Happy 15th Anniversary!

 

15th wedding anniversary, strange weather, but enjoyed eating outside anyway

Special champagne

Giant beef chop

With veg from a friend. Yum!

Happy 28 years together!

 

First Frost

 

Bloody cows, bloody neighbors, bloody heatwave/drought

Wandering around a really steep field well after sunset chasing the neighbors cows out of one of our fields. AGAIN. It wouldn’t be so bad, but it is still hot given the heatwave and this field has pretty much the only grass left for the cows, the rest has shriveled up in the heatwave.

Pretty though…

Good bye and good riddance to Boris Johnson

It’s a worry that he hasn’t yet properly resigned to the Queen, but hopefully the Tories will make sure he does.

Hoping for the best and going ahead and celebrating…

Of course there is now the worry which swivel eyed idiot the loonies will inflict on us next… but let’s enjoy this for a minute….

You know you are old when…

… the delivery of a new washer and dryer is one of the most exciting things to happen in weeks, MONTHS, YEARS!!

Here the delivery guy is teaching us how to kneel and worship it properly. 

Happy Valentine’s Day

We are not big on Valentine’s day, but marked the occasion with a nice homegrown meal. Monday so stayed off the wine :)

Chicken breast with orange (didn’t grow the orange juice), chips and kale. With some nice homemade mayonnaise.

TGI Friday!

 Sangria and popcorn to celebrate.

We have had very mixed weather through all of July and August. Rain and cold with some hot humid days thrown in. We have even had to burn the fire for shower water once! Unheard of in the summer.

Full (ish) moon

… and pizza too

Piano Pic

 The piano festival happens every year and features some great musicians

There was only one event last year with covid, many more this year… we made it to a few though it was tiring when they didn’t end till 11 or 11.30 and there is work the next day!

 

Happy Wedding Anniversary to us!

13 years! Time flies!

We went to a lovely piano concert with fantastic Chopin amongst other things.

Part of the Pic Piano festival. We were terribly spoilt for live music in London, so it is nice to be able to see something so good locally here!

https://www.piano-pic.fr/

Funny weather for July!

 

It’s been quite variable through June too. Some sunny hot days and some rainy cooler days. Lovely having dinner outside whatever the weather! We don’t mind the cooler weather in general!

Clearing more land for the sheep

 Doug has been heroically batting first the trees then the brambles for EVER, on this patch of land below the house.

It is now mostly clear ready to plant grass, clover and some wildflowers. The brambles are starting to regrow, but we hope the sheep will eat the shoots, otherwise some more strimming needed soon.

This is a big fire with branches from various trees that had to be cut through plus lots of pine needles

This is lots of strimmed then dried brambles raked into rows then burnt

Setting it all alight

Happy Easter!

 They rose really slowly and I thought they weren’t going to come out well, but then they came good!

Happy Easter.

The neatest!

The lawn grows so fast in Spring and early summer it is hard to keep on top of it! I have just kowed it and Isaac as strimmed the bank in front. This is probably the neatest it is going to look all year!

Maybe you can’t make it out in the photo, but there are some daffodils at the top of the bank looking very Spring like.

 

Happy New Year!

 Wild boar with butternut squash and kale (also with Champagne) for Hogmanay.

Little walk and a ski on New Years Day

Wishing you all a Happy New Year. Hopefully this one won’t be as eventful as 2020

The Star of Bethlehem!

We thought it was going to be cloudy and we wouldn’t see it, but then it magically cleared and we did!

https://www.space.com/great-conjunction-jupiter-saturn-christmas-star-2020-nasa-tips

This is the view by day (just happened to be on the camera!)

and this is it by night. The church is obvious, then to the right of it is the folly/chapel on the mount, both lit for Christmas. Then further right and down is our friend Emma’s, then the ‘star’.

Before that we had a nice lunch with friends, nice to feel a little bit of nomal... 

Cute huh!

Yummy spicy chicken and noodles...

Change to lockdown

From today (after 4 weeks of the 2nd confinement) we are allowed to go a little further from home for exercise (and drive to get there). Up until now we have only been allowed to go 1km from home for 1 hour. We can now go 20km for up to 3 hours! Hurrah. This is just far enough to make it to La Mongie so we are hoping to get a little bit of work done there or at least check the apartment is ok.

Lockdown is due to end on the 15th of Dec as long as new cases are below 5,000 a day. But ski areas, restaurants and bars won’t open until late January.

Today we celebrated with a nice walk. Not far from home, but a very nice change of scene.

We had tea and eclairs too. Yay!

She has a slight scratch that she won’t stop licking, so not a serious injury, it just needs a chance to heal

The Virgin

Super cool fungus!

Jew’s ear (or jelly ear or wood ear)

Tends to grow on dead elder trees. Is edible but not exciting (apparently, we can’t fancy trying it!)

It is growing in the chicken enclosure.

Snow! Lots of snow

Uurgh! We went to La Mongie for a night, taking advantage of it being empty for more than a couple of days the first time since the start of the summer (this week’s guests cancelled, they were Spanish, maybe worried about border closures, not sure). We carefully planned the trip to be ahead of the coming storm.

But look what we woke up to! We were in the small car, no winter tires, no chains!

There are still farm animals up there (you may just be able to make out some Alpaca in the photo - they are better equipped for it than the cows!)

We decided we had to get home because we needed to check on the animals after the storm and Poppy had a vets appointment (sore leg). We managed to drive on the snow a little and then had to dig clear tracks as far as the ploughed road. After that thankfully it was fine. I had to dash back at one point to rescue the plant that Doug remembered - it was going to die if left behind!

All the animals had survived and we had a nice warming pizza for dinner. Bit too much excitement in the day though. This year is full of the unexpected!

The vet says Poppy has hurt her elbow and needs to rest for 10 days. It’s going to be tricky to persuade her to!  

Visit to Chateau Sabazan vineyard

Lovely visit to a vineyard with friends. It is part of the Plaimont collective. This chateau grows and produces the wine onsite - which then allows the wine to have ‘Chateau’ in the name. About an hours drive from us.

Nice old buildings with stone walls (and Doug)

This is our guide getting some wine out of an oak barrel for us to taste. It has been in there 6 months and will mature for another 6 months before bottling.

This is the Chateau itself. Plaimont bought it some years ago, but it has a mad 95 year old lady who refuses to move out because she says they never paid her the money (it sounds like she didn’t get much money because it had to go to paying off all her debts). 

These vats are used to ferment the wine from the grape juice and also in various blending procedures.

As we as the wine straight from the oak barrel we tasted several different ages of wine. It was amazing how much it changed as it aged. It started off with quite sharp fruity flavours with the oak being quite a harsh woody taste and then mellowed and got more complex with age. Very interesting.

This years grapes are not quite ripe yet. We also heard about how they manage the vines, lots of work to make sure that they have the best flavour possible and the right sweetness.

We had a nice packed lunch with some more of the wine. Thankfully Liz was driving!