July-a

The absence of photos is once again evidence that we’ve been out doing things.  Gabriel is now on summer vacation and Julia is now creeping and has teeth and is waving and clapping.  Gabriel had an end-of school party with a spit roasted pig and apricot/port stuffing (if there’s any question why we have adopted Feins as our home, let this be a partial response), a piano recital and has also learned the trick of the laundry game that i learned from the amazing Christine in Burkina many years ago now : lining laundry up in order of hues on the rack to dry.  You’ll note that this implies that he is also sometimes hanging up laundry to dry, which is much appreciated, and has also begun mowing the lawn and weedwhacking, under supervision.  The other great news is that we’re now able to bike again as a family because miss Bean is able to ride in her bike carriage.  We’re looking forward to a great summer, and will try but cannot promise to put up pictures because the to-do list that we made this morning after pancakes is rather daunting; we’re buried under a pile of zucchini.  Happy summer!

Happy Mothers’ days!

To celebrate mother’s day (the american one, we transcontinental mothers get to celebrate twice), a small gallery of Eating with Julia pictures, because any parent or childcare worker out there can understand the combination of delight and ennui that a small child’s first forays into food can produce : ennui, because you realize just as you set the pasta on the table that in less than a half hour you’re going to be wiping it up off the shiny red surface of the the lovely scandinavian chair and picking noodles out of your baby’s chin-folds.

Eating is something that we do well here at Le Maffay.  Here is a partial list of things that Julia has eaten, as we approach her 9th monthaversary.

Spinach

Swiss chard with garlic

pumpkin

risotto

peas

corn

pickles

ice cream

chocolate

pineapple

mango

green beans

mushrooms

pizza

applesauce (many times over)

plums (compote)

pears

nettles (soup)

eggs

pancakes (every morning almost)

Nathalie and Laurent’s good bread

carrots

gesiers (digestive part of a chicken, panfried with garlic and served with balsamic vinaigrette on a salad at Pre-Easter by Malin and Simon at K-JJ’s house)

sausage from Jean-Yves’s organic, milk fatted pig

salmon quiche

Jane’s tomato tart

chocolate macaron

banana (many times over)

yogurt (many times over)

swedish pickled herring

lamb

Egyptian green soup

oatmeal

rice and beans and quesadillas

crab

pasta (many times over)

polenta

boulgour wheat

strawberries

artichokes

…

And a picture of one of the aftermaths – just before i kneel down again to wipe off the chair and wonder again, now why do i try encourage autonomous eating?  Because the grin of a baby successfully eating a banana on her own is worth its weight in cleanup time.

Maffaien april

We’ve passed our Consuel, it’s official as of today’s poste.  Now we just have to invest our un-savings in many kilos of copper to link our house up to the underground electrical line on the road, but we’re up to standard.

And Julia’s passport came in the mail today too, she is now officially a citizen.  And Gabriel and Julia have eaten their first strawberries of the season

they’ve had pancakes many times over

Julia has eaten and enjoyed swiss chard, and roquefort cheese, and lots and lots of Jean-Charles’ organic carrots.

And Gabriel made a Ferrari garage, and a new boat, and has perfected paper airplane fuselages and is making plans for a treehouse to be built over his spring break

And i finally started recycling the old chestnut planking from the barn to turn it into a bathroom door,

and made a new wall and shelving over the refrigerator based on our consultant Wich’s idea,

and dug around and found some old oak pieces in the chapel (not from the chapel, but in the chapel).  And Rodolphe came by and put up a gutter on the chapel, but those pictures will have to be for next time.  The other great news is that Pierre-Yves let the cows out into the meadow yesterday, and they’re the baskingest cows you’ll ever see…

The Fancy Restaurant

Great events of 2010:  Jane and Ed came home!  For Jane’s birthday in July, we were their guests at a Fancy Restaurant, le Grand Hôtel du Lac, in Combourg, and it was a wonderful treat and we are so happy to have our neighbors and great friends from so long ago, back.  Little Julia turned over in her womb in delight at the delicious food, especially the two types of asparagus in an espuma of foie gras.

Finesien gothic, 24.11.2010

 

 

Thanksgiving preparations abound.   We’ll be celebrating this year with the sisters and Jane and Ed, and we picked up the turkey this morning.  The bird weighs 5,12 kg; Julia has a kilo on it, and Gabriel 30 more.  Here’s this morning’s countertop lineup.  It’s a very good day.

Fall

With Antoine (you can see his arm, at left) and Yves and Hélène Roullier and an enormous cèpe that they found and brought by; we ate it for dinner last night and sauteed and froze the rest for Joyce and Paul’s upcoming visit, October 16, 2010.  (happy birthday Magnus!).

We’ve been a family of three for almost two months now; Julia bulia is clocking 7 weeks, and each minute has been a delight.  The good news of last week is that Yanis was born on October 14, so Julia has a new friend to grow up with here at Maffay, we look forward to Yanis and Emilie and Romain coming home so we can chat over the fence about diapers, spitting up and sleepless nights, in addition to electricity and bricolage.  We have had wonderful visits, lots of help, good meals have been made for us, and Gabriel has become an extraordinary older brother, from babysitting to brushing her hair into the mohawk that we call ‘shark hair’ and learning tricks from Sary Poppins (our great friend Sarah who came to visit last weekend from the states) about soothing a little crankis girlie.  She has visited Rennes, Angers, the health food store , which is for some reason, one of her favorite places to be, Combourg, markets, Jane and Ed’s for pigs in a blanket and hoppin’ john, a transportation department, a cow-farm, basketball games, friends’ houses for meals (we ate the rooster Dexter Gordon in an exquisite coq au vin that Mme Roullier had prepared, and are now even more enthusiastic about our small coterie of chickalicks and their potential for great meals), she knows now how to light a fire in a fröling 3000 and cook pancakes and empty a mousetrap and she loves going for long walks along the canal into the coming autumn and twilight with her mama while her older brother has practice.

Here are some photos to keep you updated on the little girlie and her adventures.

Very first excursion to the Etang de Boulet, the day we came home from the clinique, 28 august. We celebrated the launch of Gabriel’s homemade sailboat.

Malin’s mama Eva came to visit.

Malina, who helped Julia be born!

Klara

Anton

With Cippis.

Small harvest. Gardening was not a high priority this year.

Gabriel’s cherry-tomato harvest.

She woke up from her nap, and i was downstairs, and she stopped crying so i thought she had gone back to sleep. When i went upstairs to check, she was stretched out next to her brother in his bedroom, listening to music and watching him read tintin…

one monthaversary, september 24. she hates this hat; i love it.

Mme Roullier dresses Dexter Gordon for the table.

Our chicken doctor and conselor.

With Mme Roullier

Wall-e our house chicken who now lives outside.

Learning how to do dishes.

Precision helicopter flying lessons with Sarah.

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.

Still summer

We’re nigh on a month without significant rain, which is astonishing, and makes July’s porcini, brought by one morning in M. Roullier Père’s tractor,

seem all the more nebulous.  The first walnuts are starting to drop now, school has fallen back into its usual morning and afternoon rythms, and our chickens berate me for not posting their photos on this little site.

Patience, i say, i still haven’t put up the pics of the fête du village in june.  Stella caught a baby couleuvre yesterday, which is a snake, and the two chickens fought over it for a quarter of an hour before it finally played dead convincingly enough so that she dropped it, and it slithered off to repair its wounds in some underground part of Maffay to which we are denied, thankfully, ingress.   It’s the opposite of Africa where the snakes slid off with chicks in their maws.  The chickens understand now that i work in the office with the glass door, so they can come and peck at the window during their explorations of the garden, and peer in to see how we live, retribution for the first weeks where we would come and look in through the chestnut spires of their fence to watch them scratch and cackle.  They follow us around like dogs ever since we began playing the worm game with them, where we would find worms with the shovel and give them to the ladies to eat.  They are the true ladies of Maffay, and Stella and Garfield will have their pictures up here soon, really.  Right now they’re taking a nap on the doorstoop outside my office.

Other belated photos from past months:  the piano tuning, back in July.  We found an old piano (from around 1910) at Emmaüs when Aunty C. was visiting, and bought it and had it delivered on the merit of its tone; it sounds round and golden, especially when played as it was meant to be played.

The tuner came for a visit and adjusted its notes to something closer to real-world harmonies, and i’ve been playing around a bit, G will start lessons in two weeks, and visiting musicians (like Jane) stop by and play feet-tapping tunes that warm up the whole house.

Happy Tet, and the X-men

We’ve not been, shall we say, exuberant poster children this month of january of the new year, and now years, with the advent of the Bull. It’s been a busy month of work and travails, and the subtext of the crisis and having to read that word every day makes one feel a little bit like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight – are the foundations of the world shaking, or is it just me?

Small things have advanced nonetheless here at Maffay. I planted finally all the jonquil bulbs and nectarine tree that Jacqueline and Jean-Pierre brought when they visited after Christmas with Mamie, Rokia, Bruno and Selyan. The tulip bulbs from the school sale in November. The iris from Mme Brugalais at the Poste, and the crocosmia as well. And some bulbs on sale from our faithful Leroy Merlin, because everyone in their right mind knows that it’s now too late to plant bulbs, but i have hope, and a need for color in our messy rainforest of a weed-garden. Cip has now joined Max in the tribe of X-men, and is nutless to begin the new year; the vet found his hidden testicle after opening up his abdomen, tucked up next to the wall of his intestines. Cip is very proud of his soft shaven belly and otherwise shows no signs of trauma at his loss of masculinity.

Politically, recent events in the United States had inspired me to halfway imagine that we would wake up on the morning of January 30 after the strike, to find that Nicolas Sarkozy had left office to be replaced by a coalition of people from Sortir du Nucléaire, proponents of ecological farming methods, bankers with lots of bonus money destined exclusively for investment in eolians, a bevy of chefs de cuisine and sous-chefs to establish a Museum of French Gastronomic History with vast wings devoted to each of the Hexagon’s colonial excursions, Patrick Chamoiseau as Housing Secretary (of my house), Mathieu from the école de Feins as Education minister, with a guidebook written by Anne T., and a Joey Starr in Secretary of the Interior. With the RASED rehabilitated and reinforced, to help everyone in the coalition to get along, and the benefits from converting the Elysee to wind power given to the Education ministry to employ ten new school professors per day. The trees that Klaus knocked down will be used as the beginning of a radical new program to replace cinderblocks, the omnipresent parpaing, with wood-framed, efficient passive low-income housing. Brice Hortefeux shines in his role as chief toilet scrubber at the Elysée, as he has shown particular efficiency at “cleaning” during his time as the Minister of Immigration and National Identity.

But it was just a dream. And here at Maffay this morning we’re listing to Buxtehude at the Folles Journées in Nantes while typing, delaying doing the dishes and grouting the shower, Izzy is waiting for her little Luca Paul to be born in California, Grandpa Paul is in Oaxaca eating seven different types of mole, and we hope that you all are all well and happy and healthy as this second new year begins.

This is what the kitchen looked like before i finished putting down the big black tiles on the countertops (which we loooooove),

and what the shower looked like a few days ago, with the first coat of impermeabilization green stuff on over the Fermacell panels.  The flames at the beginning of the post are what it looks like on the inside of the Fröling when i’ve managed to get the fire lit. All bets are being taken now as to whether or now we’ll have enough wood to last us to the sundrenched (hah) days of April, when the solar panels will take over.

Mère noël!

or: mother christmas, or ‘more christmas’ if you’re speaking in Expector Clouseau patois, as Gabriel has been for the past two weeks.

Happy New Year, a healthy joyous one, to everyone.

Happy Birthday to: Carol, Renaud, Joycie, Helena.

And a word of thanks to Anne Tanné, who we all wish we could have known better, but who leaves behind her a great burst of light, laughter and color in the world.

Santa Clause came to Maffay and was a woman, my mother, Sally, who arrived on the 21st with smoked salmon, Good Earth tea, chocolate, maple syrup, corn tortillas, tillamook cheddar, socks and warm scarves in her sack. In the past few weeks the weather has been as cold as Siberia (because météo france tells us the winds have been coming to us direct from the Steppes to our temperate meadows). But the greatest thing about the past three weeks has been Grandma Sally’s visit, which, as effectively as the cold from the Siberian steppes, shook us into action as she simultaneously:

1. got us mostly moved out of the mobile home and some cleanup initiated.

2. got lots of laundry done.

3. made lots of great meals.

4. watched lots of expector Clouseau (the pink panther series from Izzy) with Gabriel.

5. held my hand at ikea as i bought the kitchen over several torturous trips (we’ve been back a total of 7 times now and know all the shortcuts in the new Ikea at Pacé).

6. helped infinitely as the kitchen took shape: cleaning up after me, finding lost screws, giving tips on where the best parking spots are at Ikea.

7. and a little bit of gardening too, before everything froze.

Gaël would come over at night after work and do cool things like connect the water line so that we have running water in the kitchen, and connect the electrical lines so that we can plug in computers and the internet in the living room. And then Jean-Luc came over too and played Marcel Marceau, sanding and mudding the final coats on the office ceiling so that i can paint it, and have an office instead of a corner of the living room. One day there was freezing rain, and sheets of razor thin ice slid off the solar panels and floated light as ash down to the ground, where Cip hunted them as they fell. Birds, unsettled by the weather, have been flying into the windows of our house; one, we watched with Gabriel as he came back to consciousness and stumbled off drunkely into the courtyard, and managed to fly away on a different route. One day, sadly, one of them flew too fast for his own good, and fell to the ground, his final landing. And another bird flew down next to him, and waited by him, and pecked at him, trying to get him to move again. We buried him by the chapel.

We love our grandma Sally and are so grateful for her visit, because now instead of a mobile home, we have a real home, and a real kitchen, and so much space that we get lost, wandering from room to room, amazed that we now live in a house where you can jump up and down, and the cds don’t skip, nor do dishes fall from the kitchen shelves. And you can reach out your arms, and not hit something. And you can walk through a doorway straight-on, not having to turn to let your shoulders squeak through. We’ll devote another post to our darling Fröling, who has been keeping us warm over the past month, and whose firelit visits have become an anticipated daily ritual. This post is for Grandma Sally so that you all can see all the cool changes she wrought (what a great word: unsure of how to employ in the present, i’ll use ‘write’ instead, below).

And all the changes we write.

Here are a lot of pictures to make up for the silence on this little blog of the past weeks, as you can see, we’ve been a little busy. There was also of course that strange disconnection from the world that we experienced when France Télécom left us without internet for a long week after the phone line was moved into the house on the 23rd, but otherwise, our hands were full.