Looking for Jack

I spoke too soon. Yesterday afternoon Olivier’s friend phoned him as he had a flat tyre and couldn’t find the jack to lift the car. So we very kindly lent him ours. Olivier came in an hour later with a bent jack.

Today, minus the half hour lie-in I was looking forward to, I have been out looking for a new jack (I should be so lucky!). Nowadays they make what I can only describe as a camping stove look alike. Rob phoned the Renault dealer and all he could offer was a new jack at 200€ and told rob to try the scrap merchant. There is one nearby so I dragged Olivier along with me and we got one for 10€ cash. Rob will collect it this evening as I didn’t have any cash. The nice man remembered that we used to have a Citroën 2 CV… twenty years ago.

A bit of everything

Two good pieces of news to start the day bright and early. The most important is that Debbie’s father is fine. They had to wait and worry for a lot longer than necessary for some results due to the slow wheel of the NHS in the UK.

Then, when I put AOL on to look at my emails this morning I saw that they have a feature on France in 1900. This should stimulate interest in vintage postcards. All in all a good start to the day.

I spoke to Dom on her birthday. Her parcel had arrived okay and she was pleased with the contents, especially a purple jacket exactly like this one. Though she still insists she prefers the orange/pumkin one! She is teaching English twice a week now and really enjoying it. The job at the library is very demanding indeed. It’s very quiet so she’s on MSN most of the time AND getting paid for it. The afternoon of her birthday was going to be spent baking and preparing food for her party in the evening. One of her friends was kindly lending their flat as Dom’s has only got standing room for about 4 people (one in the shower) and two of her friends were coming from Paris. I haven’t heard anything since…

Olivier is being driven to lycée this week by his friend who is an apprentice chef. The building where he studies for 1 week every month is next to the lycée so they go together. Half an hour extra in bed all round, much appreciated by me. It’s strange to see them going off, it only seems 5 minutes ago they were sitting on the doorstep together, in the sun with their toy cars.

Rob and I worked flat out for a few days last week. Ebay put on a special offer for professionals (that’s us); free placements. You can imagine we prepared a maximum amount of postcards and managed to put on 180. We’ve been selling groups of cards too, to clear our stock, which have been doing very nicely. I was rather proud of this group, which now has a bid I’m pleased to say.

Click on the image for a much better view..

Happy Birthday!!

Dom is 20 years old today. I haven’t managed to speak to her on the phone yet. I imagine her struggling back from the post office with the parcel we sent her. I remember driving to the hospital in the early hours of the morning. I started to panic when we hit the streets around the market and there was a lot of unloading going on. We got blocked in for a couple of minutes…. The rest is history. Yesterday she phoned me for a recipe for mustard cake, she’ll be making her famous carrot cake and asked me for other ideas. Hope you all have a great time tonight Dom!

Bad Medicine by Bon Jovi was the number one hit according to Billboard magazine the week that Dom was born

I got my page a Day diary out for 1975 to see what I did on my 20th birthday. It was a Friday so I went to work as usual. My friends at work gave me a couple of books ‘The Fortune Tellers’ and ‘Natural Magic’. In the evening I went to see some friends and we went out for a drink. It was the start of a new relationship which lasted 4 years. I didn’t have the time to write much else.

Dreams and Children

It’s strange how the subconscious works. Just before Dom left she went to the hairdressers to have her hair cut, it looked really good but the real test is when you have to do it yourself. She washed her hair just before she left and it hadn’t dried properly when I took her to the station, so I didn’t really see how it turned out. Last night I dreamt that Dom was home and I asked if she’d turn round so that I could see her hair. She obliged – she’d just washed it and it was still wet! I had my hair cut last week. My hair is very fine and needs a little lenghth to hold it down, it's too short and all over the place - at least it will grow.

Christian phoned this evening. He’ll probably be coming to stay at the end of November for a few days!!

Me and science

I participated in a scientific experiment last week. I had to finish around 200 sentences and not use pronouns, be grammatically correct and all in French. Needless to say I was hopeless, I was also a bad subject as I’m not a native French speaker. The idea was to see if people used the correct forms under stress, I suppose to see how the subconscious takes over. The sentences were messed around a bit to trip you up and I kept reading qui as que which changed things a lot. It certainly was stressful for me. The only other experiment I’ve taken part in was at the common cold unit in 1984. I had flu and was given placebos.

I took Dom back to the station this morning and collected Olivier from a friend’s on the way back, how’s that for ecological co-ordination? (Or perhaps convenient children)

A visitor

I've just seen the Eurasian Jay again. He was sat on the wall when I went into the kitchen, so I sneaked up to the window and stood very still. He hopped down to where I leave out crumbs for the sparrows and had a ltttle explore. His colours in real life are really lovely, much better than all the photos and paintings I've seen.

Tempus fugit

On Saturday evening the telephone line went off so we lost our internet connection with it. Rob went into town twice on Sunday to put the postcards I had prepared onto ebay and to deal with inquiries etc. from customers. I did feel cut off from the world.

Yesterday morning my annual check up with the Swedish chef*. As I was undressing he popped out to his receptionist and collected his post. A parcel from England! He asked me it I minded him opening his parcel. A book on the anatomy of the brain. He was as pleased as punch and before I left showed me some of the pages he’d been send via the internet; Oh yes, everything is tickety boo – I find it quite amusing that Rob pays for another man to tell me I’ve got impeccable breasts! (for my age)

After that, across to the other side of town to collect Dom from the station. She was waiting for me and half of the very busy, too small car park was closed off for resurfacing. Dom is fine and she was very tired. She’s got a job in the university library when she goes back. 7 hours a week. She’s decided that she is going to open a bookshop. I’ve passed her my notes from the Chamber of Commerce about setting up a business. Working 7 hours a week she is going to take a while to save up enough to start a business, but at least she has ideas. Olivier is panicking a bit, I think, about what to do next. In the immediate future I’m pleased to say that Dom has taken up drawing again. She was always very good and I was disappointed she didn’t pursue it more. I am now minus all of my watercolour equipment and would I look for a tin to keep the tubes of paint in?

Olivier looks less like a Hamster now but is in pain still. He’s eating more solid food and is as hungry as ever – he’s making up for last Wednesday when he didn’t eat anything.

Me? Busy doing the washing, of course.

*Rob had his wisdom teeth out the day before I saw the Swedish Chef for the first time!

Hamsters, hedgehogs and yoghut

Still continuing with the mushy food. I visited lots of sites giving advice on what to or not to eat. As usual advice varies from country to country, culture to culture. He still looks like a giant hamster….

Did you know that if you come to my house with a yoghurt you have to store it at a temperature one degree centigrade lower than if you visited Zoe’s house with the same yoghurt?

This evening Rob and I were putting the car away when I heard the sound of rustling leaves. From underneath came out an adorable young hedgehog. He took no notice of us at all and came right up to us looking at us as if to say ‘What are you doing here?’. He snuffled back into the leaves and went on his way again.

Don’t forget to put your clocks back. It’s the last weekend of October already!!

A little bit of wisdom - not

I took Olivier into the clinic this morning to have his wisdom teeth out. He makes a bad patient, he was grumpy, tired and hungry. Matters weren’t helped when we all had to wait in a room with vending machines full of chocolate. Not the best place for people who haven’t eaten for 12 hours. About half an hour ago the clinic phoned to tell me that everything had gone okay. We are picking him up this evening at 6.30. He was sure he was going to be one of those people who are awake during their operation, I’ll be interested to see how he got on if that was the case.

He’ll be off school till the weekend when the holidays start

Computers and Postcards

We had no internet for most of yesterday afternoon. There were so many ‘things to do’. Now I’ve discovered the new widget where blogs that are updated come to the top I’d like to put everyone onto that and show the top five. I’d keep the ordinary blogroll too. On my other blogs I’d do the same with the blogs that were relevant to them.

We’ve been digging through our ‘put to one side’ stock. Rob had the idea of selling lots of 50 postcards. So far we’ve come up with two good lots. We’ve also found some gems which we overlooked in the past because of lack of experience. That gave me something to do away from the computer.

Someone is selling a lot of 100,000 postcards on eBay (yes, one hundred thousand). We’d love to have them, the starting price is only 14,000€. It is, in fact, a bargain at only 14 cents a card. It's fortunate that we can’t afford them as we haven’t got the space to store them. I think we’ve got around 20,000 postcards at the moment, which is just about manageable.