24/11/99 Humble Pie & Other Subjects

Well, the big news over here was that the French team lost against the Australians. On the other hand, they weren't actually expecting to win against the All Blacks, so it wasn't too much of a let-down (and rugby is definitely a minority sport here anyway, played only by garlic-munching thugs from the South) and they didn't feel obliged to lynch the coach and cut the players into small bits with blunt rusty axes, which is, as far as I've been able to gather, more or less what happened in NZ. And Massey University set up a grief counselling crisis cell for depressed students during their finals? Get a life!

Winter's come in about a week earlier than usual - at least by our rather primitive measure, which is whether or not it snows down where we are. Started yesterday and kept up quite heavily today, so there's about 15cm of snow down in the garden, the trees occasionally go "Whoosh! Slither!" as a branch gets tired of holding up so much snow, and right now it's stopped and there's a glacial wind fresh from Siberia which means that the slush on the road will be nicely frozen for tomorrow morning. As if I didn't have enough problems getting home tonight. (As, let it be said, did Margo - the BMW is a right pig on snow. Needs a couple of 40kg sacks of cement in the boot.)

Great whoopee next week as the radiators finally arrive on Monday: on Tuesday the plumbers actually put them in and finish off the last little bits of the installation. With any luck the central heating will be functional in December. It'd better be.

It's now Monday next week - when the radiators were supposed to arrive - and as you can of course guess they haven't. Friday, they're now promising. The snow is deep (about 35 cm) and crisp and even, and looks like hanging around a while as it's definitely not the sort of weather you'd want your pet brass monkey to go out in ie bloody cold. Tonight there are no clouds in the sky, a full moon and it must be about -10 out there. More snow forecast for tomorrow.

Of course there's the usual chaos on the roads, mostly caused by the freight lorries which try to go through mountain passes before the snowploughs have had a chance to clean them up a bit, then of course they jack-knife on the snow and then the snowploughs CAN'T get through - then we have the edifying spectacle on the evening news of truck drivers moaning about how they can't get through to Italy or wherever because people haven't been doing their jobs and keeping the roads clear. Having been overtaken by at least 40 lorries doing 110 on Thursday night, when I was lumbering along at 80 due to the snow, I can't say I have much sympathy for them.

A handy tip, incidentally, for winter driving in the continent - do NOT take the autoroute when it's snowing. It is usually clearer than the nationales, but IF there's an accident and you get stuck there's no way you can get out - just have to wait until it's cleared up. And that could take some time - they're still working on the A7 from Chambery to Marseilles, which was blocked by snow last night.

Succumbed to temptation and bought a Palm V (two, in fact, one for Renaud, one for me) today. About two weeks back Renaud said he WANTED ONE as a NEW toy, so I thought I'd better check the things out. I must admit that I thought it'd probably turn out to be some sort of executive fiddle beads, but I borrowed an old one from Jean-Gilles and after a week I was hooked. The address book is handy - it's all in the mobile anyway, but when someone rings me and asks for so-and-so's phone number I can't give it to them 'cos I'm already using the phone. So it's nice to have the numbers somewhere else. What'd be good would be able to synchronise the two lists, what's in the mobile and what's in the Palm.

The calculator doesn't have a hexadecimal function so it's of no earthly use whatever, and I haven't yet figured out how to make the e-mail work, although when I finally get the proxy server at the office working correctly that will doubtless be no problem.

But what really makes it useful is the notepad. Once you get the hang of writing on the little beast it really is simple, and it saves me an enormous amount of time bringing out the big notebook, flicking through it to find an empty page, writing my notes ... and then, back at the office, trying to find all the notes in my big notebook concerning some particular contract. If only for that, it's worth the money.

Now I just have to overcome my aversion to spending money long enough to buy two portables with 17" screens, sufficiently equipped for Windows NT, decent-sized keyboards and built-in ISDN modems, and I'll really be able to work anywhere. At the moment I'm still lugging the office machine back and forwards between office and home, as there's no way I'm going to pollute the home machine (which is working nicely, thank you, and will probably do so as long as I don't install any more Microsoft crud on it) with SQL Server and as at any rate it's only a poor 133MHz Pentium I it'd take me at least an hour to execute a query.

Anyway, we're all well, if a bit on the chilly side. Tess rufuses to go outside unless she absolutely has to (ie is kicked out) and I can't say that I blame her. Margo is much the same. Jeremy doens't seem to worry too much about the temperature so long as he can play with Lego - or watch the cartoon series of Godzilla. Great way, incidentally, to get him showered and clean - "You can't watch Godzilla until you've had a shower. Godzilla is on in 5 minutes." 4 minutes, 30 seconds later, he's clean, damp and sweet-smelling and sitting in front of the TV.

As for Malyon, it seems that she's settled in very well - got her yellow belt in judo so I expect that when she gets back here corporal punishment will no longer be an option - I've no wish to find myself lying on my back with her elbow in my throat. It's bad enough sitting in the armchair with Jeremy bouncing on my lap.

17/10/99 Return of the Redeye

Monday, 11/10:

Well, we picked up Margo safe and sound from Geneva on Saturday night, as according to plan. Luckily her flight arrived about 10 minutes early and as we arrived bang on time we only had to wait 5 minutes or so for her to finish picking up her luggage and then we were out of the dump. Jeremy was extremely pleased.

Today things didn't go quite so swimmingly. I had to head back up to Vevey to try and iron out the last wrinkles in the test gear for our (excessively rude word) Swiss client and someone had neglected to inform me that today was the opening of the big Telecom 99 expo at Palexpo, just opposite the Geneva airport. I spent an hour inching forward in the tunnel (it's almost 2km long, so the calculation of my average speed is fairly simple) and then another 20 minutes or so getting past the Palexpo/airport exit ramp. Instead of getting to Vevey at 10am, it was almost midday by the time I got there.

Never mind, when I left this evening (just in time for the traditional traffic jam at the Bardonnex customs post, that's only 10 minutes) things were working at about 95%, it proved to be their fault (I can say "I told you so") and on top of it on arriving home I found our lovely central heating burner sitting up in the attic, all plugged into the hot water cylinder and just waiting to be hooked up to radiators! There are minor details to attend to, of course - getting the fuel lines hooked up from the tank to the burner, getting a filling inlet for the tank set in somewhere, getting a power point put in the cellar and in the attic, getting the documentation for the burner in a language other than German ... but I start to feel that things are moving, in more or less the right direction. Too slowly, but we'll have to live with that.

Still working on my big SQL Server application with its Visual Basic front-end, and getting more and more frustrated. The application itself does more or les what I want it to, apart from a few minor bugs and not-yet-implemented features, but it's come time to add the reporting side of things. Microsoft thoughtfully provide a handy DataReport control with Visual Studio, which you can hook up to a database table and use to generate simple reports. Provided you want to do what its designers thought you might want to do, in the way in which they thought you might want to do it, it works - sort of.

Unfortunately, its designers were people (I suppose) of limited imagination, so they didn't think of many things you might want to do, and even what you are allowed to do doesn't work 90% of the time. It is very, very, annoying. I realise that all their competent people are working overtime trying to get Windows 2000 out with only 16,504.2 known bugs before they have to change the name to something like Windows 2010, but why oh WHY do they have to hire cretins fresh from university to write controls that get distributed everywhere and which would be incredibly useful if they actually worked as advertised?

So long as I take my tranquilisers and no-one gets me onto the subject of compiler service packs which require you to reboot your machine three times (a record for something which is not, à priori, an operating-system component) and which break all your existing applications (a big hand here to the Microsoft QA teams -who now utnumber the programmers at Redmond, or so I've heard - for their non-existent egression testing) I'll be all right. But how can any software company employ more software testers and QA people than the entire population of Peru and still turn out such utter rubbish?

End of moan, and rather more time has passed than I thought: it's now the 17th. The usual busy week, although I spent rather more of it than I'd like tracking down a bug in a fixed-point multiplication library. It's been fine and warm - at least during the day - and yesterday I went down and gave the lawn its last short back and sides before spring comes round again. Hot enough to be out there in nowt but shorts and gumboots. Spent this afternoon bashing small boxes into kindling for the fire (really must order the firewood this week) and tidying up under the balcony to get enough place to stack the wood when it gets delivered: Jeremy really enjoyed that. He got to smash boxes with his hammer and then jump up and down on them - definitely reduced to kindling after that.

Somewhat to my surprise Jeremy hasn't regressed since Margo came back: he's still into tidying things up without being told, serving himself at dinner, getting his breakfast ready ... must really have decided he's grown-up. Now if we could just get him to learn to wipe his own bum without leaving brown streaks up backside, walls and underpants, life would be looking pretty good ... I suppose it'll come with time.

Anyway, as you'll have guessed, we're all of us alive and getting on well enough, even Fat Tess, who's laying in her winter grease supplies and is looking more like a furry beach ball than a cat. But she's suffering from a Lack of Cuddles, and I get the feeling that she misses Malyon more than the rest of us. Jeremy's no fun to curl up on at night.

Margo and her partner Monique are going to close up the shop as soon as they can do so and get out of it without losing too much money: what with the explosion and now the fact that people who would normally be clients have found that they can order stuff direct from the US (without paying import duties or TVA, if the quantities involved are small enough to be classed as "for personal use") it's just not worthwhile carrying on. Never mind, they had fun while it lasted.

And now goodnight - I'm back off to Vevey tomorrow for another day's farting about, with any luck I'll miss the traffic jams this time.

03/10/99 Autumn Blues

A lovely autumn day here: started off grey and raining, kept it up through lunchtime and on into the afternoon, and as I write it's still going strong, grey and raining. The stream is up, and a dismal air of dampness is around. Mind you, that's most Sunday afternoons.

Not that things were helped by last night's little effort. As usual on a Saturday, Jeremy popped in to see Sophie and Renaud on our way back from the market and stayed on for lunch, and as we were leaving Sophie suggested we stop by that evening for a little apéro - not dinner, she was too tired, just drinkies. So we went home and I went down and cleared out the cellar where the fuel-oil tank is going to go and made a bonfire with useless old bits of wood and did our little bit of shopping and then we got our glad-rags on and went back to Sophie and Renaud's, bearing a bottle of hydromel as our contribution.

We got there about 19:30 to find Bruno Fontanel and his wife Patty there as well, and they'd bought two bottles of Bordeaux, and Renaud had opened a bottle of his extremely strong Swiss white, and when we'd finished the apéritif it was after midnight, we'd written off all the bottles and were on to the vodka that Sophie had hidden away in the broom cupboard. Jeremy and Lucas and Thibaud were still happily playing upstairs (Rémi had crashed some time earlier) but the grownups were rather written-off and decided to call it a night. It made getting up this morning a bit of a chore - especially as Jeremy crept into bed with me about 8, but happily went back to sleep - without wriggling, thank God - and we managed to grab another two hours of sleep before getting up, blearily getting a baguette for breakfast (with lots of coffee) then making a tart and heading off to see Hervé and Jocelyn for lunch. Drank Perrier.

Right now Jeremy is busy vacuuming the playroom. He keeps saying that he really wants to help, so that I don't have to do things. Quite sweet - it'd be even better if he were actually capable of doing what he tries to do. Mind you, there's not too much that can go wrong with a vacuum cleaner, except perhaps my having to open it up and pull Jeremy out of the bag.

At least we've had a couple of fine days this week so the vendanges have finished. Unfortunately it was the whites that got left on the vine while it rained, so with the first fineish day everyone was out hurriedly getting them in before they rotted. They're still promising a good year: we'll have to see. I really must take the time next year to go down south to Courthezon and Orange to pick up some more Chateuaneuf-du-Pape now that we have a bit of spare cash: the stocks are running low and the oldest bottles I have down in the cellar date from 86, and at 13 years old they really need drinking so I shall have to replace them. Maybe in Spring I'll find the time to take a couple of days off.

As far as I know the world hasn't ended: can't be sure, as I haven't watched TV for a month or so (no time) and I may have missed it. It seems that Jospin is trying to shore up his socialist credentials by talking tough about new laws punishing businesses that make a profit and yet lay workers off: I doubt it'll come to much, he's playing to the gallery. At least in the last budget the 10% surcharge on the ridiculously high company profit tax of 33% is to be removed, which will knock 4% off what Upstart has to pay at the end of each financial year.

Unfortunately the tax loophole whereby I got reimbursed the difference between what I actually owed in tax and the tax credit from our dividends (on which Upstart had already paid tax) comes to an end, so I can no longer look forward to a nice 15000F cheque in the mail every August. Bit of a shame. It's now in my interest to pay myself a bit more so that I personally owe more tax so as to get some use out of the tax credit, which will also reduce the tax burden on the company. Accountancy is so much fun.

Anyway, I'm going to get an early night tonight, so goodbye and love to you all.

Trevor

26/09/99 End of week update ...

Back again, after a busy week and a busy day.

Off to the market in Chambery this morning as usual, then stopped by Renaud & Sophie's for lunch and so that Jeremy and Rémi could play together while I gossip, then up to St Jean d'Arvey for William's birthday party (and some more gossip with Steve while Isabelle looked after the kids). Jeremy was the token boy: William invites girls to his parties. Says he likes them. It's probably hereditary - Steve's the same

Finally got the evaluation from Bruno and the quote from his supplier for the central heating system: a bit more than I'd expected (hoped) but everyone tells me that it's incredibly cheap. At about 75000F all up, it probably is: most people are happy if they can get away with 125000F. The radiators are expensive but should last a lifetime or two (they get made to measure, I found out) and the big oil burner that feeds them and the hot water system is another big item but once again, it's top-quality German stuff (only the Germans understand central heating, or so the French say) so I suppose I can't complain.

The only thing that annoys me is that I have to wait three weeks or so for the radiators to arrive, which pushes us back to the end of October before the system is up and running - I suppose we'll just have to grin and bear it, and hope it doesn't get too cold before then. Couldn't be worse than last winter anyway, when we had the electric heating on and it made no bloody difference (apart from the power bills). On the brighter side, the bank's lending us the money to pay for the hardware at only 3% interest: we had points left over from when we bought the house, and although I could (just) pay for it out of my pocket I rather prefer to have a bit of cash sloshing around just in case and at that sort of rate it's pretty much a no-brainer.

Renaud and Sophie are in pretty much the same situation, which I suppose should cheer me up. They don't even have any backup heating in their nice new house, which worries Sophie no end. Mind you, she likes worrying. Renaud has been enormously busy trying to transform the 45° slope down to his front door into a sort of rustic rockery with stone steps up to the driveway and garage. Their house, you see, is built on two levels on a hillside, with the garage and bedrooms up at the top and the living areas below. As the place was, until very recently, a construction site, he has about 100 cubic metres of topsoil at the top of the slope - which he'll have to shift down to below the house when he gets around to terracing the hillside so that they can have something resembling a garden -and a muddy slope with 150kg rocks in it down to the front door. So far he's managed to get a retaining wall about three metres high up to the level of the driveway and has terraced about half-way up following the curve of the hillside. Hard work - I don't mind watching.

The tractors are out bringing in the trailers full of grapes for the vintage and I bet those who started harvesting at the beginning of the week are feeling pretty smug as today it started persisting down. Still warm - about 24° - but wet. Very wet. They're still forecasting another "vintage of the century" - what else could you expect for the last year of the millenium - but they might even be right: the grapes are healthy, as the summer has been so dry, so a day or so of rain won't do any damage that a few sunny days next week (as predicted) and some extra sugar in the vats won't cure.

Tomorrow ... definitely the first day of autumn: grey and wet and a bit blustery. Still, it's relatively warm. Had to rush up into the attic at about 11 last night to push a slate back into place: it had shifted sideways a little over the summer and as a result the rain was plitting on top of the ceiling, making a nice little soggy puddle of the insulation. Which I shall have to replace soon anyway, as it's not really in the best of shape.

Given the weather we haven't done much so far today - Jeremy's been busy with his Junior Meccano and right now is sitting in front of the TV watching Cow and Chicken, while I try to summon up the courage to go and attack the Pile of ironing. I've been trying to put off the dreaded moment by working on my stock-control project, but I've just about got to the point where I'll have to run it against the database to check out the inventory transfer functions and as I haven't installed SQL Server on the home machine it'll have to wait until Monday. Maybe if I went and had lunch ... that would gain me another 20 minutes.

And then I think we'll head off to see Jean-Gilles and look at getting a new 19" screen for the home machine: the one I've got now works fine but only with one specific video card (probably the last remaining on the planet) and on top of it won't lock on to anything but 1024*768 in 256 colours, so I can't see a thing if there's a full-screen DOS box up, or while the machine is booting. Now that 19" screens are a reasonable price (and I can get one at cost from J-G anyway) I think I might as well profit from the situation to pick up a new one (and a spanking new video card to go with it) and Margo can inherit the old one.

Bye now
Trevor & Jeremy

19/09/99 Rotting grapes ...

Yes folks, it's that time of year again when Frog-people go out by the thousands into vineyards on ridiculous slopes and harvest wasp-infested bunches of grapes which they're planning on turning into wine. For the next few weeks the village is going to be clogged with tractors towing enormous trailers, and the place will smell like a brewery.

By this shall we know that autumn is approaching, if it hasn't already sneaked up on us unawares, and the colour of the leaves shall change, and lo! it shall start to get cold at night. Which pisses me off, as I am still waiting for the quote for the central heating. Never mind. At least today, after an unpromising start, it turned out fine and sunny and even hot, which is good as I'm planning a BBQ for tomorrow lunch, doubtless the last of the year.

At least it was almost a pleasure mowing the lawn this afternoon: not too hot, and with the dry spell we've had the stuff hadn't grown too much anyway.

Tomorrow now ... well, the BBQ got cancelled: it's been grey and overcast all day, and the temperature has plummetted to 25°, not really ideal weather for it. So we've just mucked around all day: I got the house cleaned and even plan on doing some ironing sometime Real Soon Now - like when Jeremy needs some clothes to wear to school.

Went around to see our friends Hervé & Jocelyn (she's the New York lawyer) and Hervé reminded me of something: our good friend DSK (that's Dominique Strauss-Kahn to you, the French finance minister) has just put through a budget lowering TVA/GST on house building and alterations to 5%, from its current 20.6%. Which means that when we get it done, the central heating will be about 15% cheaper! Whoopie! Just have to get it done now (resigned sigh).

As some of you will already have noticed, Margo and Malyon made it safely to NZ and are even now lurking in your midst. As far as I know all is going well. The highlight of their departure (apart from peeling Jeremy off Margo's left leg so that she could make it into the departure lounge) was seeing a typical Swiss farmer on the autoroute as we went to the airport: we passed a beaten up old Renault 4L with the farmer driving in the front seat and a sheep sitting in the back seat. Not something you see every day: Swiss agriculture in action.

Jeremy has been excessively good: almost overnight he's turned into an angel, or something closely approximating one. Before, when it came time to tidy the playroom, Malyon would do the heavy work and Jeremy would pick up one piece of Lego, put it in the box, and cry out that he was tired and his arms were hurting him: now he tidies up without being told and calls me up to let me share the surprise. He goes downstairs in the mornings and gets his own breakfast (OK, I have to get a plate down for him) and when he's finished he puts away the milk and cereal and puts his bowl in the sink all by himself (trap for parents - in the evening the porridge has congealed and I have to get out the electric drill and wire brush to get it off) and then goes off and dresses himself. Then in the evenings he gets into the shower by himself and into pyjamas ready for dinner: I am really impressed. No doubt when Margo gets back it'll go back to what it was before, but for the moment I'm really enjoying it.

He's also taken to his Junior Meccano: we got him a box for his birthday and it's turned out to be extremely popular. He still has to call me in for some of the tricky bits, but he manages about 90% of it himself and is already on model n° 9 out of 13. That and Lego keep him happy.

Oh, just in case it interests anyone, I saw my first ever woodpecker today. Saw this sort of bright flash fly across the paddock and when I got the binoculars out and trained on the fence-post where it had landed spotted a red-headed, green-and-gold feathered beast with a big solid beak. Looks very exotic and colourful when it flies, as the underside of its wings are yellow-gold. What with that and the badgers (geting diarrheoa from eating too many grapes at the moment), the squirrels (little red ones) and godnose what else, there's quite a bit of wild-life infesting the garden at the moment. Without counting the odd visiting fox (one wanders down the path occasionally). The swallows have all left though: in enormous flights, about two or three weeks ago. Off to Morocco for the winter.

That's about it for now: goodbye!

Trevor

05/09/99 Departure of a daughter ...

Hello again, people.

As usual we've been incredibly busy, haven't got half the things done that really need doing, it's Sunday night and I'm half-cut again so it's time to let you know what's going on over here.

On the politico-economic front, not a lot. The French central bank and regulators still have to rule on what BNP have to do with the (hostile) minority 37% stake they acquired in Société Générale whilst trying to put together a Frog mega-bank (BNP + SG + Paribas): the only certainty about the outcome is that it'll piss off a lot of people, be bad for consumers and certainly won't help the French banking "industry" (in quotes because it's actually a small, exclusive and excessively expensive gentlemans' club). The minister of finance went so far as to harrumph that foreign bidders were extremely unwelcome: they all took the hint and no unfriendly foreign bids arrived which is probably just as well for them, it'll be the French government, rather than US & UK institutions, pumping billions of francs into some bloated inefficient bank that's not allowed to fire one of the fifteen people in its Crumbville (pop. 200) branch office. Citibank is probably heaving a sigh of relief.

But basically it's been the silly season for the past two months - when all the political parties go off on what they call "Université d'été", or summer brainstorming sessions - and real news is banned, or ignored. Incidentally, these Université d'été things are actually quite interesting, if only for the chosen sites. They're supposed to be prestigious affairs, hence the name - the sad reality of course is that only the party faithful appear, usually the ones that wear Crimplene suits and drive Skodas. Anyway, the Socialists have an enormous media-friendly affair somewhere like Bordeaux in which Jospin makes a brief appearance on a 150m² TV screen and is cheered by the crowds (to the best of my memory, feminine underwear has not yet been chucked at his feet on the stage, but that's probably not far off). These days the different right-wing factions (talking National here, not LePen and associated turds) have difficulty agreeing on anything important and even more difficulty getting together for what is - now - essentially a publicity stunt, and consequently have three or four affairs, usually in minor (don't tell them I said that) provincial cities (but not too far from Paris, because otherwise no-one would notice). Blue rinses are prominent in the audiences, and the differences between the different factions are so negligible that quite frankly no-one cares, apart from political commentators, who are paid to care but even so have difficulty. The Greens go and commiserate together either in some dreary seaside resort in Britanny or in some grim ex-industrial town whose current state is a direct result of 50 years of failed state industrial policy, and promise more of the same. This (and the fact that they do prefer crimplene suits - environmentally friendly - and Skodas - emphatically not environmentally friendly, but you can't just fire all the people making the filthy things) is probably why the Greens are not really taken seriously by anyone, certainly not by the Socialists, with whom they're supposed to be junior partners in government.

Still, the school holidays are now over and autumn is coming in, so with any luck some group or another will start feeling oppressed or deprived and stage a massive strike which'll paralyse the country, and then we'll have something to talk about over drinks in the evening.

Anyway, the month has gone by - Renaud & Sophie went off on holiday and I went in and varnished their staircase while they were away, and we went around last night to inaugurate the house. A little soirée "bien arrosée" ie we drank a lot, altogether very pleasant. Got the kids to bed about 1:30 this morning and slept in massively this morning before getting up to organise Malyon's birthday/departure party.

Which was a relatively small affair, about 10 young girls running screaming around the place and dunking for apples in the paddock, luckily Anne-Laure turned up aound 4pm to say goodbye to Malyon and help supervise so the adults could lie around drinking in the shade. The last of the balloons have exploded now and the chippie crumbs have been swept away, so that's all over. Now there's just the actual departure to get organised - bags to pack, stuff like that - and then Jeremy and I have to drop the pair of them off at Geneva at some filthy hour on Wednesday moaning

But right now I'm tired and I'm going to bed -

Love
Trevor & margo

08/08/99 Yet more DIY ...

A very busy couple of weeks since last I ranted, so here goes.

My estimable friend and partner Renaud has finally got his house finished - at least there are walls, a roof, and a floor - so last weekend we shifted house. Four burly gentlemen (one of them, the least burly, being myself) took a day to move their apartment into the new house. Sophie had been very organised and had boxed everything except the kitchen sink, each box being numbered, indexed (Dewey decimal) and destination coded in plain-text just in case. With the exception of the house-hold cleansers (still un-accounted for as I write, a complete mystery to all) I think everything arrived. A right pain shifting the white-ware, as we had to take them down a 45° slope of unsettled earth to get them through the front door without apparent damage, but we seem to have managed.

Since then I've become an expert on fitted kitchens, as I've been helping out in my own little way by setting his up. First you put the modules together (one small error where I banged a hole in the side of one with my fist trying to set the dowels in place, happily it's hidden), then you stick all the different modules together side by side, check the level, stick the wall oven in its slot, put down the workbench and cut out an enormous hole to fit the gas hobs in ... I have to go back on Tuesday to cut out and attach the cornice and mouldings to cover up the raw particle-board edges, but with any luck that should go pretty quickly.

Meanwhile Sophie is painting over the gross marks we've left on the walls from all this, Bruno is pulling all the electric cables through their pipes, and Renaud is doing heroic things like sticking up the hot water cylinder on the wall and hooking it up to the pipes using only string and chewing gum.

So I took this weekend off to make a start on the decking. Borrowed Hervé's big van on Friday to shift the wood, then spent yesterday running around getting all the screws I'd need (640 of them) and the bricks to lay the beams across and the felt stuff (they call it "géotextile here, it's basically a waterproof plastic cloth you put down under your bricks to stop rising damp and above all weeds) and then today was spent laying all that out and getting the beams down and level. Hervé also lent me a handy dandy spirit level with a laser beam integrated - you stick it down, get it level, then switch on the laser and your level is extended for a useful distance of about 20m, which was perfect - and that helped a lot. The bricks are now laid, the support beams are across and all levelled, I just have to slice and screw the planks in place. All for next weekend, because I foolishly promised Jeremy that he'd have his last year's birthday present ( a sandpit) out there on the terrace for this birthday.

And Jeremy doesn't forget things like that. Never mind, the worst is out of the way and if I take a day off during the week it'll all be done - thanks be to Heaven for circular saws and electric screwdrivers.

During this time I also have a major database application to design for someone who, as an intermediary, manages JIT delivery for his clients. He has his clients, their suppliers, and the warehousers to keep track of, and the stock at the warehouse has to be kept track of at the palette level - plus there's all the billing side of thing to handle. I spent Friday installing SQL Server at the office (much to my surprise, I didn't have to reboot the machine during the process) and then started using the database design tools to start designing the thing. Fair takes me back about 20 years to Computer Science 58-203, fourth-order normalisation and all the rest. Except that back then normalisation and table relationships were things that you scribbled down on grubby scraps of paper, at least one of which would be missing when you came to write the SQL code to set up your database, whereas now you can do it all graphically.

Given that it's Microsoft, I still wouldn't put it past the beast to forget one or two electronic equivalents of grubby scraps of paper and get the entire architecture screwed up, but at least the diagrams it produces look pretty. Gives me something to show to my client tomorrow to make it look as though I've been working for him.

Our friends Magali and François and their three girls came round last evening to camp in our garden - idea was to check that they could get their super new tent up in the requisite 15 minutes etc before trying it out on a real holiday. We all dined and they went off to bed, us too - and about 4am, when Margo went down to check on how Tess had managed to get inside given that all the doors were closed, she found them all camping in the living-room. Can't say I blame them - the wind was up to about 70 kph, and it was raining a dog's breakfast horizontally. Not really the night to choose for camping out.

At least it was better than Friday night: we had the same thing, only redoubled in spades, and I spent rather more time than I wanted sawing up fallen branches and generally getting rid of bits of dead tree. Much to my surprise, the old apple tree is still with us - it's old and looks rotten, but there's life in the old thing still.

Margo of course spent most of the week at Pesselière with Ian & Marie and various other frog family members - probably Malyon's last chance to see this set of cousins before heading off to NZ on or about the 10th September. I'd sort of planned on heading up on Wednesday night to be with them, but realised that it meant that I'd have all of Thursday to spend with them before heading back on Friday, and consequently gave up the idea - especially as SQL was calling. So I missed out on all that, but never mind, I'll make it up later. Don't know when.

Jeremy came back and naturally enough he and Elise had made friends with some horses in a paddock down the road. The proof is the enormous masses of horse-hair coming out of his pockets in the wash. Yucky stuff, horse-hair. Long and stiff and springy and well, horse-coloured.

That's probably enough from me, you're doubtless tired of hearing about how the temperature is up in the 30°s most of the time and the weather (apart from the cloudbursts around 3am) is more or less perfect - so I'll say goodnight for this week.

Love
Trevor & Margo