Le bar

Happy birthday to Paul and Carolina!

This is a precursor to a larger post, entitled “the 12 labors of Sean and Timothy,” to commemorate Seanie’s visit with us.  One of the things that advanced significantly during his stay is the Bar, or the large piece of wood that now separates the kitchen from the living room, and as of last night, is illuminated from underneath.  It still needs the backing (the horizontal pieces of chestnut flooring on the living-room side), but from the kitchen, it looks about 80 percent finished we can now finally organize the rices and other treats where they have been meaning to go since last January.  Ouf.

Planing and sanding, with Cip's tail.

Dog days

We’ve finally had about 2.5 days of canicule, so it feels at last like summertime.  I capitulated and tore out all the mildering tomato plants and made green tomato jam, and it’s rather good and has helped my perspective on tomato blight evolve into delight, deblight, because it’s an easy way to get a good supply of fat green tomatoes right in August when there’s nothing else to jam, in the lull between jars of plums and blackberry preserves. 

Plus the color is green like gooseberries and crunchy and you could think that you’re eating grapes, only they’re tomatoes, so it’s confusing, but in a very delicious way.

Gabriel lost his front tooth.

And we had visitors last week,

our friends Alain and Béa and Clément the aptly-named,

four years to the day from Alain’s visit with Laureen four years ago.

They promise to come back earlier next time, too many changes happen in that much time, but it’s reassuring to discover, in retrospect, that most of the changes are joyful good.  And, i put together the last piece of the kitchen, the counter under the courtyard window, which required 2 trips to Leroy Merlin and Ikea, with a followup to come soon, and we now have more storage but of course it’s already not enough.

Otherwise, we’re working (g in the sand pile, me on the computer in the new Office, which has also officially been inaugurated this week) and dreaming of… chickens.  More to come soon.

So uh…

It’s been awhile.  We could blame it on the rain, or on the onslaught of jam season (currants, cherries, apricots, raspberries, and now plums), or inveterate village parties, or lots of great visits (Paul and Joycie, Timothy, Cynthia, Marie Laure and Andrea, Jane and Ed…), meals, or even work.  Or even tomato blight (2 plants have succombed so far and more rain is predicted for this weekend).

But, we’re still here, and still working on the shower.  This has been a project since December 2008; it’s now July 2009, and almost August.  Here in no chronological order at all (because i have pictures from May that need to be posted also), are the updates from today, the latest evolutions of the shower with a detail of the horrible job i’ve done on the grout in the glass bricks that i’ll be fixing as early as the next trip to Leroy Merlin.

More to come soon, as long as we agree on a flexible definition of soon.

Gone fishing

We’ve been absent from these virtual pages, only because we’ve been busy elsewhere.  First Malin and Simon and Anton and Klara came over and fixed everything that was broken like Gabriel’s bedroom floor and cleaned the house spotlessly and made lunch too, and then Klara walked,

And the next day,

Grandpa and Mimi came to visit and brought boots and music and trumpets and letters and birth certificates and manual labor in the form of yard landscaping and good work advice and great meals.  And then Jane and Ed came

and Ed wrote a poem in the chapel. 

Then on the 26th, Timothy arrived in Paris, and the rest is his-story too now.  After two days of playing in the capital and seeing my dears Marie-l’or and Nicky and meeting Andrea

and velibbing at midnight up to the Arc de triomphe and the Eiffel Tower,

we came home to Maffay and played here with Paul and Joyce and Gabriel, and Malin/Simon/Karin/Jean-Jacques/Sylvain/Jacques/Astrid/Oskar/Anton/Klara for music night.  And we worked in the garden and worked in the house and had more good meals and lots of music and went to the beach too and then more music at a boeuf with Jean-Giacomo and Sylvain and Jacques and two Oliviers,

and fishing and meals with Sandra and Jean-Luc and river expeditions on the Couesnon with Jean-Luc and visits to the dentist and the bank and the local saxophone shop. 

Timothy gets along well with Cip and Max, and Gabriel, and me.  We all agree that he is welcome to live here with us in Maffay, so you’ll see a bit more of him, here.  And we are very happy about that.  More pictures to come, soon.

A shower! and an upstairs toilet!!!

No pictures yet, because i’m still in shocked overjoyment, but today Gaël came over and hooked up the hot and cold water for the upstairs shower, and also set up the upstairs toilet, so now, but for some joint work, we are a slight few steps away from having an upstairs bathroom (the floor, the counter, the second shower wall, the sink, the faucet, are all to come soon).  Tonight also i took the first outdoor solar shower of the season.  No pictures, we need some private time to process these major events, but of course they’ll come soon.

Saving rainfall

Rain in Bretagne is a prized commodity:  without it we would have nothing to drink but chouchenn, and we would no longer know how to appreciate blue skies.  We love the rain so much that for the past year and half we’ve been collecting it, in a big 6000l box, saving up for a dry day.  And then one day last week, HP Energétik³ came over to plug in pumps and water lines and fix leaks and by the time they’d left, we have the means at our disposal to extract the rain and use it to flush the toilets and wash our clothes and water the garden, in the even that it ever stops raining enough to need a supplement.  During the course of their visit, Simon Olivier and Michel also managed to staunch the bleeding of a small boy who tried to carve a bamboo twig with a shiny new Henckels knife, so we can indeed attest not only to the quality of their plumbing and solar work, but the quality of their first aid kit leaves nothing to be desired.  I don’t have a good picture of the pump yet, but it’s red and shiny and deserves to be photographed so it will be soon.

Green(house) envy

Gaël et Romain ont fait leur serre le weekend dernier et lundi je suis passée prendre des photos dudit château de la surpousse, maison clôse de tendrilles verdoyantes, moi-même yeux verts d’envie (mais il faut le dire haut et fort qu’on emprunte le serre de Jean-Luc et Sandra, donc on n’est pas à plaindre).  Voici quelques aperçus avant que cette grande cage de lumière ne s’auto-bâtisse de branches grimpantes, et les grappes de tomates ne fassent rougir le soleil de gourmandise.

Rallye

I was sawing away at something upstairs today when Gabriel ran in and said, “mama, a race car!”.  So we went out into the courtyard, and a Porsche 911 drove by.  Truthfully, our road is tractor-wide and dusted with a covering of cow dung and rocks, and seeing a nice car go by is relativey infrequent.  Also, as Rich can attest, it’s a blind corner to turn down to Maffay, so we could watch the cars up on the road to Sens pass by the turnoff, back up, then take the left down to Maffay/La Chevrolais.  Our other favorite moment was when Pierre-Yves drove by in the opposite direction in his speedy red Italian charger, off to the northern corn field for a spin in the dirt; the shot of the day would have been to see the tractor attempt to share our tiny road with the yellow Ferrari, but they must have met up down by our neighbors to the south, in La Chevrolais.  The Ferrari was Gabriel’s favorite, i think there was a Simca as well, and a Volvo, and four Porsches, three of which passed by the turn and had to reverse.

Also Gaël and Romain started building their greenhouse today, it’s kind of like Versailles only with a see-through roof.  I got the rest of the shower wall up, Gabriel helped plaster it just as night began to fall; earlier, i’d finished the next to last layer on the bathroom floor, and cut and laid the osb spacers between the heating coils in my bedroom.  It was so nice to actually work on the shower instead of whining about it, that i felt a little guilty.  We went over to Jean-Luc’s for what may indeed be our very last shower dehors…

Radiant (wood) heat

Wall, G’s bedroom.

Simon and Olivier came back about a month ago and put down the upstairs heated floor:  just to keep track, we now have the following layers on the upstairs floor:  the floorboards, which went up a long time ago when Wich was here, then the dammpellets, ported by Willy and Sandra, then two layers of 10mm OSB, and as of their visit on March 7, a layer of Deltareflex, a layer of aluminum-lined water tubing, sandwiched between another 15mm layer of OSB.  One more layer of OSB will be (is being) screwed into the tubing layer (hopefully, not into the tubes) and then there will be parquet.  Hopefully within the next month or so, depending on everything else.

As we were finishing up lunch that day, Jacky stopped by and tractored the mobile home away.

After the floor was laid, Malin and Simone and Klara and Anton came over for dinner…

and a little toad sat outside the door and watched.

More lights!

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.