A lovely weekend!

The weather has been very changeable here this past week, but then that's only to be expected in March, I suppose. I'd planned to get so much done before I went away last weekend but the weather obviously had other plans. I did get to pressure spray my back terrace last Monday before the rain set in again, but I managed to get some kind of junk in my eye while doing it so I've had to make an appointment with my eye doctor to get that sorted. It doesn't hurt at all but I reckon a speck of dirt must have gotten in my eye and now it feels like I'm looking through a film with a black dot in the middle. I've tried rinsing it regularly but I reckon I'll have to leave it to the professionals now!

So the weather was good enough for me to at least get that done on Monday but when I kept Charlie on Wednesday all that changed and by the time I left Wednesday evening I was driving through a horrendous snow storm (with a naff eye) and it was really tough! It didn't last long, but long enough to make the drive home hard work and for me to realize yet again how much I hate driving in the snow! And now - well the weather has cleared up enough for me to be working outside getting my garden ready and dragging furniture up from the basement in time for the good weather to come. LIDL were advertising small fibreglass "greenhouses" for €20 so I ordered a few of them online and had them delivered last week. The first one took me four hours to assemble (I know, I know) but to be honest the biggest problem was that unlike IKEA, many of the drill holes don't line up. Still, by the time I'd gotten to number two I'd gotten assembly down to one hour and am hoping I can get the others done in about 30 minutes - a kind of assembly line production, if you will. The big problem, of course, is that they then need filling with soil but I decided to start the first two off with used cardboard followed by garden clippings/compost and then adding the soil because (a) it can get expensive and, more importantly, because (b) lugging bags of soil around at my age is "challenging" to say the least. But I hit pay dirt a couple of days ago when I realized that the new recycling bin in the village is absolutely stuffed full of used cardboard boxes!

I've mentioned before that we haven't had garbage pick-up in the local villages for about 20 years now. They have recycling spots everywhere where you sort your rubbish into household refuse, paper, cardboard and aluminium, and glass. Anything other than that has to be taken to the big recycling centre in town. But about two weeks ago I noticed another container had been added for larger cardboard boxes, you know, the kind you get with large Amazon packages or like the boxes my two new garden tables came in! So there I am fishing out as many large boxes as I can and stuffing them back into my car in order to line the base of my new mini greenhouses. Bingo, less soil for me to lug around (but I do hope they don't have security cameras to see me "stealing" their recycling. I'm pretty sure I'm good though)!

Anyhoo, Friday lunchtime we set off for the Jura mountains for our Christmas present from Jen's mom and partner and in order to celebrate Charlie's fifth birthday. The Jura mountains are shared between France and Switzerland and are to the north of Lake Geneva, whereas the Alps (where I live) are to the south. They're very different too, in that I would call the Jura "brooding" and the Alps "majestic" - that's about the best way I can describe them to be honest. It took us about two hours to get there and the short-term rental turned out to be lovely, so nice in fact that Jen's mom really fell in love with it. It was a 4-bed, 2 1/2 bath prefabricated home on the site of an old barn. Jen's mom moved into an apartment about 4-5 years ago but is not happy there so she's been looking for an all-on-one level home and this place seemed to be exactly what she is looking for. Oddly enough, I saw an article on post-war prefabs in England not so long ago and asked my sister if my memory was correct in that Uncle Bob had lived in one in the early '60s. She confirmed that he had, and that he had loved it. Birmingham was very heavily bombed during WWII so I guess people were just happy to have anywhere to call home at that point!

Post WWII prefab!

This house was of course nothing like the picture above and was indeed so lovely that not only Jen's mom, but also Jordan and Jen said they would be very interested in looking further into prefabs in our area!

The view from our rental. To say it was
"isolated" would be an understatement!

The whole point of being up there was to visit a local polar park, which we promptly did on Saturday morning and were lucky enough to be one of the first groups on the guided tour. Our guide explained to us about the different types of deer/reindeer they had in the park and then went on to tell us the history of the bison that had been bred in captivity throughout Europe. Apparently at one time there were only 50 bison in the whole of Europe but by working with other parks they had managed to get that number up to 10,000 - which was still not enough but, as he said, was a very definite improvement over 50! The little kids were starting to get bored at one point though as what they really wanted to do was play in the snow so Charlie asked him "when we were going to get to see the mamoths" and was most put out when the guide told him never!

The deer will often come over to the visitors
as they are quite tame, but it wasn't our lucky day!

The wolf enclosure!

By the time we were able to get closer to the bison and to pet the deer and goats it had started to snow and since we were already up to our ankles in snow we decided to call it a day!

Saturday was also Charlie's fifth birthday so we staggered presents out over the day and he was one very happy little boy. I'd bought him a magic set and we (or more likely "I") had great fun figuring the different tricks out. The first one was pulling a rabbit out of a hat but I had a helluva time with my sausage fingers fumbling around inside the hat to pull the rabbit out of a hidden pocket, while Elynn found it straight away. After a short while Charlie was producing a flower out of a magic wand and miraculously producing a silk hankerchief from his "empty" hand. It was great fun, so much so that Jen's mom asked if I'd actually bought it for Charlie or for myself (the jury's still out on that one)!

There were a couple of tricks that neither André nor I could figure out for love nor money, but when we handed them over to Jordan he managed to figure them out in a couple of minutes flat. I was telling one of the ladies at sewing club about my theory of "right brain/left brain" and how Jordan could figure out things that had stumped both André and me, and she said they have exactly the same thing in her family. Three of her family are dyslexic (as is Jordan) and they are all extremely creative/artistic but not at all practical. I'm extremely practical but, much to my regret, not in the slightest bit creative or artistic. I have no idea if my/our theory holds water but I'm more and more convinced that the right brain/left brain thing really is "a thing"!

A picture of the church opposite sewing club
as a storm was about to roll in - just
because I love it!