Ouch!

Damn, I ache all over. Y'see, I had another bright idea this morning and now I'm paying the price for it! Since I'm trying to get some walking in every day while the weather allows to work towards my 1,000 miles challenge, after yoga yesterday I decided to drive back down to Thyez and walk for an hour on the cycle path along the river Arve. While it was better than nothing I realize that an hour isn't really enough to clock up the steps/km - even if it's more than I was doing before I signed up for the challenge. So my intention was to get up and out this morning for a walk through the woods before my 2.30 p.m. yoga class in a village two villages away. Trouble is, since I'm now retired and no longer have to the hit the ground running in the morning, I've gone back to my natural sloth tendencies and spend a good couple of hours reading while having my breakfast and a cup of tea (or 10). That then made me a bit pushed for time to get in a decent walk before heading off to yoga class in St. Pierre - so like an idiot I decided to walk there! With that I ran round to my neighbour and told her I would meet her there as I was going to walk - and she just burst out laughing and said I must be mad (she's probably right). My neighbour's mirth notwithstanding, at 12.30 I set off walking in the direction of the village of St. Laurent, and then on down the forestry road to St. Pierre. Turns out it's almost five miles away! Who wudda thunk! I made it to yoga class with just five minutes to spare and the teacher then chose today of all days to up the ante and teach a much more dynamic class. Damn, I'm aching all over! Buuuttt, I got a total of 12,400 steps in today in just a couple of hours and walked about six miles in total in addition to 90 minutes of yoga! I guess that should up my weekly total a bit then!

In other news, when we were driving up to Grand Bornand on Sunday Jen said that they would like to ask my opinion on something! It turns out that Jordan has been offered a job back at the company where he worked while apprenticing as a plumber. Max, the young man that installed my new heating system, is the boss and Max's dad started his plumbing business many years ago and employed both his sons in the family business. Dad retired in September so Max and his brother are now the owners of a rather large plumbing business that specializes in "big jobs" - like replumbing hospitals and apartment blocks - and Max called Jordan to say they had a few big contracts signed and their only other employee had just resigned to move into a different branch of plumbing and would he come back. Now this sounds ideal because Jordan really doesn't like what he's doing at the moment - servicing central heating systems - and wanted to get back into "proper" plumbing anyway. The way Jordan looks at it, though, is that Max is a long time friend (they both play in the same band together) and sometimes they clash, but to my mind the positive is that they know each other, he knows how Jordan works, and he will have much better working hours with Max than where he is now. His current employer schedules in as many as eight service appointments a day but does not factor in travel time and the eternal traffic jams, so Jordan often works through his lunch break and then on until 8 p.m. While he doesn't mind occasionally he says it shouldn't be an every day thing - and he's quite right, especially considering he starts at eight in the morning! He already told his employer before Christmas that he was looking for other work but they asked him to hang on during their busy winter period so he agreed to see them out until the end of February - which would tie in very well with Max's offer. He doesn't want to leave them in the lurch as he said they have been good employers but doing routine maintenance work is doing his head in. So I told him I think he should go for it, since Max has also been very good about lending him tools in the past if he had other jobs on the side (jobs that Max doesn't want because they are too small). If worse comes to worst and they do clash he can always look elsewhere anyway, so I think he's going to go with it! And good for him. Fewer hours, the same or more money, proper lunch breaks, although with harder physical work - but that's what he wants so I say go for it!

Then yesterday I dropped off my car at the garage for them to repair the damage caused by the wild boar the other week. I had asked the garage if they could lend me a car for the duration and they have lent me what must be one of the smallest cars in captivity (a little Fiat), but you know what, it isn't bad! It's about as big as a matchbox car and probably has less power than my sewing machine, but it's fairly new and quite nippy so I can live with that. In fact, now that I'm no longer putting in the km to drive to work and belting along the motorway at high speed every day I don't think I will need such a heavy duty car when this one dies on me, so maybe a nippy little four-wheel drive might be nice! Still, we're not there yet, and hopefully this one will keep going for a few years yet.

And finally, tonight I drove in to town to drop off a crate of stuff that I had bought for the food bank. The elderly man there who took my crate can never figure out how to collapse it back down when it's empty and we always laugh and joke about him needing to take night school classes in "crate folding". Anyway, he was telling me that the food bank will be moving to new premises next month and when I asked where it turns out it's near the Church of the Blessed Fountain. So I told him that that was near to me, so we got chatting, as you do, and it turns out he lives in my village, right near the church, and knows my neighbour well, since they were on the village council together! And now I think about it I might just recognize him from around the village but who knows! As I say, it's a small world isn't it!