On the buses!

I have mentioned before that I really dislike having someone eating their breakfast or whatever when sitting next to me on the bus. Maybe it's just me - I guess we all have our little niggles right - but I hate the elbows in the ribs and the smell of someone's breakfast all within 10 inches of my nose that early in the morning. I posted previously that there is a chap who gets on and always has his tuna-mayo sandwich followed by a slice of pizza and coffee, so you get a varied array of smells depending on how far along his route we are. Well on Friday the guy sitting next to me seemed to have a bottomless pit for a bag. First the crackers, then the sandwich, then the banana, followed by more crackers then another banana - in the end I had to smile because it just put me in mind of the scene where Mr. Bean is sitting an exam and has the never-ending bag of supplies, or indeed Mary Poppins' bottomless bag (you see, I really am easily amused)! The only thing missing from this banquet was the flip-down table!

Whinging apart, there are worse places than Geneva to be on a bus, as witnessed by the elderly couple on the bus on Friday evening. The gent didn't seem to be completely with it and it was obviously the lady's job to take care of him. Immediately people jumped up and helped him to a seat while the lady was trying to explain to him that she would be getting off at the Museum as she was going to Paulette's but that he must get off at the next stop and make his way home. He seemed a little confused but I have seen them on the bus before and I guess this is the way it rolls for them - it can't be easy for either of them. Anyway, the lady got off and when the gent went to follow her a couple of young men stopped him and explained that "she was going to see Paulette and that he should get off at the next stop", and then took it upon themselves to make sure he got off safely at the right stop, at which point he seemed to get his bearings. Sad really, but at least there were decent people around to take care of him. I make no judgement on the lady (his wife?) leaving him on the bus as I would guess this is their norm, for the time being at least, until one day it won't be!

I also mentioned in a post in January about a young cyclist (she was 27 I think) who had been killed on my bus route having gone underneath the wheels of a truck as it was turning. Her loved ones put up a tribute which still remains, although the dead flowers have now been replaced by candles. What amazed me though is that a cycling helmet had been left amongst the tributes, and three months later it is still there - no-one has taken it! It warms the heart a little, I must say.

In other matters, I had great plans for the Easter weekend, none of which came to fruition because, apart from being woken up at 4.40 a.m. by a telemarketing company, unbeknownst to me my neighbour had set up with his friend to come over with his digger to dig out the ditch which would re-channel the underground springs in the garden. So I was woken up to that unexpected joy at 8 a.m! This is what my back garden looked like over Easter, and where I spent my time humping stones out of the ditch in order for them to lay the piping. Happy days! Still, to be fair, it ended up costing us less than half what our other neighbours paid!

My sister made some smart-arsed comment about how if I really didn't want them to visit in July I should just tell them rather than digging a moat, but I explained that while the ditch was for the underground springs I thought the anti-tank guns out front would suffice to keep them away!

This is the top end of my garden leading down to the neighbours' where the springs would have ended up if I had gone ahead and started without them. I don't have much land (and for that I am thankful) but am lucky enough to have the field behind which is agricultural land so even better. I think I only have about 350 square metres, but frankly that is more than enough. It's sad really but when we first moved in in 1990 the farmer was selling a riding lawnmower and my ex desperately wanted to buy it! I mean, you have a plot of land about as big as three handkerchiefs and he wants a riding lawnmower!!!! And worse still, I would have given in and let him get it if we had had the money, but having just bought a house and paid for a move from Switzerland to France we were broke! How stupid would he (we) have looked on a riding lawnmower having to do a 350-point turn just to turn around and go in the other direction!!! I don't know if it was just because he was used to that kind of thing in the U.S. where people have bigger gardens but really .........????? He also bought a ruddy great roto-tiller to turn over a patch of ground as big as my underwear so we could grow veggies (my 80-year old neighbour just leaned on his shovel and smiled benignly). And then the lawnmower - everyone else's cost maybe €400 and we had to have one that cost €2,000!!  I never did understand but I sure as heck discovered pretty fast why we never had any money! More importantly, he never took care of anything so it really was money down the drain. When he moved back to the States and left me to empty the farmhouse he had rented, he had three strimmers/weed whackers rusting in the garage and he didn't even have a garden of any description! Nothing. He had, I think, four rose bushes at the side of the house, no grass at all, and that was it!  One day, he came to the house and said he needed to borrow the aforementioned expensive lawnmower. When I asked what for he said he "needed it" but I knew he was just going to give it to one of his buddies so I said his buddy could borrow it when he replaced the hedge trimmer he had lent him last time which he then broke and never replaced! Grrrr, those bloody mates drove me nuts - but at least I don't have to deal with them any more.

And on a slightly different note, in connection with a programme on UK TV about people who were living "mortgage free", Jane over at Shoestring Cottage was talking about "saving money" and one of her commentators mentioned the moneysavingexpert.com website where you can calculate how much interest you would save by making overpayments on your mortgage. I started overpaying my mortgage three years ago but couldn't be bothered to work out the back details so I input my info as though I was starting overpaying this month and - just wow! According to their calculation table, I would save myself around €72,000 and almost eight years on the mortgage by doing this. When I did a rough estimate of the three years that I didn't take into count I reckon it will be nearer €100,000! Just wow!

And finally, it's a small world isn't it? I follow Anne's blog at New Happenings at the Table. She is based in Alabama and one of the ladies who commented on her blog (Nathalie) put in a mention to me about how, while she lives in Florida, her dad lives just up the road from me in a place called Thônes! Blogging world really is small isn't it!