A somewhat less frenetic week than last week, thank
goodness. We took Pieter down to Toulouse on Sunday to catch his plane back to
Mallorca and made a day of it although the airport is only about an hour and a
half away. It was cloudy and fairly cool but a good day for driving and we
enjoyed the trip there and back. Since then it has been a fairly solid grind of
getting boxes emptied and disposed of and the contents put away. Neels has
recycled a shelving unit that was previously in the lounge and made some
splendid shelves for the pantry. I must be the only person in France to have
blackwood pantry shelves! It made a huge
difference to the amount of storage space that I had and they were put to good
use immediately. Another couple of boxes
out onto the verandah! Trying to find the right places for everything in the
kitchen has also been quite a problem. There has to be a certain ‘flow’ so that
one doesn’t have to walk backwards and forwards all the time while preparing a
meal, and with a kitchen as small as mine is now, that flow is extra important
or we would be tripping over each other all the time. Poor Neels! I have to
feel sorry for him as each time he gets used to finding the coffee cups in one
place, I decide that they would be better in another place and they all get
whisked away and he has to find them all over again. But we are getting there.
A couple of things that we would really like to have handy, but which have not
yet appeared, are my laundry baskets and my cleaning cloths and the dishcloths.
We are still using borrowed crockery as I just don’t seem to be able to pick
the right box when it comes to unpacking our day-to-day plates, but we have now
got all the cutlery and kitchen implements. So the Box Mountain in the kitchen
is gradually diminishing although we still have seven to go.
I mentioned last time the wonderful aerobics workout we get
while unpacking and have now decided to call it Boxercise. Those fitness ladies
who used to go and punch a sandbag and called it Boxercise had really no idea
of the real thing. It goes like this :-
select a box regardless of what the label says. You have as much chance of
really getting what it says as anything else so just plough on. Split open the
box with an extremely sharp box cutter and close
the blade! Open the flaps and remove the top few centimetres of packaging
paper and drop it on the floor. Take out the first mystery item and unwrap
carefully. Find a flat surface to put it down on and repeat, each time bending
further and further into the box until your hands are at toe level. By now you
have a mountain of packaging paper and/or bubble wrap on the floor and an empty
box. The next phase is to put all that wrapping back into the box, but somehow,
even without the items that are now standing all around on any flat surface, it
never fits so Neels has to get into the box and jump on the contents until we
can fill it up. Then it gets tossed onto the verandah. Phase three is to cart
all the boxes from the verandah down to the car and load as many as possible
into the back. Then it’s off to the recycling centre. Here there are a number
of large skips carefully positioned behind railings so that you can’t fall in
by mistake. All that paper so carefully stuffed into the boxes now has to come
out and be posted into a large bin with a ridiculously small opening until the
box is empty once more. Using the very sharp box cutter again, open the other
end of the box and flatten it. When there are two or three flattened boxes they
can be carried to the other end of the centre and hurled into a skip.
Bubblewrap goes into a separate skip as
does metal, but we don’t have much of that. And then we can go home and do it
all over again.
We don’t get much time for doing anything else, and when we
do have time we are generally exhausted and flopped out in front of the fire.
And there too, is something else we are not accustomed to
having to do – wood for the fire has to be chopped into usable pieces. We
learnt to our cost, many years ago, that a whole tree trunk will just not burn
if it is put onto a fire. Neels doesn’t mind chopping wood, but a friend has
lent us a wonderful toy called a log splitter. It is electric and hydraulic and
is great fun to use as it does all the work itself as long as one is pulling
the correct lever. Huge chunks of wood just give way as they are forced onto a
V-shaped blade and make firewood seem easy. We are wondering how we can
persuade the friend to part with his toy but it may be a difficult task.
Spring is definitely around the corner and we have great fun
watching the birds on the church roof opposite our bedroom. We only have
skylights, Veluxes, roof windows, whatever you want to call them, so they look
upwards and all we can see from our room is part of the wall and the roof of
the church next door. The other day when it was raining there were two pigeons
up on the roof, the one definitely showing signs of amorous intentions. The other
was not so keen and kept side-stepping along the ridge to get away. Then she
fluttered down on to the rather steep roof and next minute she was skittering down the wet tiles, slipping and sliding and flapping madly to keep her balance. And
then there are the sparrows. Also feeling the beginnings of Spring , they dart
back and forth, inspecting all the cracks and crevices of our ancient church
wall, seeking out possible prime nesting sites and bringing their mates along
for a look. It may not be a view in the usual sense but it keeps us entertained.
Well, I did warn you at the beginning that things may get a
bit boring but hopefully by next week we will have cleared some space in the
lounge and will be able to show you that.
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