Yes, Thursday we were off again to IKEA in Bordeaux, our favorite shop...not. First we spent an hour and a half waiting at customer service to return a few items and order one remaining bit. Meanwhile Ed gathered and purchased the previously out-of-stock parts. Too late for lunch after the customer service wait, we had a snack and went to wait for the ordered item. Two more hours and a change of staff later, we finally got someone to pay attention to how long we'd been there. He went back and pulled the one thing we needed off the shelf himself. On the way back out, he found our piece sitting and waiting. It had been pushed aside and our number was never called. Sigh. So we left Bordeaux just in time for rush hour. Back in our area after 7pm, we stopped for a quick dinner at a nearby cafe and discovered it was curry night!
Ed has now gotten the remaining cabinets mostly installed and Kaye is starting to move the kitchen around again. Tomorrow she'll start working on the pile of boxes in the living room. Two more cabinets remain to be installed left of the new stove that hasn't been bought yet. And the perfect knobs for the cabinets have yet to be found.
When we unpack our real dishes, we have to decide how much of our "camping kitchen" dishware we want to keep. We don't really need this stuff, but it's a bit sad to bit it adieu. On the other hand it means we're really settling in.
Friday evening Kaye attended another meeting of, not the comité des fêtes, but the foyer rural. (We're not sure of the difference; some communes have one, some the other.) Another exhausting evening, with even less understood than the previous time. There's another all-day fête coming in August; this time a frairie (whatever that may be). Kaye will help with getting the plates and cutlery ready the day before and with the serving the meal on the day itself. She still haven't discovered when and who will do the clean-up.
On Wednesday, we sent a (very polite, we thought) email to the woman who owns the barn behind us to tell her about the latest round of leaks and asking if we can do something to prevent more water entering our house. She went absolutely ballistic. She's accused us of spreading rumors about the barn leaking and of remodeling the old stable into a house without having planning permission. Of course, the remodeling had already been done when we bought the house and we've done nothing but add some windows ... with planning permission. This morning Kaye went to the mairie to find out if the previous owner had planning permission to do the remodeling, only to find it closed until the end of the week. We're not sure of our position if he didn't get proper permission. We now understand why everyone is so leery of this woman.
Sunday afternoon we attended a gala tango event nearby. It was held in the small village of Cruzeau that's been converted to a fairly swank gîte. The event was held in an old barn that's been converted into a very nice recreation hall. The first part of of the program was an "initiation to tango." Dance instructors were brought from Paris to teach audience volunteers some simple steps. Following the break, there was a tango quintet lead by a local accordion/bandoneon artist, Frédéric Langlais, accompanied by a regular string quartet. They played tangos mostly by the Argentinian composer Ástor Piazzolla, whose music, some of you may remember, was played at Willem-Alexander and Maxima's wedding in 2002. Neither of us are accordion fans, but it was easy to see that Langlais is in a higher class than your common oompah band player.
Ed's just discovered a small group of bats over the kitchen door, wedged in between the porch roof and the outside wall of the house. These seem to be another species -- maybe these are the common pippestrelle -- but it wasn't possible to get a picture of them.
Aside: Did any of you FollowSite-ers get an email after last week's post? We didn't. For a few weeks this was working quite will, with an update email within hours. Last week not. If anyone knows of another email notifier of this kind, please let us know.
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