And breath!!!!!!

It's been another jam-packed, fun-filled week here (not) but I suppose as each day goes by hopefully things are closer to getting back to normal (Caree, I feel for you)! On the positive side we had our latest board game evening at Jordan and Jen's place on Saturday night and as some of the games just go straight over my head (too French-focussed), I seem to end up being Charlie's chief dinosaur chaser - not that I mind. At the moment we're reenacting the Mufasa and Scar fight from The Lion King (using dinosaurs), but I'm happy to say Mufasa wins every time in our version!

I saw snippets of the US inauguration but just like any lengthy ceremony, there's no way I would ever sit down and watch the whole thing. One thing that did strike me though, was that at one point there was a shot taken from outside the White House and while of course security was ramped up by about 1000 per cent, I remember that when I was working at the World Bank (1985-1987) I would often walk down to the park near the Washington Monument at lunchtime and you could virtually stand and look in at the White House through the railings! As time went by security was heightened more and more and it kinda made me sad to see how over the years the White House became (like so many other places, I suppose) a virtually inviolable fortress! Heck where I worked our building was right on Lake Geneva and our security guards were basically just car park attendants. And then, over the years, massive gates were installed, turnstyle entrances for the staff showed up and x-ray machines became the norm. How sad is that!

The electrician showed up to begin work on Monday and after spending the entire day just sitting around but trying to stay out of his way, I decided on Tuesday that I would leave him to it and do whatever running around I had to do. I suppose you shouldn't really leave workmen in your place alone but I think he was glad to get me out of his way and in any case, he knew I had cameras in the house - not that I have anything worth stealing! So I called up the lady from the food bank and made arrangements with her to take six trash bags full of blankets, sleeping bags and coats to her place. She was recovering from a knee replacement so couldn't drive out to meet me, but in any case I was glad to get out the house. When I finally found her house in the back of beyond I commented what a lovely place she had but, being alone (she'd already told me that) didn't she find it a lot to keep up with, like I did? And so over the next 15 minutes I think I found out her entire life story, how she'd bought the house after divorcing her serial cheater husband and got to decorate it exactly how she wanted and spend her salary/pension how she wanted too! It was weird because I don't know this woman, but in the space of a 15 minute coffee break I think I got her entire life story - not that I mind - I'll talk to anyone! So then I asked her if her house was anywhere near where the squatters had moved in (she hadn't heard of it) but apparently, while it was in the same village, it wasn't exactly close. In the end I believe it was a group of Roma gypsies who had taken over a house and land that had belonged to someone who had recently died (apparently they check out local obituaries for houses likely to be empty) and while the police had got them out pretty quickly, it would seem that it was not before they'd managed to make off with the huge copper flower pot outside the Mairie!

They have them on video, but fat lot of
good it did!

Chantal from sewing club was asking me about the squatters as she lives close by so I told her about the FB group I follow if she was worried about it. Chantal volunteers at the village library so I showed her some of the pictures I'd seen on FB that proved librarians actually do have a sense of humour! She loved them!

The lady I ordered the sewing trolley for did indeed pay me for it so I'm hoping that's the end of it, but we'll see, I guess. Goodness knows it took me ages to learn to stop "doing" for other people - my ex-husband's US taxes (hey, your're the American, figure it out), his DUIs (why don't you ask some of your drinking buddies), people at work wanting a breakdown of their education grant status per child (I'm sorry, you'll have to ask Mrs. R in Finances for that - it was their decision not to forward these to staff members). It's not normally in my nature, but sometimes it's just too easy to allow other people to get you to do things for them because they're either too lazy or because you've always just done everything for them. I do remember once watching the programme Catfished on Youtube when they interviewed a rather lovely English lady who had been taken in by someone she'd been talking to online for about six months. All of a sudden he was "trapped in the Middle East because his employer wouldn't let him return until he'd paid for material that was broken", or "his son had been in an accident and they wouldn't let him leave hospital until his bill was settled" - you know, that kind of stuff! She was desperately hurt when she realized what was going on because she thought they had a genuine connection, but everytime he spun her some kind of sob story she would just say "oh that's terrible, what are you going to do about it"? So the scammer never got a penny out of her and so far, she's the only one I've seen that hasn't ultimately been scammed. Mind you, did any of you see the recent story of a French woman who divorced her husband and sent hundred of thousands of €€€€€€ to Brad Pitt to help him with his hospital bills? Her husband was a very wealthy man so she completely shot herself in the foot on this one, but can you imagine falling for some of the worst photoshops in the world and losing your marriage over it!!!

Poor Brad, I'm thinking of setting
up a Go Fund Me for him!

And finally, my electrician is finding more nightmares to put right with every plug he removes. I have a small space heater in the living room for when it's exceptionally cold, although I rarely use it because I tend to live on the first floor anyway. Well he showed me how the wiring there had started to melt and would most likely eventually have gone up the same way as the top bedroom at some point. He told me that everywhere there was a plug socket on an external wall, there was no insulation so my house was just a huge leaky sieve, with cold air blowing in through all these outlets. Mind you, he also told me that the lightbulbs throughout the house were waayyy too powerful and to get them changed to max 5w bulbs and "stop heating my house through the lightbulbs". When I told him I'd run out and buy some he told me not to bother as they were cheaper on Amazon and within 24 hours I'd received the whole lot! In the "TV room", where I spend most of my time, I have eight spotlights and he showed me how these bulbs, again, were way too powerful and had started to melt the transformers that had been installed when we'd had the false ceiling put in about 20 years ago. Basically the whole place was a potential tinderbox! Everytime he came across something he called me over to take a look at it so that I was aware of what was going on, so right now I'm in the process of changing all the bulbs in the house which, he said, I should see reflected in my electricity bill in short order!

I'm gonna have a helluva lot of
cleaning to do pretty soon!

I left him in the house the other day while I ran out to drop a carload of stuff off at the charity shop and on the way back picked sandwiches up for both of us for lunch. He was surprised as he'd never had someone do that for him, but Jordan told me he'd frequently had a little old grandma insist he sit down with them and eat when he's been out on a job on his own. So on Friday he showed up with croissants for both of us for breakfast - nice huh! Anyhow I reckon I have another week of his being here all day every day but I'll be relieved when it's over and I can feel more secure in my own house. He was telling me that his family originally came to France as refugees from Somalia but he has spent most of his life here as he arrived at a very young age! Blimey, with me being a Brit, the Bangladeshis coming in to do the plumbing/decorating and my tiler being from Kosovo, it's starting to feel a bit like the United Nations only without the flag and the diplomatic status!

Gifted?

It's been a pretty hectic few days again this week, what with having various "trades" come to the house to give quotes for work. I decided, that depending on the quotes, I would have all the electrics done, the second bathroom installed (I've given up on the other guy) and the upstairs hall and top bedroom redecorated - the top bedroom being where the electrical fire was in December. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the bit where the carpet was burned but my brain just doesn't have the bandwidth for that at the moment! I think I mentioned in my previous post that the Bangladeshi guy had come back with a quote for the electricals of €9,400 - which shocked me - but then I haven't had electrical work done in years. His two brothers then came back with a total quote of €3,200 for both installing the second bathroom and the painting and decorating work I want doing. However, the French electrician who showed up first got hold of me to say that he was having trouble getting his quote through, but when it finally arrived it came in at €4,600 - which is a helluva big difference from the €9,400 quote! So I accepted the French electrician's quote and the Bangldeshi brothers' quote for everything except the electrical work and let their electrician brother know why - that he was just too expensive! And that was when he suggested that "maybe we can come to some arrangement"! Well that only pissed me off even more because that was when I knew he was obviously taking the piss - either taking advantage of a woman alone or just the fact that I obviously didn't know anything about the cost of trades! I did have Jordan take a look at the quote for the plumbing work and he said it looked fair to him, so that's where I stand right now, with the electrician coming on Tuesday to install all the new plugs, light switches and an electric radiator, and then coming back whenever the new electric panel/box(?) shows up. After that it'll be lining up the plumber, the decorator and the tiler, on top of baby-sitting duties etc., so it will very definitely be a busy few days/weeks. Still, if I don't drop from the exhaustion of shifting stuff out their way, it will be a means of getting the entire house cleaned from top to bottom after they leave!

Mind you, the Bangladeshi brothers asked if I would be interested in giving them English lessons (??) but I told them that I'm not a teacher by nature and don't have the time in any case. But what a cheek - or was it? Am I just being too sensitive? And talking of being too sensitive, before Christmas B, from sewing club, was asking if anyone knew where to get a military-style uniform for a five year old as her little grandson was army-mad. I told her to look on Amazon as you can get pretty much anything there but she told me she wouldn't go on Amazon because she would be afraid to put her credit card into their system. But when she did indeed find something she liked she asked me if I would order it for her! It strikes me as somewhat odd that she doesn't mind me putting my credit card into the system though. In any case, I ordered it for her before Christmas and she paid me back immediately, so no problem there. But then this week she asked me if I would order her a trolley on wheels for her to tote around her sewing machine, plus all the attendant gear that goes with it. Well this cost around €100 and the client would have to be present to sign for it, so I had to ask her for her home address and told her that I didn't want it delivered to my address because it was a huge parcel and I wouldn't be home on that day in any case (baby-sitting duties)! I don't know though, am I just being too sensitive about this because while I know she will pay me back, I also don't want to get into the habit of being her P.O. box when she isn't a little old lady (she's six years younger than me) and has three adult children of her own who could do it for her! I don't know, maybe I am just having a bad few days!

I'd had a sore throat for about a week and was feeling pretty tired, but even though I'd been gargling with warm salt water, it didn't seem to be going away, so I stopped in at the chemist's and she asked me if I was allergic or averse to essential oils. I told her not that I was aware of, and blow me but within about two days that sore throat was gone. I just love what I would call natural medicine or "old wives' remedies", so I'm always willing to give them a shot, and even happier when they seem to work! Talking of which, if One Family happens to read this, you were asking about vitamins etc. and when I left a comment on your blog I forgot to mention the wonderful Dr. Eric Berg on Youtube. His videos aren't very long at all but he seems to have made nutrition and natural remedies his speciality, so you might enjoy checking him out! I also seem to wake up every morning with a stuffed up nose, even though I don't have the heating on in the bedroom, so today I decided to hell with everything that I could/should be doing and took myself off down to the lake at Passy for a walk. The weather was wonderful and listening to a good book on my walk and then sitting there afterwards with homemade cake and a flask of tea has got to be my idea of (cheap) heaven - and of course, no more stuffy nose!

In other news, on one of the private FB groups I follow a few of the members have been saying that they swear some of the communcations received from their other halves (usually in the case of an adversarial divorce) seem to have been written by AI. So now these same people are raving about Chatgpt's Brenda and Frank feature, which allows you to feed someone's incoming correspondence into it and it analyses the "real" meaning behind the often pleasant words. You can, of course, also run your own correspondence through it and "Brenda and Frank" give their thoughts on it, help you to tone it down or make it more succint, whatever you choose! So while I have my doubts about some of the nefarious uses for AI, I can see, conversely, that it could on occasion be very useful indeed!

And finally, on Friday I looked after Charlie for about eight hours and while he is absolutely adorable, god he wears me out. He's an intelligent little thing (you can see Jen, in particular, spends ages with him) and when one time he asked me how to do something and I said I didn't know, he said "not to worry Nanny, there's always a solution"! Yikes! Around 5 o'clock we walked down to the daycare to pick Elynn up and since his feet are too small for the special slippers you have to wear inside and I had my giant clodhopper snow boots on, I took both of our boots off and we went in in our socks. The new lady didn't recognize me so I had Elynn in my arms while trying to wriggle my ID out of my bag, then was quite flustered trying to dress Elynn in her outdoor clothes, put mine and Charlie's boots back on without dropping Elynn and making sure the stroller didn't blow away in the wind. There's got to be a more rational way of doing all this (I was a sweaty mess by the time we made it home) and Jordan said there was, he just waited till Jen got home to keep Charlie before he went to pick Elynn up! While we were at daycare two of the older ladies recognized Charlie and asked how he was, and how he was getting on at school, so he told them that he liked it very much but that he would soon be finished with it and be going to work with his dad to help him in his plumbing job! They (like me) roared laughing, but in the end I think they were pretty mean. I mean, what if the kid really is gifted huh?

That went well!

It's day nine of the new year and it already feels like Christmas was ages ago! I was at home on New Year's Eve and stayed up just long enough to watch the fireworks out my window and then another hour later the fireworks displays in the UK. It was lovely here, so clear and crisp that the small celebrations further up the mountains were easily visible, so it was funny when I spoke to my neighbour's daughter the next day and she was telling us how they had been shrouded in fog and couldn't see anything! I don't know what altitude she's at (I'm at 800 m) but she's only about 15 minutes away so, as always, it's weird to see how you can be in bright sunshine one minute and just a few minutes down the road surrounded by thick fog!

So I spent NYE either reading in the peace of my own home or watching a few videos on Youtube. It's odd really because for some reason the algorithm decided I must have wanted to see loads of short clips of Michael Jackson as a very young boy/man. I was a huge MJ fan when I was younger and to see him (and his brothers) bursting with raw talent so young was amazing. That being said, I couldn't begin to imagine how stressful it must have been, for Michael in particular, to have the weight of all that talent and other people's expectations on such young shoulders!

I got off to a great start with my walking resolution by doing a few local walks immediately following the festivities. I'd walked for about an hour the other day when I bumped into the farmer's daughter walking her dog, so turned round and did the same circuit in reverse while we got to catch up as we hadn't seen each other for ages. Every year they instal a still where my friend, Stan's, old bar used to be and I really enjoy seeing it. I always understood that they mainly made eau de vie from walnuts that people brought over, but apparently they can make hooch out of pretty much anything so who knows!

The roving still!

It's a pretty and easy walk through
some local woods, although muddy
of course!

Leading back towards the village you have a 
local allotment. I'd love to have an allotment
there, but since I can't keep up with my own
small garden it'd be a pretty dumb thing
for me to get involved in!

I let the end of the festivities pass by getting paperwork up to date and sorting out what needs to be done in the new year (a lot, as it turns out). I updated my French tax deductions to take into account the small UK pension that I started receiving in September. I know quite a few Brits living here who haven't declared their UK pension, but I feel that it's just not worth the risk of getting caught (and potentially a large fine) for such a smallish increase in my taxes!

I got my heating fuel top-up ordered (ouch) and sent out a request for a quote to get the electrics in my house sorted after the recent fire! I got quite a few responses and have so far had two people out to my house to take a look. That's when I got the shock of my life when the first guy (confirmed by the second) told me that since the electrical work in the top bedroom was not up to code, had my house burned down the insurance wouldn't have covered any of it!!! Now to be fair I realize that this entire bedroom was most likely never declared when the previous owners created it in the attic and having seen some of his handwork in the rest of the house I've little reason to think the electrical work would be any different, but I had honestly not given any thought to possibly having no coverage if the house had burned down!

This is the cleaned up version of
where the fire started! It could have been so
much worse!

Anyway, that was enough for me to decide that the whole house is going to get a complete electrical make-over and while the first guy hasn't sent me his quote in yet, the second guy could be interesting. He is from Bangladesh and has brothers who are plumbers/tilers/painters and decorators so who knows, with my second bathroom never having been finished and my original plumber seemingly having disappeared from the face of the earth, maybe the brother of electrician number two (coming over tomorrow) can finally complete my bathrooms. And I suspect the painter and decorator brother will make an appearance at some point as I want to get that bedroom plus the hall and landing completely redecorated! The electrician's quote for the entire house, plus installing lights and electrical sockets outside is €9,400!!! but since I'm pretty good at saving "for a rainy day" (some rainy day though) I have the money and will just bite the bullet and get it done, although I suspect a potential trip to India in March this year is now off the cards!

Yoga started up again on Monday (thank goodness) and then Jen asked me if I could take care of Charlie on Wednesday (he doesn't have school on Wednesdays) rather than her mom, who is still feeling unwell. Of course it's no problem to look after him, although if I ever have to run and hide under the table again from the big bad wolf I might end up doing myself an injury. Then of course as we have to chase him with our respective dinosaurs and dragons I'm definitely getting the feeling I'm too old for this lark! I did ask him how the wolf got up to their floor and he told me that the monkey pressed the buttons for him in the elevator! Well of course he did - why didn't I think of that!

Monday night sewing club started up again and since the ladies bought in a galette des rois (a traditional pie eaten at Epiphany) and champagne, Claude asked me if I would open the champagne. Probably not a good idea as I couldn't keep my hand on the cork, which shot off across the room and whizzed between two of the ladies' heads. It could have been really bad had it hit one of them, but can you imagine a trip to the ER with a champagne cork stuck in your ear!

Pilates started up again this morning so I made the rather brave decision to walk into town rather than try to find a parking space on market day. It takes about 40 minutes and while I don't mind the cold, by the time I got there the wind and rain was blowing a hoolie! As has become my habit I caught the local bone-shaker bus back up to the village but when I went to hand my €1.70 to the driver he told me that they no longer accepted cash so I had to pay by card. Problem was, when I tried to swipe my bank card their machine rejected it, and since I was pretty sure I still had at least €1.70 in my bank account (although who knows right now?) he told me to forget it since if they couldn't be bothered to make sure their card readers worked, well then that was their problem wasn't it. And yet again, when he dropped me off in the village he offered to take me all the way home. It was a different driver this time so I'm wondering if this isn't maybe part of company policy! Who knows, but since I was pretty soaked through anyway I thanked him kindly and just walked the rest of the way. Then it was into the shower and off back into town for my bi-annual contrôle technique, which is the roadworthiness test linked to the age of your car. And wouldn't you know it but as I was on my way there I realized that my front right headlight had blown, so had to stop into Ford yet again, for them to change it for me. Thank goodness they are very accommodating and, so it would appear, I did indeed still have at least €1.70 in my bank account to pay for it, although the way things are going I'm wondering for how much longer! At least the car passed though, because even though I have the money set aside for a new car, the thought of either having to shell out more money on this one or buy a new one right now gives me the willies!

Oh while I think of it, apologies to anyone whose comments I haven't published lately, as I've just realized that I've had a problem with some comments going to spam!

And finally, I just saw a video on a Youtube news channel about a man in Corsica whose mother had recently died and her house had been taken over by squatters. As most people know it's almost impossible to get squatters out, particularly in the winter, so this man phoned his elderly friend who told him not to worry and that he would come over right away. Well this friend was a beekeeper and had his buddy kit up in a beekeeper's outfit before going in through the back door of mom's house and dumping one of his beehives in the middle of the living room! This was followed by a bunch of panic-striken squatters running screaming from the house shouting how they were going to sue! The old guy laughed and just said he considered his bees to be "pets" and good luck with suing him! And that's why I love living in France. Most people don't have guns over here, but I'm pretty sure there is an absolute army of beekeepers who are probably just as lethal!