Les vacances, and Luca Paul is born!

We have just finished two weeks of vacation, without going anywhere at all, except a few trips to Shopi or SuperU, and the pépinerie for some new plants when we cashed the check for the mobile home.  Gabriel stayed home and created new worlds in his sand pile.  I worked and puttered in the house and the garden and talked to San Francisco on the phone, because Tiny Mo now has a new brother, Mr. Luca Paul was born on February 18 at 2:30a.m.  This is the greatest news of February and we’re looking forward to his visit, in July, when he can roll around in the grass a bit.

We’ve discovered the joy of the birdfeeder, figuring that it was a good time to feed the birds, who have now woken up to spring like mostly everything else in the garden.  It seemed like a good time – they need energy for mating and trilling, and we need them for our garden, and the cats need them as the carrot for their stalking and jumping exercises (they never catch them), so it’s an equitable exchange, only we didn’t count on the fact that our birds are able to empty the birdfeeder in two days.  They’re very well-mannered, in their blue jackets and yellow shirtsleeves, or black-wingtipped hovers, but they have voracious appetites and I’m afraid we’re encouraging bird obesity, between the proliferation of worms in the soil, and the grains hanging from the tree.  We might have to cut them off at some point, but it is so nice to watch them line up on the branches of the plum tree to take their turns at the feeder.

Also the days were sunny, and we tested heating the house only with the solar panels, and it worked for three days!  Not bad for February, I’m beginning to take back the disparaging things i’ve said about it being grey here.

Observant readers will have noticed that we still do not have a shower.  But with Sandra and Jean-Luc’s generous loan of theirs, we have been keeping clean, albeit on a reduced regimen of cleanliness, which hasn’t been a disappointment to Gabriel at all.  But we will indeed have a shower in the next weeks, we promise, and after that, hopefully, wood heated floors upstairs, and after that you’re all invited to come visit.

Having fun is what’s importning

That’s our Valentine’s day phrase-of-the-day from Gabriel, who offered this advice preceded by: “Don’t worry about money.” And his adaptation of the word ‘important’ is lovely, the gerund makes the word even more immediate, it’s important all the time to have a good time with the people you love. It was a great Valentine’s day here at Maffay. We woke up a little earlier than planned to chat with Izzy and Sally in San Francisco, and then ran to Shopi to get some eggs (ah! if only we had chickens: who am i trying to convince?), had our pancakes, and then François our great neighbor came by, and said hey can we plant those wisteria yet?

So we went out and dug around in the thawing weeds and planted two wisteria vines that he had put aside for us, alongside the telephone pole. I’m aware of the potential strength of wisteria, and am also aware that the telephone pole is our connection to the outside world, and is an essential part, for example, for you to be able to read these words.

So the vines might eventually be trained to run horizontally alongside the road, a vined fence for Maffay’s southeastern front. François even dug the holes. Have i mentioned that we have great neighbors?

We have a bit of time before the decision has to be made about the directions in which the wisteria should grow. But talking with François we also got some advice on what to plant (temporarily) to cover up the cemented end of our barn, before we move onto a second phase of renovating that side of the house. And it was so nice to be out in the garden in the sunshine watching things poke up out of the ground, that after we went down to say hello to François and Collette’s new 8 day old lambs, we came home and and some lunch, and then went back out into the garden and started moving rocks, from the pile out back by the compost, down to the small orchard where i’ll keep building up the rock wall. I didn’t take any pictures of this, because even though we worked for two hours moving rocks, it didn’t look like we’d made much progress. So when it looks as though we’ve actually made progress, I’ll take some pictures. But Gabriel is a very good helper at moving rocks, much moreso than he is with wood, which is very nice for his old mother because rocks are heavier. And perhaps, next week, the mobile home will move off to its new home…

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone.  Heureux St. Valentin à tous.  (This picture is evidence that the writer of these notes is not French:  would a French person feed Mont d’or to their cats?  No.  Mont d’or is the favorite cheese of three of the four beings who live on the left side of Maffay so for Valentine’s Day, Cip got some Mont d’or from a spoon, and Max got goat milk, after they caught some fieldmice, and G and i got a little chocolate and sunshine.)

New haircut

It was a sunny day two weekends ago, the weekend of the Folles journées de Nantes where we puttered around the house and soaked up Bach and made lots of vitamin D with our skin in the beautiful light coming through the windows.  We are very impressed with the unexpected solar passivity of our little house – the insulated slab and the light-colored terra cotta tiles are a great combination, and now in the lengthening days of February the solar panels keep the slab heated enough during the day so that we only make one fire in the lovely fröling, at night.  And the lemon plant shares our opinion, and is now covered with white polka-dot blossoms, enough so that if they all come to fruition we’ll be making a big batch of limoncello just from one potted lemon tree.

We made some chappelle-applesauce too, with the great apples that M. Roullier père gave us, which we’ve stored in the chapel; and we’ve figured out a good trick, adding in dried figs and a browning banana will sweeten it naturally and give it a delightful crunch, and it’s very good with cinnamon, and the great fresh cheese called faisselle which is like cottage cheese but not chunky.

It was a good day for a haircut, so we got out the clippers and Gabriel got the Tintin cut, even though he would prefer a mohawk; tintin is our compromise.

Cip is still not better, he’s going to be the Million-euro cat in a short while here; his eye got reinfected, and so he gets drops in the morning and at night, and they might have to close his eye surgically so that it can heal, and then if that doesn’t work they’ll just take out his eyeball.  It sounds better in the latin name for the surgery, which i forget now, but ends with -echtomy.  He’s literally worth his weight in gold though, because he is a talking cat, and actually says ‘hello’.  I just wish that France had a Sécu for cats, otherwise we’ll have to loan him to the circus to keep him in antibiotics.

The star-spangled nightmare

I’m not making any sort of political reference in the title, it’s purely Maffaien in origin, a reflection of a very funny thing that happened here Monday night.  I’d spent the late afternoon installing the recessed lighting in the office, after having painted over the weekend.  These lights go way back; they were bought in October just before we left for Venice, and have been waiting on a little shelf in the bathroom (a workshop, a workshop, i’d give the green mobile home for a place to organize all our tools and supplies) ever since.  So they finally found their ways, all sixteen of them, up into the little holes in the ceiling that have been patiently waiting ever since Gaël put up the drywall in November, and Jean-Luc did the mudwork, in January.  You’ll realize that this ceiling is not a fly-by-night affair, it’s taken roughly the same amount of time in gestation as an elephant does, to be born, ever since the initial framing last February.  Sixteen beautiful white little circles, more or less, except for the one that i have to re-do because the drywall patch poked through, but this is a digression, anyway, Gaël came over across the courtyard to plug the wires into the electrical fusebox, and flipped the switch, and my beautiful office, designed to be sober, ageless yet imbued with subtle visual tricks, (ah! the virtual beams, crossing the existing ones in paths of light like an airplane emergency aisle!) was bathed in blue and red light like a hole in the wall discotheque in someplace like Peoria, Illinois, or the underside of a tricked-out car, or an illuminated American (or French) flag.  The gorgeous white leds that i’d bought in October turned out to be RED and BLUE leds, not white. 

Now, Maffay has its red-(and blue)-light district, and it’s my office.  And white lights do indeed lead to red lights, and to blue!  Gabriel looooooooves it.  He said, no leave it like that, it will be so amazing and went to go get his guitar, inspired to recreate a little Picasso.

The good news of the weekend was that we went for a little walk around the rain-pummeled meadow and saw that the watercress is starting to grow, as is the wild garlic, so we’ll be able to live off the land shortly.

And, the mobile home is perhaps sold.

P(l)aint

What do to when you’re painting a primer coat with a roller, and all of a sudden, the paint starts peeling off??? And when you’re using paint that is supposed to cover 25m², and you’ve got maybe 20m² and lo and behold, 1,5 square meters are left unprimed because there is no more paint, and you are absolutely positive that you did not 1: drink the paint, 2: your son did no science projects with the missing 3,5 square meters and 3: the cats each have alibis?

But, the good news is: it’s Ed’s, and Uncle Jim’s birthday. Happy birthday to youse… and, it snowed a bit this morning, and the third piece of great news is that Rich’s wet sponge sanding trick really works beautifully for dusting and the final sanding of sheetrock mud. Now, if only the paint would do what it’s supposed to…

Here are some cheery almost spring pics to help lighten our mood (because for the love of all that is holy, nothing enlightened is happening on the ceiling that i’ve just supposed to have finished painting.) And my professional painting resource is in Oaxaca eating mole. What to do? Everywhere i look there are half-finished projects, and i was hoping to at least get the paint up on the ceiling without incident. Aiieeeeeeee. Allo Leroy Merlin?

this is our cinnamon plant from Martinique, which is thriving in its new home – i’m thinking of redesigning the stairwell so that it can continue climbing up towards the skylight…

Tiny Modicum gets bigger!

It’s groundhog day, and Tiny Mo’s birthday, and now my little nephew and godson is 4. It’s also chandeleur in France, which means that we made crepes last night to practice, and then crepes again tonight, having perfected the recipe, and ate an undisclosed number between us, and shared some with Sandra and Jean-Luc to make our excesses less American in stature. The crepes represent the sun, and there are few things as positive in life, in early february, as a plate of golden disks with brown lunar seas where the batter came closer to the pan. We ate ours with powdered sugar and lemon, honey and lemon, the first opening of the Maffay plum jam, some chestnut puree… and decided that the unilateral favorite is the Maffay plum jam. Next year we will go to war with the wasps tooth and nail to fight for the plums – they make a perfect, tart jam, with a lovely garnet color that makes me feel very sad and remorseful that we only made three jars.

Also, it snowed today, and the perce-neige actually lived up to their names as you can see in the picture above. They didn’t have to pierce their ways through much snow at all, but it is nice to see them again and celebrate their resistance to the three separate bulldozings that occurred to their previously tranquil home. More pictures are coming soon, this weekend was glow-rious and blue and sunny, teeming with Bach and gardening and stacking wood.