Saturday, July 05, 2008

Off to Provence! Really!

So our gentleman seller came thru with an address, a time and a date all thanks to L's great French! All Hail to L!! She sat right there at the dining room table and called the nice buyer and sorted out all the not-so-trivial details, sooooo cool! She just rattled out the Francaise syllable after syllable fawlessly. Amazing! So now we are off to a small village in Provence to fetch our Portail du fer (Iron Gate). We will take our car, the trusty Avensis with it's A/C on full as Provence this time of year can be HOT. It's a mini-California weather type trapped between the Massif Central and the Sea. L charged us with getting her a bottle of Lavender Syrup, thick and delicious she says on top of ice cream. So we will get that done as well. Oh...when do we do this little trek? Next week sometime. Now we use Google Earth to search for hotels and restaurants in response to Kelly's internet hunt upcoming. I hope we do as well as we did in Lyon last month.
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Today my job was to nail up the wood strips to hang the cloth by and rip more strips and put the fuzzy stuff on the walls between them so that the walls are padded. We NEED padded walls as nuts as we are. Kelly hung the cloth wainscotting along the interior wall after I finished the strips.
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Tonight I'm cooking lamb cutlets, bone in. I actually will BBQ them quickly as we both like them rare. Rub them with morocan dry spice mix and them pound them gently with thyme. Onto the fire for 2 minutes each side and call them done. Garlic mashed potatoes and a salad outside in the courtyard...oh how cool. All easy, simple and delicious.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Off to Provence! Maybe.

Well we won a Gate on eBay FR. Of course he won't ship it, of course. Therefore we must go and get it, all 377 miles down and 377 miles back. We won't do this in one day either, two down and one back is the current plan. The Gate? It's to replace the gate we now have between the alley and the courtyard which is of some fine wood with a twirly-gurley art nouveau iron gate, much more in keeping with the olde ruin than the somewhat plain-jane wooden one. The new (old wreck really) gate is located deep in the south of France very near Nice. in the hills just beyond the coast. It's all rusted and sad looking now but after we load it on the roof of the trusty ol' Avensis and haul it back I'll see if my friend R or A&R will/can sandblast the bad stuff off, I'll apply a metal primer and we'll paint it black. We bought the bloody thing for about 165 Euros...at the current exchange rate that's $257.40 USD. That's cheap as these things can go up to $2000 depending on style and condition. Old iron sells. New ones are ok...boring but available, olde ones suitable to us for this house are NOT so available and thus you must use eBay to find them and typically they are expensive. This one's pics on eBay FR were awful, I had to enhance them with Photoshop so we could eye it with some detail. Looks good.
NOTE: At least it DID...as the seller guy has now returned our payment! Huh? So we write back once again to straighten this mess out hopefully and schedule the trip. Oh Jezz.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Moving Day Has Arrived!

I’m mad at Blogger.com and Google it’s owner why? Well the Obama debacle didn’t help either. Why? Well that silly Adsense site is an amusing distraction for sure, with no statistics shown and no idea where any watchers are coming from what difference does any ad make? I have a small readership, dedicated but small and I thought my babling about all things French might attract a small audience. Then along came Adsense, make a bit of cash for no effort at all, just write and If your keywords match some mystical LIST then you get a penny for your thoughts everytime someone clicks on an ad they place on your page. Simple isn’t it? No, it’s not. You have little or no control on which ads are placed on the page and when they are changed isn’t up to you either, and finding out how many HITS you get on those ads is also a secret…so without any answers to these mysteries I’m going to take my blog to WordPress where all these vexing little details are taken care of. Besides it’s nearly Hometown grown to me, being based in SF. They even collected my past blogs except for 2 (??) and moved them with one click to the new site. Slick. To the reader they probably don’t LOOK any different as I’m pretty conservative when it comes to my blog and flashy page construction. For a while I’ll post in both places and see how it feels, eventually I’ll either stay with Google/Blogger or I’ll be here at WordPress. The link to my blog at WordPress is:
http://midfrance.wordpress.com.
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L is in town, well…not exactly IN town but at her place OUTSIDE of town on the road to La Chatre to the south. It’s lil’ Nik’s B-Day today and we are going over to have a meal and drink a bit as is the local custom and wish him a happy 35th!
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Here’s our link for our Cute, cute, cute French house for sale on eBay. Change your Life!
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/House-in-Rural-France-Market-Village-Walled-Compound_W0QQitemZ130234244587QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item130234244587&_trkparms=72%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C65%3A12&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14