Progress ...

The end of last week was sunny and warm and beautiful with high temps around 24C/75F, about as warm as Kaye likes it. Saturday, however, turned cold and raining, with highs around 13C/55F. Brrr, back having wood fires in the kitchen in the evening. Luckily the mezzanine floor was well on its way to drying so we could close the skylights to keep the floor dry. Here's a bit of the work in progress:

The splash of light on the floor comes from the skylight; the standards will hold the living room shelving from Amstelveen, not reaching quite to the ceiling here! Now the floor is quite shiny, and is much smoother than it was before. And now we can start on the wallpaper, the biggest of the remaining chores.

Ed washed out the old Mac keyboard and set it out to dry in the sun. That got it back to working condition, so it wasn't so bad waiting for the new one to arrive. Now we have a spare keyboard and mouse, so it won't be such an emergency when the next drink is spilled.

The grass has been mown again and looks lovely. We've seen the baby blackbird thrush several times, along with other baby birds. Yesterday we found a lovely nest with two tiny blue eggs in the red camellia. We haven't seen adult birds in the area, so we're not sure what it belongs to and fear it may have been abandoned. Our orchid turns out to be, not the common one that we're seeing by the roadside, but one called Neotinea usutlata (formerly Orchis ustulata), burnt orchid. We had another one of these blooming in the lawn last year about this time. The flowers weren't yet open in this picture, but they are starting to open now so we can take a better picture whenever the sun returns.

Saturday we took ourselves to an afternoon movie in Angoulême (Slumdog Millionaire). After our return we saw in the paper that an American author who lives in the Charente, Eddy L Harris, was giving a talk in his hometown nearby. We quickly finished our dinner, gathered up his book that we've read or are reading, and took ourselves out for the evening. He's writing about a book about Paris right now, but has been living in Pranzac for about three year and considers it his home now. We hope in a year or so our French will be almost as good as his.

We are both getting anxious to get our furniture and things here so we can feel a bit more settled and get on with other things. We're getting there, it just all seems very slow right now.