The pre-birthday party
March 27, 2009
Gabriel has waited patiently for SEVEN YEARS to have a birthday party with friends over, and even though our house is a disaster area and they’re forecasting rain, i broke down, sent out some invitations to 12 of his friends, and we’re having a party tomorrow. A treasure hunt, with little poem-clues that they have to read, in order to find pieces of the map to the treasure (chocolate golden coins). With mint brownies and ice cream, and a pound cake for people who don’t like chocolate. And a box of haribo candies, because apparently you can’t have a birthday party without them. We’ll see how it goes.
Little swedish red riding hood
March 23, 2009
http://vimeo.com/3514904
Gabriel and i loooove this. Sorry to get all facebookie, but this is a great thing.
Sylvain’s site
March 23, 2009
Jean-Jacques made a website for Sylvain and you can now peruse it at:
(le Maffay made the cut! you can see pix from here and other homes that Sylvain and his team have worked on, including Malin and Simon’s staircase made using the same technique that Brunelleschi did on the Duomo…) check it out and tell your friends!)
Cip hunts the charolaises
March 22, 2009
Happy birthday Gramma Sally! and Happy (late) birthday to Willy…
The cows set themselves free from the barn last weekend and escaped into the pasture to taste the grass. They like the living room window, and we like to see them through it – we call it our “cow tv,” and they like to walk up to the barbed wire and see themselves reflected in the glass. Cip got in on the game, and hunted them from the safety of triple-glazed windows, scratching at the glass like a tiger in a cage, or waving at them, depending on one’s perspective. It was so nice to have the cows back. This year’s batch is friendly and curious, more so than the skittish group last year. Maybe Gabriel will actually make more progress in teaching them to play soccer? Then Pierre-Yves came and put them back in the barn, it’s still too early for them to be out. But Cip, Gabriel and I were happy that they were back with us, even for a little while.
Spring!
March 20, 2009
It has been so beautiful here for the past week that you almost can’t believe it’s real. We wake up to sunshine, and if you see a dark cloud in the sky it’s a topic of conversation – as rare as hen’s teeth, or flying pigs, and no one is really unhappy about it. Gabriel and I have discovered a secret as well, which we believe to be heretofore unknown to anyone but ourselves and a posse of black ducks: the lake at night in these final days of winter is the perfect spot for a picnic, and no one else goes there, only us. 
We ride our bikes or go in the car, either bringing a pasta salad or stopping at the bakery to scrounge for bread, some sausage, a knife – and go sit on the new wooden deckways over the water at the lake’s edge, and watch the sun go down. At the edge of the lake tucked in the reeds, which are just beginning to turn green and sprout, there is some flotsam, leftovers from winter windstorms ; 
a Coke bottle that’s too far out for us to reach, guarded by a muskrat who has been stewing in his final decomposition for the past three days. 
an old dinghy, sinking down into the reeds, a lake-mussel shell poised on the oarsman’s seat, souvenir perhaps of a wayward Viking whose matches must have fizzled before his pyre burned down to the depths.
The new deckway stretches out into the lake and arcs along the shoreline. The ducks have to get out, walk over the wooden pathway, and jump back in on the other side to get to the reeded enclosure where they do what most avian and other species are wont to do in the spring, hold court. The sun sets into the oak trees on the other side of the lake and the nautical center to our left is quiet. The boats do not even bob or tug at their anchors eagerly, they wait, patiently, for the season to start. On our scavenging-at-the-bakery night, when i hadn’t made anything more healthy to eat, we dined on pimiento flavored pringles with our bread and sausage sandwiches, and the sun was exactly the same color as the potato chips as it nestled down into the branches. 
Sitting on the deck we are alone at the edge of a watery, still world, and everything around us hushes and settles, winter ceding gently to spring.
J’ai dû rêver trop fort
March 15, 2009
Alain Bashung s’est éteint hier, et éteindre s’emplit de tout son sens à son égard. RIP.
Almost spring
March 12, 2009
Our people in the West are under snow, so here are some pictures of spring from Maffay from the past few weeks. Gabriel is expressing interest in plants, not so much in the actual digging of holes and planting, but in the selection and general love, and has taken to charming the nursery lady to get, for example, a free Griselina because he ADORES it; a picture of some of the plants he’s chosen for his birthday is included in the gallery. The garden changes every day or hour and in these last few days before the equinox, the din of mating birds sounds like the constant hum of the périphérique in Paris.
Huge news of the last weeks: we’ve joined the 21st century, or rather, have caught up with a slight lag behind the innovations of the 20th, by installing a brand-spanking lovely dishwasher in our kitchen, which will greatly enhance our ability to invite people over, once we no longer have a bed in the middle of our living room and the kitchen table in the hallway. Also huge changes have happened upstairs, thanks to Simon and Olivier, and Malin and Simone for loaning their very skillful Men, but you’ll see pictures of that soon. And, the other, wonderful news: the mobile home is gone. Pictures, really, i promise, will come soon.
Shot of the day
March 6, 2009
Cipriano Armenteros proves his derring-do by climbing up on the Renaissance grill covering the window of the manor house. He managed to get himself back down, as well. That’s a duct tape repair job on our electrical line hanging on the bottom of the grill; always so classy, ze Americans, with their shiny tape. Duct tape is called ’scotch américain’ over here, incidentally.
More lights!
March 2, 2009
These are our living room lights, which are now working, as of this weekend. We bought them back on October, because they had a cool name (Mac and Paul, you’ll agree with us on this) – they’re the Paulmann “Mac” model. But it took some time to think about how to get them mounted, i knew that i wanted them to be invisible from the side, to keep the visual priority on the lines of the oak beams – and just to see little drops of light every now and again.
The other problem was how to anchor them into the stone/stucco wall without much anguish and mollyfastening. I managed to get the transformer mounted and the first electrical lines onto which the lights would be mounted and then Gaël stopped by to look at it and said, why don’t you take the old electrical posts that we cut off the house, cut them up and weld on a triangular piece that would serve as a way to mount the screw and fix it to the beam rather than the wall? Hah. This is a very good idea except that i don’t know how to arc-weld and am not great at cutting things with the disk-cutter.
So here are some pictures of Gaël making our cool light fixtures,
which i love because they retain the historical reality of the arrival of electricity to our little horse barn house, but recycled into a beautiful, simple light fixture to enlighten our living room (currently, a godawful mess, but once all the upstairs stuff is moved upstairs, and the office stuff, moved to the office, ah it will be very nice indeed.) I got them more or less mounted and all the cords stretched out, and then Gaël and Romain came back and plugged in some things on the fusebox, and we have more light; and it looks like the rusty pieces of metal belong there, and i love the contrast with the shiny electrical cables and squarish lights.
Treasure of the Sierra Maffay
March 1, 2009
G woke up this morning and decided that he wants to be a cowboy, because he found a pink handkerchief that I had in a box waiting to make the move upstairs (the box, and myself as well). We got my green garden hat and stapled up the sides, and then sewed them up because the staples kept falling out, 
and he found a piece of string for a lasso, and with his new plastic spiderman gun, had a very good day lassoing the cats and burying or unburying treasure in the back dirtpile.
Going on seven is a very good age.
Also, Gaël and Romain came over and fixed all the slate tiles on the roof that slipped out of their rusty hangers during the last big storm,
and plugged in all the lights that were ready to be plugged in and almost hooked up the water in the shower except that i’m still missing pieces (aie!) and have to run back down to Leroy Merlin tomorrow.
But i did move further ahead on getting the shower wall up,
and i also managed to finally put up a chestnut-wood box around the electrical wires that have been dangling at the end of the kitchen counter, 
and took some rocks out of the wall in the laundry room to get ready to put in another light switch for the office.
That’s the status for today.
This is a picture of our living room/bedroom/storage room/office/dining room at the end of the day, so that you can feel happy about how clean and orderly your house is, but things really will be a bit better soon, once everything goes where it is supposed to when the rest of the house becomes liveable too.
