Aaarrgghh!

Bugger, bugger, bugger! Well now I've got that out of my system ... what a crappy couple of days I've had! And breath! I didn't end up going snow-shoeing with my neighbour the other day as she called to say she wasn't well (she suffers from migraines) so I ended up sitting on my backside doing bugger all! Shame on me though because getting out there shouldn't depend on having someone else to go with!

My electrician came again the other day (day 18 at this point) and I just left him to it as I had things to do. But bugger it wouldn't you know it when I came back he told me he had miscalculated one of my plug sockets and had not only gotten an electric shock when he plugged in my vacuum cleaner but had buggered up the vacuum also! At this point I just shook my head because heck, if I can't leave him alone for 15 minutes....!!! Actually he was okay but realized afterwards that that particular plug socket hadn't been secured yet! So now I've gotten an almost frazzled electrician and a definitely buggered up vacuum cleaner! (I have one on every floor so as not to have to lug the bloody things up and down stairs)! Anyway, he was profusely apologetic but as it was a cheapo I told him to forget it. So then I get on to looking for a replacement and found one at a local French store but he told me to wait a few minutes and check out the same vacuum cleaner on Amazon and lo and behold, the price dropped from €138 to €75 - the result of cookies, apparently! I was told to expect a delivery shortly but at the same time I was expecting a new French cheque book so I was a bit confused when the mail lady delivered a humongous parcel when I was only expecting my cheque book! Anyway, the electrical work is still ongoing but dare I hope that I can see a light at the end of the tunnel and it isn't a train coming the other way!

Then on Tuesday I ran down to drop stuff off at the recycling centre and when I went to drive off my bloody car wouldn't start! Zip, nada, zilch! One of the men working there very kindly came over and said he thought it might be my key fob and since the battery I had in my glove compartment wasn't the right size, he took the battery out of his own key fob to see if that worked. And that was when I realized I'd handed him the key fob that opens the door to the sewing clubroom!!! Oh man, did I ever feel stupid - but he was very patient with me and switched the battery into the car fob - but still it wouldn't work, so I had no choice but to call Thiery at the Ford garage! I'm guessing it wasn't a good time for him as they were flat out, but he came out and tried to work his magic on my car but still couldn't get it going. In the end he gave me their loaner car for me to drive back home to get my spare key but still we couldn't get the car going - even after jumping it! At this point I'm thinking "oh sod it" because my window was down and the car was seemingly going nowhere - well that was until Thiery tried one more thing - tightening up the bolts on the battery and bingo, it bloomin' well started. I could have (and did) kissed him I was so relieved but when I got outside the recycling centre I couldn't find my phone, so dashed back off to Ford to see if I had left it in the loaner car. Except said loaner car had just disappeared, having been lent to another client. Again, bugger it! I ended up being without my phone for 48 hours (until the client came back with the loaner car) and boy did it bring home to me just how dependent I (we?) am on the bloody thing. The biggest worry for me was that without the app on my phone I had no access to my Swiss salary account, and indeed my bank account in the UK, although that was less serious! In France I was still good, but not being able to access my pension in my Swiss account could have been really problematic. Then I realized I couldn't access my security cameras, and of course all my appointments were in my phone calendar - although here I was relieved because I also write everything in my paper calendar too. I mean the list just goes on and on of what could have been lost with that phone, although again, I do keep a separate paper list of all my important passwords! As I said to my neighbour, imagine breaking down somewhere and having no phone to call someone. Then imagine someone lends you a phone but can you remember any of your contacts' phone numbers anyway? The only number I could remember was my friend's landline because it's very similar to my own, but seriously, what a nightmare. I was so, so glad to eventually get it back that I dropped off a good bottle of red wine to the guy at the recycling centre and two for Thiery at Ford!!! And then when I got home, I tried to shut the door to the spare bedroom, and the bloody door handle came off in my hand!!!! Sod's law of course, but at that point I just thought "oh to hell with it, I'll sort that tomorrow"! And I did!

I'm still limping along listening to Traitor King but it's not doing it for me so much as I find Edward to be so self-centred and spoilt - but then to be fair, if you've been fawned over your entire life and told how wonderful you are simply because of the accident of your birth, well I suppose it's understandable really that he should have been such a navel-gazer! I want to finish it though because I'm really interested in what the historical consequences could have been if things had turned out differently! I remember reading one time that the powers that be thought they could have accommodated his marriage to Wallis Simpson despite her being a twice-divorced woman, but they were extremely worried about both their sympathies for Nazi Germany, and that apparently is where they had to put their foot down! Seemingly Edward believed that when Hitler won the war, he would be re-installed as the King, with Wallis by his side as Queen. Thankfully fate had other ideas!

Wallis and Edward meeting Hitler!

Yesterday I looked after Charlie as he doesn't have school on Wednesdays. He was as good as gold so after his nap we went to the park where he met three little girls and chased them around pretending to be a lion!!!! Thing is, I reckon he's having a growth spurt so he's growing taller but getting skinnier and the poor devil had to run around being a scary lion while holding his trousers up as they kept falling off his backside! After that we went for a walk and when I saw a bridge over a little stream I showed him how to play Pooh sticks - where you throw a stick over one side of the bridge and then dash over to the other side to see whose stick comes out first! He loved it - such a silly game but we ended up staying there for about 30 minutes. Mind you, I'm sure a couple of engineers further downstream were probably cussing out "those damn beavers" for blocking the stream again. Never mind - but thank you Winnie the Pooh all the same!

Playing Pooh sticks!

And finally last night Jen called to ask if I was doing anything tomorrow (well we're having our board game evening, that's all). She told me that Julien (her friend that comes to our board game evenings) had been given a birthday gift certificate for a sleigh ride up at Avoriaz tomorrow but his car was playing up and everyone else was either busy or not around to take him up there and what did I think? Now I hate driving on the snow but in the end thought "what the hell", so tomorrow I'm driving him up to Avoriaz for his birthday present and I'll get to wander around for a couple of hours while he's gone. Let's hope the good weather holds. Fingers crossed!

A man of many talents!

Well my electricity saga is ongoing - 16 days and counting to get the top two floors of my house re-wired etc. and then he will start on the ground floor next week. I'm really hoping it will all get done by next Friday, but if not, oh well. We can't be far off now! That being said, I was so happy the weather was good today that I took myself off for a walk through the local woods just to get some fresh air. It's supposed to be nice again tomorrow too so I was trying to decide where I should go - further afield - in order to be able to deal with the cabin fever next week! But then my neighbour sent me a message asking if I wanted to go out walking with her tomorrow so I jumped at the chance. She's the one who has lived here about 20 years but since her husband isn't interested in going out exploring she really has little idea what lovely walks there are out there. Just in case we're going to take our snow shoes with us - you know the ones we were desperate to get hold of during lockdown and which we've never used yet!!! We'll see how it goes tomorrow but I actually don't think we'll need them at this point! On my walk today I noticed yet again the house with what looks like loads of antennae all over the place. Probably five on the roof and a massive satellite dish (maybe five feet in diameter) in the front garden! I've often wondered what's up with all that equipment and assuming he's probably not a very indiscreet spy, I reckon E.T. will definitely be able to phone home from his place if he ever comes back to earth somewhere near here!

The other week after yoga class one of the ladies asked me if I would be interested in taking a trip to the Périgord region (south-western France) with their old fogies group in September. I don't have anything planned, what with all the expense of getting this place put right, but in the end I decided to go for it. I know this lady a little as she was on the trip to Corsica with us so I thought "what the hell" and headed off to St. Pierre on Tuesday to sign up. The lady president of the St. Pierre club asked me if I was interested in playing cards with them (there were about 80 people there playing when I showed up), but as we were chatting two older gentlemen came over to her bitching, apparently, that so-and-so wouldn't switch tables and "you know we're all supposed to move around after every game"! Ehhhh, no thanks, I'll pass. I had signed up a couple of years ago for card club in the village where my sewing club is but gave up in the end because it was around this time that Jordan and Jen needed baby-sitting help with Charlie so I dropped out. At our last annual meeting (where each club's financial statements are handed in) I learned that there was a lot of bickering going on in this card club too so the then lady president had resigned and someone else had taken over! Maybe card games bring out the worst in people, I don't know, but the average age seemed to be around 105 so I suppose if they're bitching at least it means they're still breathing! In any case, we'll see what this trip to the Périgord is like and if it's any good I might go on some of the various day trips with them too if they appeal!

Now that I've finished listening to the Ethel Kennedy book, I've switched over to listening to Cheere Denise reading the Andrew Lowney book, Traitor King, about Edward and Mrs. Simpson. It's obviously very very different to the Kennedy book but it could well prove interesting. What is amazing, however, are the similarities between them and Harry and Meghan - they really do seem to have been Harry and Meghan Mark I! Oh I don't mean in the sense that they both married very domineering American divorcées - that's the least of it - but in the apparent similarities between the two men's personalities and their relationships with their wives! Edward was raised never having to think for himself for even one minute. Every day someone decided what he would wear, what he would say, where he would go and so on, and he seems to have been a totally self-absorbed, selfish, entitled and mean man. After his abdication but before he and Wallis could get married (I'm guessing they were waiting for her divorce to come through) he was invited to stay with Kitty Rothschild and her husband in one of their homes. His days seemed to have been spent navel-gazing or shopping - and then having his bills forwarded to Kitty for them to pay!!!!! What is it with these fabulously wealthy people thinking other people are just dying to pay their way for them? On the day Kitty finally left because she'd had enough of him, he couldn't even be bothered to get out of bed to thank her and say goodbye!!! Good grief! What's even weirder is that Wallis Simpson didn't actually want to marry him. Oh he was good enough to have as one of her dalliances - another notch on the bedpost so to speak - but she apparently found him so incredibly boring and "soppy" she really, really did not want to marry him. The book states that the day after the wedding he smiled at her and said "so what do we do now?" and she later confided to Gore Vidal that it was at that moment she knew she was going to have take over where palace staff had left off and become his new mommy!!! Yikes! It's harder going than the Kennedy book but so far (I'm on chapter six) the parallels between them and H and M are amazing! The author actually chipped in in the comment section of chapter two to say that he very much appreciated the way Cheere Denise was presenting his book, so I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of it!

My friend came over the other day to ask if I wanted some apples as she'd over-ordered on her grocery delivery. She'd wanted four apples and ended up with 4 kg of apples (about 20 apples)! She told me that she hadn't been well as she'd strained a ligament in her left shoulder - she thinks lugging bags of firewood around - and ended up at the ER as she was in such pain. They decided to send her for a scan, but by the time the scan appointment came around the pain had greatly diminished so she cancelled it - only to end up in the same situation the following day but this time in her right shoulder. I told her for god's sake call me if she needs me to drive her somewhere but being stubborn (aren't we all) she'd managed on her own. Then I spotted my favourite neighbour trying to hump a 20 kg gas bottle (about 45 lbs) out of her car and into her kitchen, so I went running round to carry it with her before she did herself an injury too. We don't have mains gas here so use gas bottles if we want a gas hob - but changing those bottles is no joke as they are extremely heavy. Again I understand why people don't like to ask for help but ....! And bugger me but didn't my own gas bottle run out the next day, but at least I only have to lug it into the garage from the car so it's easier for me! I told them we should get a bigger place and have some kind of Golden Girls set up! It might not be such a bad idea, come to think of it!

I mentioned before that I've ordered so many different kinds of lightbulbs off Amazon these past couple of weeks that as he was leaving the other night my electrician picked up one of the duds that I was going to take to the recycling centre and asked me what reference this particular bulb was. I invented a reference off the top of my head and he started laughing. So he tried again, and again I got it wrong, and it ended with him patiently explaining to me that any bulb that started with reference letter E was a screw in bulb and the other numbers referred to the different dimensions. He told me he'd test me on it again next time, so as he was on his way out the door I asked him to name the six official languages of the United Nations without looking them up. So he closes the door and comes back in and of course he couldn't do it! As of right now we're one all!

Then yesterday after he'd spent a good 30 minutes on his hands and knees pulling cable through a very low crawl space I told him to give it a break and offered him a cup of coffee. As we were sitting there he commented on my X-box but I said I couldn't use it because last time I turned it on it needed to update settings and I couldn't figure it out! So he told me it was pretty easy and he would do it for me. After about 10 minutes he'd got it up and running and as I told him the only thing I ever played was the tennis he had me standing in front of the camera so that it could adjust itself, then told me to put my right arm up (I'm going to serve you see) and throw the "ball" up in the air with my left arm. While we're doing this I didn't hear my neighbour come round and she was half way up the stairs listening to us roaring laughing and must have wondered what on earth I was paying my electrician to do all day! It genuinely was just a 10 minute thing while he took a break, but I'm sure she now thinks I have money to burn paying an electrician by the hour to play X-box with me! Oh just think of the gossip!

It's been a hard day's night (and day and night and day and night and ...)!

Once again I've been offline for a while and am now trying to catch up with my blog reading after an exhausting week or so, but more on that later. I see that Sky News UK is officially finished - well not so much finished, but their viewing figures were dropping so badly that I think one thought was to make it now "pay to view" (if you'll forgive the expression)! I wonder which bright spark had that idea, I mean, if you can no longer entice viewers for free because of your biased "reporting" what makes you think people are now going to pay to watch your biased reporting??? Seems they're all going for each other's throats at the moment and while I think it's a shame because at one time they were a good news channel, given what they devolved into, I won't miss them at all!

In other news I see quite a few of the UK's large supermarkets are now going to be doing away with most, if not all, of their self-service cash registers due to the large amount of theft. Again, good news if it helps keep actual humans in work!

I finally finished listening to Cheere Denise' abridged readings of the book, The Other Mrs. Kennedy, and oh my goodness was that book ever a surprise! I was very young at the height of the "Camelot" era and always took Ethel to be the mousey little side-kick to the supposedly very glamorous Jackie (though I never saw it myself) but what a wild ride that book was! I tend to agree with Cheere Denise in that she thought Ethel had some kind of mental illness - and a breakdown would certainly have been understandable after Bobby's death - but she seemed to have been batshit crazy waaaayyyy before that! Her own mother banged out seven (I think) kids and then more or less dumped them on any paid help she could find in order to go off travelling with her newly-wealthy husband and spend his money. It seems to me that Ethel - never having had a better role model - did exactly the same! Oh she was bound and determined that she was going to have more children than Rose Kennedy (hence the 11 kids) but from the way the story is told, she had no particular interest in raising them after they were born. The house was total chaos, the kids were pretty much feral and they had numerous pets (including a pig) that were kept indoors and crapped all over the place. Eventually they had to start advertising for hired help anonymously because if they put the Kennedy name in there nobody would apply. One chef lasted just 12 hours, she punched and slapped the staff and had the most weird "sense of humour" where she would push her guests fully-clothed into the swimming pool or pour a glass of red wine over Andy Williams' head because it was "funny". She even rode her horse into Teddy Kennedy's brand new house, absolutely ruining the floor, and roared laughing at how hysterical it was - Teddy didn't agree! She seemed to have an intense dislike of Bobby Jr. and David in particular and physically chased them out of the house to fend for themselves as teenagers. David eventually died of a drug overdose and in a magazine interview (can't remember which one now) he described their family life as looking all picture perfect from the outside but chaos and bedlam on the inside, keeping his worst vitriol for his mother, Ethel. When she died Bobby Jr.'s "tribute" was far more restrained and not vitriolic, but if one of my kids ever delivered a eulogy like that about me, I think I'd be glad I was dead in order not to have to hear it! Honestly I think if you tried to sell her life to make as a film you would probably get turned down because it would just be seen as too ridiculous. It would appear, however, that some people actually do live lives that are beyond belief!

Aaaannnnd on to the main reason for my absence - welll the electrician has been here for about 12 days so far and thinks he might be able to get it all finished by the end of next week - although I'm not so sure. Every time I hear him say oh bon dieu I realize he's discovered yet another nightmare. The original fire was caused by the previous owner's handiwork in not putting an earthed plug socket in the top bedroom. Then we had an internal balcony knocked out and a false ceiling with spotlights installed. Turns out these light bulbs were on transformers, which were overheating gradually, and nestled into the insulation! That crap could have gone up at any time - we were just lucky it didn't. He was telling me that as an electrician you try to keep all your wiring in any particular room in one central place (apologies to any electricians out there but I can't remember what he called it), but the wiring in my house is all over the place so he's had to have his camera up in the ceiling of every room trying to locate where each block of wiring starts. Then he told me that all of my light bulbs were way too powerful - they were around 40W when they should be LED lights up to a maximum of 5W so Amazon have been having a field day with my credit card as I've been ordering lightbulbs galore for the past week. It should make a significant difference to my electric bill by the time I get them all changed but I now feel like they can probably also see my house from outer space - along with the Great Wall of China!

I was expecting a delivery on Friday and then received a text message from the driver to say that I had missed my delivery spot and to follow this link to either arrange another delivery to my home for €3 or pick up at a drop off point for €2 the next day. So I followed the link on my phone but I can't be doing with all that diddy text so typed the link into my computer - and it didn't seem to exist. And then I took another look at the order number and something made me go back into my Amazon account to check it and lo and behold it had nothing to do with my genuine order. I'm so so glad I didn't get any further on my phone because right that very moment the real Amazon driver rang my doorbell and there was my parcel!!!

This electrician is a really nice young man and usually if I'm cooking something I always offer workmen to eat with me, but with my electric being all over the place I wasn't exactly cooking up a storm so every day I ran into town and picked up sandwiches and pastries for both of us. He told me no-one had ever done that for him before, so I just laughed and told him I should introduce him to my Kosovan tiler as he'd soon put him straight. Then on Friday he showed up a bit late but walked in the door with croissants for both of us for breakfast and sandwiches and pastries for lunch! How nice is that!!!! He is up and down the stairs like a bride's nightie and as a result I have to admit he has the most gorgeous bum! Huh, and I thought all of that was dead in me but apparently not, on occasion!!!! He works extremely hard and while I'll eventually be glad to see the back of him, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend him to anyone that asks!

On Friday Charlie had his first "skiing lesson" (think walking on skis) which he absolutely adored but he sure was knocked out on the way home. I'm delighted because I loved sports as a kid and starting skiing at three is right up my alley!

And finally, I was so glad to have the weekend to myself before the "home improvements" start up again on Monday that I decided to get out to Passy for a walk at the lake. It was glorious as always and I was just sitting in my car having a cup of tea and enjoying the peace and calm, when all of a sudden some eejit with a ghettoblaster came roaring up on his bike like a displaced Rasta. Two older men threw their hands up in the air as he cycled past and then all of a sudden he stopped right in front of me, got off his bike and went striding up to them! I thought oh bloody hell what do I do here - do I film it if there's an altercation or get in the middle of it (like he'd be afraid of me, right), when he ran over to the men, kissed them on both cheeks and shook their hands! Phew thank God for that as I don't think my Bruce Lee impersonation would have impressed anyone!

So it's onwards and upwards again from tomorrow and I hope the electrics get finished by the end of next week. What with the electrician, the decorator, the new plumber (to finish the bathroom that the other guy didn't finish) and the tiler, I'm looking at a pretty steep hit to my bank account. I had the money but I don't think there'll be any long haul travel for me for a while!