Birthday lunch!

The week after I got back from Spain we (14 of us I think) had arranged to go up to the Plâteau de Glières for lunch to celebrate my, Jen's mom, Jen and Millan's (André's gf's son) birthdays which were all in the space of 10 days. I had thought we were going up to a different place, which I was quite looking forward to as I'd never been there, but somewhere along the line it got changed to Chez Constance up at Glières. I didn't really mind as I like it up there, but it's nice to discover somewhere new too. I'm pretty sure we'd taken André up to Glières as a kid but since he couldn't remember he started reading up on it beforehand and then regaled us with tidbits from his reading. I've written about it before but basically it was a famous battle between the French resistance and occupying German forces. The British dropped supplies and munitions onto the plateau to help the resistance, but despite their bravery they were beaten by the far superior German numbers. You can read more about it here if you'd like. André's tidbits included the fact that the Germans were trying to ship young men off to munitions factories in Germany (hence they took to the mountains), that they confiscated cars (so they rode bikes) and took their shoes (they took to wearing wooden clogs, called sabots in French). (On a totally different tangent, the word sabotage comes from sabots, and of course means deliberately doing a poor job to sabotage industrial production etc. In fact I remember our teacher telling us that during the industrial revolution in England workers would deliberately throw their sabots into the machinery to try to prevent it from taking their jobs - sadly it didn't work)!

The parachute drop zone!

The memorial to the resistance fighters!

Anyhoo, back to the plot. The restaurants located on the plateau must have made a killing that day because there was also a race taking place at the same time. At first I thought it was a bike race, but it turned out it was a hill (mountain???) race and as it was a lovely day, there were loads of people out supporting the runners!

When I was in Spain I bought my boys joke "beer mugs" as I like anything joke-related (and probably tacky) and gave them to them while we were having lunch. At one point I could see a table near us giving us weird looks and then I realized what they were looking at!

Elynn had been pouring her water into the mug and the people at the next table were horrified watching her "drink beer". I burst out laughing and turned it upside down to show that no, we weren't letting her drink alcohol - and thankfully we all had a good laugh about it afterwards!

I kept Charlie overnight again on Wednesday and as it was raining I took him to the library in town where we read a couple of books before heading to a cafe for a hot chocolate. He's as good as gold but (a) he never shuts up and (b) it's that much harder when the weather is bad. The following day I had a few errands to run and then took him out to lunch before heading to the lake at Passy. And the highlight of his stay??? Well that was when he realized the cows were in the field behind my garden!! I think it had probably been a couple of years after the farmer died since the new owner had put the cowbells on his cows, but Charlie was so excited every time they wandered down to "our" field that he had to put his shoes back on and run out to watch them!!!

He knows where the dressing up
box is - you should see what
I've got him for Christmas!

A couple of times now on my way over to their place I've spotted a grandma (who I'd guess to be around 75) pushing a double stroller with two littles walking either side of her. I'd guess the oldest is about five, number two about three, and what looks like twins of around 18 months, and to say she looks thoroughly miserable would be an understatement. I would absolutely hate to be in that situation, but then I guess we don't know the back story either, do we!

I got a pleasant surprise the other day when my electric company notified me that they would be reimbursing me €234 and that my automatic debit would be lowered by €20 a month, so I guess my electrician (with the nice bum) was right when he had me change all my lightbulbs to lower wattage. Add to that a first time reimbursement of around €300 thanks to my solar panels and I was pretty pleased (for once) with my bills. I'm also delighted that through no real planning on my part (the make of car I wanted only came hybrid petrol/LPG) I'm now running my car on LPG, which is just over €1 per litre, as opposed to €2.40 for diesel! I guess with the price of gas shooting up it was sheer good luck that I changed my car when I did!

I've just finished watching the first series of The Gentlemen, which I happened to stumble across quite by accident and have to say I really enjoyed it. At the same time I started listening to Cheere Denise reading Charles Spencer's book Swan Song (Charles being Princess Diana's brother). I've always thought him to be a pompous prick and after two chapters of this book it just confirmed my opinion of him so I gave up. At this point Cheere had started reviewing Collin Gosselin's book In The Shadow of Eight (Collin being one of the Gosselin sextuplets from the series Jon and Kate Plus Eight) and it was both horrific and absolutely riveting - that is until today when she let everyone know that the book's publishers had contacted Youtube and she had to take all of the episodes down. It's a shame as I always enjoy her readings, but she encouraged everyone to support Collin by buying his book and I've just downloaded it on Audible, so at least I'll get to finish it!

I have to go into Geneva tomorrow for a routine medical check-up but as it's always hell to try to get parking at this clinic I reckon I'll park at the border and walk. It should take me around 45 minutes each way, so at least I'll get a few steps in tomorrow - I'm just praying it won't rain!

And finally, I was wondering what to do with the few remaining green tomatoes from my garden when I stumbled across a short clip on Youtube. Knowing that there's no way I would be making pickles from them, I was interested to see how "grandma" used to simply cut up left over tomatoes and bury them about an inch deep before the winter frosts set in. Cover that layer with crushed eggshells (which I always keep) and a thin layer of soil and (hopefully) some of the tomatoes will self-seed for next year. What really tickled me though was someone in the comments section from Germany said he'd like to try doing the same to his mother-in-law but he was worried she'd grow back! Dark humour I know, but it made me laugh anyway!