good thing that 2010 is on its way out. Looking back over my blog entries, January saw pictures of snow - December too. February is good for birthdays, Olivier and Christian are both February boys. 2010 say the hurricane Xanthia passing through. Unfortunately we drove through the village where there were several deaths quite regularly. It’s still shocking to see the bricked up houses that used to be people’s homes. In March I was still posting about the aftermath of the storm.

Then McAfee did an update which closed down a lot of computers including ours. 2010 wasn’t too cheerful, was it? Nothing interesting to remember in May.

June saw the opening of ExposeYourBlog! A few of us got together disgusted with the way that the owners of BlogExplosion were treating members and volunteers and created our own blog traffic exchange. This is one of the nicest parts of 2010 for me. Being part of building up a new blogging community and making a lot of new blogging friends. June saw celebrations too. 25 years of marriage on the 17th and Rob’s 50th on the 30th.

Only two posts in July!

In September we visited Dom and J-M in their apartment and moved Olivier into his. Christian had also moved out of his Grandma’s and was renting a house with a friend which they eventually bought. I fell over and my knee is still swollen. I celebrated 55. (me!?)

Autumn: Doms’ birthday in November. Mild weather brought, wasps and a hornet as well as the annual hoovering up of spiders, but twice this year.

Time flew by and the year finished with snow and cold weather. We are lucky compared to a lot of places.

I’m looking forward to 2011. As Rob said earlier tomorrow will be 1.1.11. That must be a good omen all those ones - a fresh start.

Happy New Year!

Another one blogging about snow

Exceptionally, I’ve got two mornings of exam supervision this week. I can’t get there this morning because of the snow. Snow is forecast for tomorrow morning too. Looking out of the window I see the tracks of one car on the road. Everyone is taking the advice to stay indoors it seems.

Officially it never snows in La Rochelle. When we built the house the roof was left unlined - because it never snows. The first winter we had a lot of snow which collected inside the roof space. We couldn’t remove it because it was lying on top of the insulation. We just waited for it to melt. We have snow every four years. In the late 80s new houses had lining inside the roof to keep out the snow.

We had a lovely Christmas and a very quiet New Year. We watched DVD’s of ‘Yes Minister’ and remembered to save a glass of fizzy wine to toast the new year in and then straight to bed. Olivier disappeared for 2 days. They had a party up the road at his friend’s house. At least I didn’t have to worry about him getting from A to B. He had splashes of red wine on his white sweater, apparently someone threw a glass of wine at him. Fortunately they were too drunk to do too much damage. I got the stains out with my beloved washing up liquid.

Happy New Year to everyone. I like the shape of 2010 written down. A good omen.

Happy New Year

I’m sorry there has been ‘silence’ for such a long time. Here’s a charming young man who would have been wishing everyone a Happy New Year around a hundred years ago. Notice that he’s holding the horseshoe upside-down. In France it’s the iron that counts, not the shoe itself!