19/07/99 Sun, surf and foie gras ...

Back from our holiday, all rested and tanned, thought I'd see if I couldn't provoke a bit of envy (a mortal sin, if you recall ...)

Well, we made it down to the Gers and back without getting the car pranged this time - in fact I was rather pleasantly surprised, the BMW is a very economical car to drive on the autoroute. Averages about 7l/100km, which isn't too bad for an ancient bomb weighing in at a couple of tons.

Margo managed to put her back out again just before we left, which meant that by the time we got down there she was ready for a week's bed rest, which is about what she got. Didn't do a great deal at all, really: made it down to Biarritz (nice place, shame about all the people on holiday) and then (just) into Spain to pick up some cheap sherry and suchlike, then off to the beach to try and drown the kids and that's about all. I took the kids off to a nearby lake a couple of times - not feeling up to the 2-hour drive to the beach all by myself, Margo being laid up - and all my good intentions of taking them off to see cultural things like the Dartagnan museum went by the board as they confessed themselves to be extremely happy just puddling around in the water. Can't say I was too distressed.

Shame about Biarritz, really - I'm sure it's a nice place, but my memories are of about 50km of Tauranga suburbs in endless procession, linked by a nationale crammed full of Dutch caravans. Our fault for heading down in the holiday season, I suppose.

We did make it off to see the old farmhouse that Jacquy bought and is slowly making habitable: the kids weren't too impressed until they found the shed full of old tiles (the place was at one time owned by a mason) which they collected in an alarming selection of plastic bags and insisted on bringing back home "to do things with". I can see that we'll have ceramic place-mats and potholders coming out of our ears.

It was a nice relaxing week, which we all needed - miles from anywhere, cellphone didn't work, too hot to do anything - apart from pat the cats and type up the course I had to give on getting back - good food ... (I did actually get around to giving my course, by the way. 12000F for a days speaking but I think I earned it - I spoke so long that I managed to put my jaw out. Don't know how Malyon manages it.)

Stopped off at Carcasonne to give the kids another look at the place - Malyon probably remembers a bit of the last time we went there, with Renaud & Sophie, but for Jeremy it was as though it was all new. It is an impressive pile, I must admit. Made it back on Monday evening to find a happy cat waiting for us (a bit pissed off that for a whole week she hadn't been able to sleep indoors) and then back to work on Tuesday. (Rather to my surprise, Jeremy sobbed like anything when we came to leave Patricia & Jacquy's place.

He definitely did not want to leave his G'ma Pat, nor his favourite Jacquy. Took all of 20 minutes before he cheered up enough to start listening to Malyon's stories.)

Wednesday of course was the 14th of July, so we had a couple of people round and ate and drank excessively, as usual, before heading off to Montmelian to watch the fireworks.

The next few weeks (or weekends) are going to be busy: tomorrow I absolutely have to take a couple of car-loads of rubbish down to the tip, price out wood for the decking in the courtyard, and buy (and then put in) the sand and concrete tiles for the barbecue area in the garden. I also have to wander off with the circular saw to give Renaud a hand in the house he's building - I think he can do the actual cutting, I might get a bit carried away.

Speaking of new houses reminds me of Ian & Marie, who've just moved into theirs and who've had a minor plumbing problem: they have two toilets upstairs, and when they were installed the pressure was so finely balanced that when you flushed one of them, the contents turned up in the other. They apparently had a rather confused turd going from side to side of the house for days before they figured it out

Tomorrow evening now, and I'm feeling rather tired. I didn't realise - didn't bother to check - that 40x40 concrete tiles weigh in at about 10kg each, and I've just loaded 35 of the damn things into the back of the 205, along with two 40kg sacks of sand, and then unloaded them little by little here, taking them slowly down in the wheelbarrow. Made for a lot of trips.

Anyway, the little BBQ terrace is now installed - just needs the BBQ installed to finish it off and that's planned for Real Soon Now ie sometime this week, then there's the wooden decking to go down in the courtyard. I still have to price out the wood for that and get it delivered, but once that's done it should go quite quickly. And then we can - finally - put up Jeremy's sandpit, which he got for his last birthday. Almost a year ago.

Reminds me that the other night he was getting worried - "What will happen to me when Mummy dies?" The answer of course is "Mummy's not going to die just yet, don't worry". "But mummy is old!" At which point Malyon stuck heroar in - "Mummy isn't old! She's not even 30 yet!". All lies. Don't know howMargo got her to swallow that one.

Right, I'm off to bed - or at least to watch the end of the bad film ("The Peacemaker", with George Clooney) on TV before turning in. Goidnight, all.

Trevor & Margo.

01/07/99 Usual blurb

Haven't written for a while so I thought I'd get up the collective nose again with some more useless information from the bottom half of the world!

Off on holiday on Monday - a whole glorious week of doing as little as possible. Down to the Gers to see Patricia & Jacquy, with no more worries than a briefcase full of papers I have to organise into a two-day course to be given on the 15th, just after we return. Never mind, it'll be alright on the night - or so I keep telling myself. I'm taking the laptop, but not the modem.

Anyway, we're slowly getting into summer mode: winding down for the long school holidays. Malyon has finished school, Jeremy follows suit tomorrow. And as Margo is working full-time at the shop, that means I get to work at home for a while. Quite pleasant really, I find I manage to get a lot done (don't know how) and there's none of this silly business of getting up at some ungodly hour when the alarm goes off.

Margo is working full-time partly because her partner, Monique, is marrying off her eldest son this coming Saturday (we're invited to the whole lot - registry office, church, drinkies, dinner & piss-up, dancing to traditional obscene French folk tunes) and has consequently been busy for the last two weeks or so making petit-fours and patés. There will probably be enough to feed a NZ family of four for about three years, which means that there'll be no leftovers.


The kids are now officially on holiday, freed from all care and worry apart from who's going to look after them when Mummy and Daddy are away working. When they were smaller we could just lock them in a cellar and they'd stay quietly there until one or the other of us came home, but it doesn't seem to work anymore. Shame, really.

Malyon bid a tearful farewell to her school and came away with the address so that she can post a few letters there when she's in NZ. She also came away with something I hadn't been expecting: every year, the kids in CM2 (ten-year olds - is that form 2?) who are heading off to lycée get a book each from Mme Carceles, their teacher. Malyon walked off with a $60 boxed set of stories of life in old China. Mme Carceles approves of us, although she has said that we'll have to make an effort and try to get Malyon to lighten up a bit.

I think I've mentioned before that my friend and estimable colleague Renaud is in the throes of having a house built - in theory they move in at the end of the month. Spent all last Sunday round at the site, helping lay the pipes for the underfloor heating. You learn a lot about house-building doing these little things, but what I haven't learnt is why exactly people actually want to do it! As far as I can see Renaud might as well get the phone surgically grafted to his ear - it'd save time - and it seems to be extra stress that anyone could do without. Still, when they sort out the problems of exactly where the sewage line is going to go (through the neighbour's garden is where the builder wants to put it, but the neighbour is - understandably - reticent) and how they're going to get a bit of flat land out of their 45° slope, it should be really good.

Just to make you all envious, it's been stinking hot all day and we had dinner out on the terrace, as usual. Supposed to carry on like that for some time, I gather. The swallows are flitting about in the evening - as are the bats - and the apple tree down in the garden is groaning under a bumper crop of worm-ridden apples (you expected plums, perhaps?) And the grass needs mowing - again.

Anyway, I'd better get back to looking up interesting articles concerning the Windows 95 registry on the Redmond CDs - you'll hear from us again when we get back, tanned and fit, from our too-brief holiday.

Love

Trevor & Margo

06/06/99 Sumer icumen an'all

Back for another brief blurb whilst Margo slumbers fitfully in front of NYPD Blues ...

Nearly lost Jeremy last weekend: we went off and up to Montlambert, not too far from here (about 4km back down the road towards Montmelian, and 600m higher up) where the paragliders take off from, for an evening BBQ. There's a sort of little plateau which turns into an 80° slope which falls 200m or so into the forest below, and the kids were playing there with Pierre's motorbike helmet (do not bother asking why) when suddenly Jeremy came scrambling back up to us bawling his head off - they'd been playing at the top of the slope and he'd been given the helmet to bring back up to us and as it was about as heavy as he is he'd dropped it and it had gone all the way down! Lucky he didn't follow it, I suppose.

Apart from that little incident it was a really nice evening, although a bit chilly: 600m makes quite a difference in temperature, and I wasn't really dressed for it.

The 205 is still at the garage waiting for an assessor to drop by and say whether it's worth repairing or not: if I don't hear back this week I'm going to get seriously pissed off. I no longer know how it works in NZ, but in France insurance companies don't have their own assessors: there are little firms of the beasts around the place to which the work is sub-contracted. It's supposed to foster independence and make sure that the assessment is impartial, but in practice I'm not sure that it works like that ... never mind. When I started to get impatient around the middle of last week, having rung the garage every evening to discover that yes, the assessor had dropped by, but no, he hadn't looked at my car, I finally managed to get in touch with the insurance company only to discover that they'd cocked up and assigned the job to a firm that doesn't go anywhere near the garage concerned: I suppose they'd probably have worked out that they'd made a mistake in a month or so, but I don't really want to wait that long.

Especially as just at the moment the 205 would be bloody useful: there's rubbish to take to the tip, concrete and sand to bring here ... and in a short while Renaud is going to need it to start shifting into his new house (the boot of the Clio - the other work car - is fine for people who travel light, like with a couple of average handbags, but not for much else).

Margo's shop is still closed, probably until the end of next week. They have to get rid of all the rubble on the roof and shore up the wall of the apartment that exploded to make sure that the rest of the place doesn't fall down. It's all quite worrying from a busines point of view, as every day they're closed is a day they don't take any money.

Anyway, sumer is icumen, but it's not here yet: we'd planned a lovely BBQ with Renaud & Sophie yesterday, but as it turned out had to eat inside, it'd started to get almost chilly. Then the rain set in, and kept going till midday. Boo hiss! Same sort of weather predicted for the rest of the week, which is no fun at all. The wood strawberries are out on the banks of the stream though, which is nice for all of us. The kids go down and get what they can, then I go down and eat the rest.

And the grass is still growing, although it's slowly getting a bit tamer - or has learnt to keep its head down when I bring the mower down. It's not an English lawn, and probably never will be - more what the French call "gazon rustique" (read "rugby field") - but at least it's well-trimmed enough to make it a pleasure to go down and loll. Most of those who saw it when we bought the place are now suitably impressed, not to say amazed.

Looks as though we're in for a bumper crop of apples and plums this autumn too: the apple tree is literally bowed down under the weight (luckily Wednesday's storm blew a lot of the smaller fruit off, saving us the bother of picking it off by hand) and the three plum trees are well loaded too. This is good: we're in sore need of plum sauce.

Both kids are well: Malyon is eagerly counting the days until her birthday, which she may well celebrate in a 747. Jeremy is definitely getting up her nose, and while she's away we'll definitely have to organise things so that she has a room of her own. Got another 18 months, filed and forgotten. Jeremy is still Jeremy, with that bizarre anatomical adaptation (from the Vickridge side, no doubt) whereby both ears are directly connected by some sort of tube going through the brain without being hooked up to it, meaning that what goes in one ear really does come straight out the other.

Yesterday was St Igor's day, so all those of you who know an Igor and forgot to wish him a Happy Saint's Day may go off and hang their heads in shame.

Love
Trevor & Margo

28/05/99 Boom!

An exciting day today, Margo's shop exploded!

Well, not quite that bad. All started off quite reasonably, in fact - I rang a client I've been neglecting for over a month now (pressure of work, all that) and managed to put off delivery of his useless system for yet another month, which I suppose means that I'll have to start working on it pretty soon - fobbed him off with the usual story of how I've been off work for two weeks and anyway the hardware won't be here for another two weeks anyway. So far so good.

On top of it the Swiss business looks as though it's finally finishing - things are becoming clear. It's all time billed out, so money-wise it's no problem, but it's still an enormous pain in the fundament.

Margo's shop, on the other hand, has a little three-story building next to it which is all in apartments, and around midday today the top-floor apartment exploded - apparently a leak from a gas bottle. About 70 m² of wall (not talking Kiwi wall here, talking good Frog stone & concrete wall about 80cm thick) fell on the shop roof and in the courtyard behind the shop. Result is that everyone's been evacuated, the street is closed to traffic, and the shop's been shut until further notice. At least no-one was hurt.

Now we just have to wait and see what happens: whose insurance will have to pay for loss of earnings etc, whether or not they have to pay rent for the period that the place is unusable, whether or not they bother opening up again (if it's closed for too long there's no point, they'll have lost too much money), whether or not the municipality will offer them temporary space in one of the boutiques they own in the street ....

I got down there about 16:00 to find Margo calmly discussing matters with cops, various elected officials and the other commercants of the street - mainly along the lines of "who's gonna pay?". Fair enough too. I must admit that if they continue to push the municipality probably will do something to help: they hate seeing small shops go under, especially in electorally sensitive areas.

Other than that life's fine. The weather's been lovely all week, temperatures up in the 30s (now that's what I call a temperature) and the rain's eased off so the grass isn't growing quite as quickly - plus repeated mowings seem to have frightened the grass a bit and it's rather more amenable. Just waiting till I get the 205 back from the garage now so that I can go and get some sand and some cement and concrete slabs and a big outdoor BBQ and I can get all that finished ...

Love
Trevor & Margo

25/05/99 Over-ripe Brie

Back for some more punishment?

A really great week all around: tonsillitis again, grotty weather ALL WEEK and I pranged the 205 on Saturday. All in all, I've known better.At least the weather's picking up: we managed to erect the big garden tent down in the field this evening and we're planning on a BBQ tomorrow: it's Pentecost, innit, which is a public holiday in this rigourously secular but none-the-less Catholic state. And it should stay nice and fine and warm (like about 28-32° - these are what I call real temperatures) for at least the rest of the week.

Unlike the tonsillitis and the weather, the accident was in fact my fault: rear-ended some-one who'd slammed his brakes on to avoid rear-ending the bloke ahead of him, who'd decided at the last minute to turn left. Still, no great harm done, apart from the Peugeot which now needs a new radiator and a bit of bodywork, but it pisses me off and I could do without the extra hassle just at the moment. Never mind.

The thermals around the Bauges (that's the massif just behind us) must have been fantastic today: counted at least 60 parapente (those rectulangular parachute thingies - paragliders, that's the word!) up in the air, flying in formation along the massif and up and around the peak of the Arclusaz. One of them went a bit too low, and landed in the paddock behind ours - must have made his getaway across the fields, as we saw no more of him.

Oh, we saw our resident snake again. I'd just finished mowing and left the kids down playing whilst I contemplated a beer and a well-deserved (and much-needed) shower when Malyon came running up with Jeremy in tow to say that she'd just jumped over a snake in the grass. We all headed back down to check and sure enough, there it was, slithering quickly out of the way. Tess bravely waited until it had disappeared before going off to make threatening noises around where it was last seen. At least we know that it is a couleuvre, ie quite innocuous. Still give you a nasty bite, though.

Tuesday now, and I'm totally knackered. Spent two hours waiting at the insurance agency to hand in my statement, up to the office to abuse a few people by phone, then back here to look after the kids for the afternoon. No urge at all to work - doubtless the aftereffects of the barbecue, which turned out a great success. It was beautifully fine and hot so we ate, drank enormous quantities and generally idled until the end of the afternoon, when Rémi (being Steve's son) made me play badminton with him. Fine, only I haven't played for about 20 years, and my legs are regretting it.

Anyway, I'm off to bed - got another busy day tomorrow, and I need my beauty sleep.

Love
Trevor & Margo

16/05/99 Corsica Rules!

Another shitty week over and done with, and here I am to complain about it again.

Spent last Sunday out mowing the paddock and starting to level out the little bit where the BBQ is going to go - really hot weather, of course I stripped down to the painting shorts Malyon won't let me wear when there's company - and on Monday I woke up to raging tonsillitis and a fever. Off to the quack for some more industrial-grade antibiotics and then back to bed, that's Monday and Tuesday wiped out.

Back to Switzerland on Wednesday: in theory the gear goes off to Gravelines on Monday to be tested on site, but I can't see that happening. Spent all day discovering all sorts of lovely electrical problems with one sort of system that the gear is supposed to check out: I sort of sat around and looked elegant, or tried to anyway, and did little else.

Spent Thursday working around that and other difficulties, and on Friday I was planning to replace the microcontroller with an Intel 80151, which goes 6 times faster and would allow me to keep to the spec. and generate pulses at about 50KHz. Arrive, check out my code one last time (the Intel component can only be programmed once, and at 350F a go you don't want to make too many mistakes) and find that there's no way I can program it: the programmer just doesn't want to know! Arghh!

Spent a lot of this morning looking for answers, and found that when Intel says in their documentation that the 80151 is programmed just like an 87C52, they mean that it isn't. Yes it is, in the sense that the algorithm is the same, but it's not, in the sense that all the pins are different and you need a new adapter for your programmer. There are times when I would like to be able to go - unsearched - into the building where they hide the people (loosely speaking) responsible for Intel documentation, and satisfy a few of my more revolting fantasies. The developer community would, I'm sure, thank me for it.

Margo's garden gnomes have been installed around the paddock (a malevolent friend gave her three of the things) and show no signs of wanting to move, so perhaps they've become acclimatised. On the other hand we haven't seen the snake recently: it may have gone back into hiding. Or perhaps the gnomes were hungry.

The weather's been pretty grot too - started out lovely and fine -for the two days I was lying in bed - and since then has been raining steadily. Lovely thunderstorm lasting all Wednesay night, and it hasn't really let up since. I don't dare go down to the paddock to see how much it's grown.

Tomorrow now, or was when I started this, and we've had a lovely idle day. Turned out fine for once, and we got invited round to Joc & Hervé's (she's the American lawyer, he's the French entrepeneur) for a BBQ lunch. Good French affair, lasted about 4 hours, then we came home and I mowed the lawn - again. Then watched the very last of AbFab on CanalJ - depressing to see it go. Don't know what they'll fill the slot with next weekend.

Down in the field the acacia tress are in blossom - looks a lot like kowhai, only a sort of discreet greeny-white instead of vivid yellow, and smells like a tart's bedroom. Pretty, though. The apple tree and the plum trees have heaps of small green soon-to-be fruit hanging off them, and the best of all is that the wood strawberries are out in force, so that shortly I shall be found lying on the grass with my head over the bank stuffing my face with the little darlings.

Malyon's getting taller and leggier - eats like a horse and you can still count her ribs. Still doing very well at school too, although she has a tendency to make stupid mistakes through not bothering to think what she's doing. And she looks after her aged mother very well - Margo just has to bellow "coffee!" on a Sunday morning and Malyon's downstairs loading up a mug and toasting muffins for breakfast in bed. (Unfortunately I don't get that sort of treatment - I'm usually ambulant and semi-sentient about an hour before. The time to go up to the boulangerie, get a fresh baguette and then finish half of it off with marmelade and a gallon of coffee whilst slowly going over Saturday's paper, that I didn't get time to read on Saturday. Life is full of these small pleasures.)

Jeremy too is growing and, like Tigger, the bigger he gets, the bouncier. He does seem to be having problems with short-term memory (this is perhaps a boy thing, I don't know): we tell him not to do something under any circumstances, and about five minutes later he's guaranteed to have done that very thing. "Gowling him", as he puts it (as in "I used Daddy's cooking knives pour try to couper les rocks, and Daddy gowled me", has a limited effect - he stands sulking for a few minutes but can't keep it up, and carries on. I suppose he wouldn't be our Jeremy if he didn't. Heart of gold, head of ... well, never mind.


Anyway, it's time for me to go to bed - no trip to Lausanne tomorrow, thank God - the stream is babbling as usual but the birds at least are quiet, so now we have just the crickets with their infernal bloody din. You get used to it. Eventually.

Love
Trevor & Margo.

09/05/99 Frogs Legs and Other Delicacies

Back for my weekly moan, I'm afraid.

Well, the big news over here is the arrest of the préfet Bonnet of Corsica for having ordered the fire-bombing of an illegally-built restaurant on a Corsican beach-front. It was so ineptly done that the three gendarmes involved in the affair were easily identifiable: they were the ones with 2nd-degree burns on the face and singed moustaches. Shades of Rainbow Warrior - you'd think they'd have learnt by now!

Exactly why the préfet (whose status, incidentally, is rather akin to that of an American governor, in that he can call in the army or rule by decree if he so wishes, but who is appointed by Paris rather than being democratically elected) would wish to have a third-rate restaurant which was due to be torn down at the end of summer bombed remains a mystery for the
moment. This being France, conspiracy theories abound, and the loyal opposition has of course demanded the resignation en masse of the government. Unlikely.

Kosovo is also in the news, naturally enough - after all, it's a small, if undeclared, war being fought more or less in Europe's back yard. Once again, the conspiracy theorists are busy - why is America doing much of the work whilst letting the NATO allies take most of the credit (or blame)? Whatever the answer to that, the news is full of civilian casualties and aghast responses: don't seem to realise that if you're going to have a war you might as well do it properly and kill people.

Anyway, Spring's in and the grass is growing as if there were no tomorrow, which means regular mowing (twice a week if possible). I'd planned on getting it done today, but the weather had other ideas and it's been raining steadily all day, so it's been pushed off until tomorrow. I hope.

In fact, with the warm (28° promised for tomorrow) and humid weather we've been having, the place is almost impossibly green: all the high mountain slopes that are forbidding grey rock in winter have suddenly turned into pasture, the trees are in leaf and the massif behind us is covered in great clots of different shades of green. Looks a bit like the top of a swamp, really.

9/5/99

And as it turns out, today was hot and sunny. Yesterday having been totally grot, I "profited" from the fine weather to take the mower down and frighten the grass, then carry on shifting soil to level off the little bit where, in the not too distant future, we'll install the barbecue. Another couple of weekends should do it, I reckon, then it's down with the sand, on with the concrete slabs, and up with the BBQ. Then all we need are a couple more adult trees planted around the place to give a decent bit of shade.

After that, there's the courtyard to get done. The first plans were for just paving it over, but I'm leaning more and more towards sticking decking down: looks nicer, and it's a lot less work, all things considered. But it's so hard to think about working when it's warm, and the sun's shining brightly at 8:30. Especially after a hard day's mowing, with the attendant beer consumption.

Had a ring from our painful Swiss client, who swears blue that he's finally cabled up all the necessary gear so that we can start testing another type of equipment. This does not please me, as it means I'll be back to doing 5hrs/day driving again all week, and we still don't know whether or not the thing will actually work when it goes out on field trials in a week's time. The buggers will pay for this!

Anyway, I'm up early again tomorrow morning, so I'll sign off here. Love to you all

Trevor & Margo