Cooler now!

The horrendously hot weather finally broke last week and we, unusually, are getting temperatures around 25°C (77°F), so just perfect! The cooler weather allows me to get so much more done around here including the "irritating stuff"! When the electrician was here he commented how useless my downstairs vacuum was so I bought a new one for downstairs and then a second for the first floor. The first floor vacuum is working just fine but about two weeks ago I was finding that the ground floor one just wouldn't pick anything up! I was really pissed off as it is less than six months old so I just shoved it into a corner of the garage until I could summon up the energy to tear the bloody thing apart. When I finally did I found that one end of the hose was as near as dammit totally blocked with hard core trash and nothing was getting through to the actual bag! I'm guessing some of that was stuff I'd hoovered up following both the electrician and the plumber's visits but I never expected to find anything so rock solid blocking it. Still, at least it's now sorted. Actually I find that when things malfunction on me (like the AC unit that was shredding wasps) if I leave it until I'm in a better mood, I inevitably end up getting it sorted without throwing a tantrum!

Then to add to my woes, my security system started malfunctioning. I would often get a notification to say that there was a "suspicious vibration" which made me think that their sensors were becoming overly sensitive to any slamming doors, but then I was finding that I couldn't set the alarm via my keyfob so had to go into the app on my phone and do it from there. So I left it and left it until one day I read a message indicating a "sabotage" on access point X. Now I knew darn well that nobody had tried to get in the house but in any case I went round all the downstairs windows/doors and checked the sensors and wouldn't you know it one of them seemed to have moved just a little bit, and was thus preventing my keyfob from working! Thankfully it's all now up and running but don't the little things get you down - or maybe it's just the straw that breaks the camel's back! (As a useless aside, in French that would be "the drop that made the vase overflow")!

Jordan came over the other day as I had offered to give them the AC unit I had on my upper floor and a huge parasol that I had in the basement, which their apartment block can use with the picnic table they've bought for the little park area outside their building. I then asked him to take a look at the enormous wood supply I had down there (not firewood, just old pieces of wood that my ex had stored for "one day when") and he said he might be interested in some of the larger pieces but the rest I could get rid of. So bit by bit I've lugged upstairs an old stereo and music system of my ex's that got dumped in my basement and am now starting hauling the wood too, but I may have to give that a rest for a few days as my elbows are starting to hurt, what with lugging all this heavy stuff up a flight of stairs and then off to the tip!

The other day I got a call from André who had had to take his car to the garage as there seemed to be a problem with the turbo. He's had to leave it for a few days and needed a lift home so off I trotted to pick him up. He was telling me that while much of his organization's budget comes from government contributions, they also have large projects funded by individual grants. Apparently his unit has just received a huge grant for a specific project so his boss told him that he has put him on a post funded by that grant in order to ensure he's on a securely funded post (as much as anything can be secure at the moment) - so that's a bit of good news, at least!

There's been a big hooha in the UK regarding the upcoming film version of Raynor Winn's The Salt Path with information coming out that calls into question much of what she wrote about the reasons behind their losing their home and embarking on the grueling journey along the southern coastal path, and the claims that her husband is/was suffering from a terminal illness! I read the book because everyone was raving about it, but to be honest I got fed up of it after a while. Oh she writes beautifully but I just found it too much "this day it poured and we were soaked, and that day was scorching and we burned", so no, the book didn't do it for me at all. I'm assuming the film will be a success, even though I suspect we haven't heard the last of the revelations (true or otherwise) about the veracity of their story!

When I was over at Jordan and Jen's the other day, Jordan showed me an article where several local Italian restaurants had been raided in connection with money laundering linked to the Calabrese mafia! We used to go to one of those restaurants pretty often as we were quite friendly with the owners. Thankfully they sold up about 20 years ago and are not (I hope) linked to this in any way. Apparently what tipped investigators off was the high turnover of staff, most of whom couldn't speak anything other than Italian!

Then the other day there was a knock at my door and my favourite neighbour just stood there unable to speak. I told her to come in and sit down and she just burst into tears. The sale of her house was signed last week although a moving date has yet to be agreed, so she's in the middle of getting rid of as much as she can and packing up whatever she plans to take with her. She said that the fatigue was getting to her and she found herself ruminating on what the hell she had ever done to deserve being treated so badly by her late husband, with him trying to write her out of her share of the house and block her from receiving a widow's pension (he was unsuccessful in both but managed to screw her over in other ways)! She knew he started cheating on her within two years of their marriage (if not before) and managed to get a job transfer to another area in order to get away from him quite early in their marraige, but he got wind of it and arranged a transfer for himself too and subsequently, over their 50+ year marriage, she had her spirit broken. She said if he hated her that much he could easily have divorced her early on (makes me wonder why his first marriage ended so quickly) but I told her that in my opinion sometimes men like that want all the convenience of having a "wife appliance" at home, the legitimacy of being a "family man" and hey, who was gonna cook his meals and scrub his skivvies if he divorced her. I can't help but think that men (or women) who behave like that have to make "you" into the baddie in order to justify in their own minds their appalling treatment of you! After about an hour she said she felt better and that she was going to go to bed, but I just hate to see her so bruised and battered having, as she said, wasted 50 years of her life on that arsehole!

Last week I drove down to Passy again, but this time not to the lake but to the large outdoor/mountain store as I wanted to get a few things for my walking trips. They have a cafeteria and a restaurant there so I decided to treat myself to lunch in the restaurant and boy was it good. The starter was a mixed melon, olive and feta cheese salad followed by really tender chicken on a bed of bulgur wheat (I didn't bother with dessert). It was so good that I decided I wanted to try and duplicate it myself but haven't gotten around to it just yet. Then this afternoon I decided to pull out a very old Good Food Guide magazine (I must have about 20 years worth) and flick through it while sitting in the garden and low and behold they had the almost identical recipe in a magazine going back to 2016, so I'll definitely be giving this a try now!

Good Food Guide, January 2016

While I was there I noticed that there were quite a few workmen having lunch too, so decided to mention it to Jordan in case he's ever working in the vicinity. Because they move around between different work sites, his employer has a contract with many local restaurants where the employees can spend up to €20 per meal "on the house" and the bill is submitted directly to the employer. The set menu I had was €19 so if they aren't already, it would be a good idea to have this place set up a contract with his employer. Another thing the employer does is put €30 per month onto a kind of credit card for each employee and credits an annual or bi-annual bonus onto it where they can get all kinds of discounts on local attractions, on household goods, or employing a cleaning lady, for example - or use it for pretty much whatever they want. Jordan currently has €800 on his card so they will be using that when they go on holiday in August. It's a pretty nice set up (and fairly common in France) so at least they won't have to worry about spending money when they go away!

And finally, today is Bastille Day (French national day) so yesterday Jen's mom invited us all down to her place to watch the local fireworks. Most people celebrate on 13th because 14th is a holiday and while it poured rain in the morning, the rest of the day was hot and dry. For such a small town the fireworks were very good. We all took a dish and drinks and I made two different vegetarian dishes as one of our crowd is vegetarian. I'm in the mood to cook at the moment and having pulled out that foodie magazine, I'm thinking it might be fun to pick a couple of recipes from each magazine and try to replicate them, in order to expand my reptertoire, as it were. At the moment I'm all gung ho, but we'll see how long that lasts, I suppose! Still, you never know if you don't try, right?