Dark weekends in November

The weather has continued to be exceptionally wet and windy for the past three weeks with only the occasional short lived respite when the sun has poked through for a matter of minutes. The rain is heavy; bordering on the torrential and the winds here blow it against the side of the house. Now to make it worse it is getting cold! This time of year has got to be the most depressing, with the days getting shorter and shorter up until Christmas. At least once January arrives, although it is often cold, you get a sense of spring coming as the days get slowly longer. Ian cycles 11 miles to work every day and after a week of battling the wind and rain he was tired and I am still recovering from the inevitable winter cold so we had another quiet weekend.


I am now the proud owner of a very nice camcorder! Ian bought it for me for birthday/Christmas and so I spent a while playing with it. Watch this space for my first attempts at movie making! I am also now working on a new computer made from the left- overs of Ian’s computers and a few new parts! We are now planning our IT system for France and as we both may need computer access for any work we do we decided that we need one each! It is a bit of an extravagance but then these things will be more difficult to justify when we don’t have a regular salary!

News from France is that despite our array of drains the cellar has flooded again. We are not sure why but it seems that the pump had become disconnected. A spare pump and generator seem to be essential. There have been a few sunny days by the land and the builders finally returned to finish moving the downpipes. The next stage (hopefully) will be the rendering although that will require a few dry and mild days. Unfortunately Warren has not reappeared to finish the septic tank!

Talking of my birthday, I made myself a birthday cake as I really can’t expect Ian to make me one! This was a dark chocolate cake with a dark chocolate ganache topping. It took me two goes to get the topping right and even then I wasn’t that pleased with it. Note to self for next time; it needs very good quality chocolate and careful handling and tastes much better if paired with cherries of some sort!