Catch-up.

No posting for a couple of weeks due to a mix of good times and bad.

Good times: S&R arrived back from Spain (with dulce de leche :) ) and stayed for a few days before heading back to Canada. As always, I really enjoyed having them around and it was a great excuse to hold my first proper dinner at the flat. We managed to get eight round the table and managed to feed them all too, thanks to S taking care of pudding and an inspired decision to plug in the oven in the bedroom and leave the kitchen free for plates and other gubbins. Not the best picture ever, and I've no idea what exciting story was being told, but I think it kind of captures the atmosphere:

More good times last weekend, down in Cannes with another friend and her cute-as-all-heck 10-month old. Three days lazing on the beach and spending the evenings sipping rosé on the balcony was just what the doctor ordered... yep, work is hideous at the moment. Resignations a-go-go and one of the new recruits is giving me real headaches by behaving like a jerk with clients and then getting aggro when I try to coax/steer him back on to the right track. Very unhappy state of affairs which isn't leaving me with much energy for anything else.

In the circumstances, not much has moved with the flat. I finally sorted out my bedroom curtains yesterday, and I'm going to do more paint-stripping in the kitchen tomorrow night. At least my flowers are still looking nice. :)

Damn. Leaky bath... again.

Yesterday, I steeled myself and went ahead one of my least favourite tasks in the world: cleaning out the bath plughole. I can't stand it - it really brings me to the point of vomiting. My reward? A bath that drains... directly into the floor underneath. Soaking concrete, welcome back, we've missed you. :( Clearly my manoeuvres had dislodged the precarious plastic pipework that links the bath to the rest of my plumbing. Just what I needed. Back to buckets... I haven't done anything on the flat this weekend apart from cleaning. Last night I went for ciné/dîné with J. We saw Tabarly, a terrific documentary that I'd highly recommend. I found it quite moving, in part because he and J could be father and son. The likeness - from their faces, to their physiques, to the way they walk - is remarkable. In the trailer, it could be J in the little black & white interview (and in the shot that comes just before, where he's in the red shorts climbing the sail ;) ). It was like seeing everything that's good about him up on screen, the shyness and kindness and toughness and sense of humour, but without being confronted by the stubborn, headstrong, uncommunicative aspects of his personality. I've been feeling quite melancholy all day, mainly because Eric Tabarly seemed like a genuinely decent human being, but also perhaps because I know that it will never work with J, however fond of each other we are.

Anyway, all that's as may be. Even if I did nothing this weekend, I did at least work pretty hard last weekend, zapping woodworm and stripping paint on Saturday night until 2:30 am. It's so painfully slow. I started here:

And five hours later, I was here:

I've worked hard for about fifteen hours and I reckon I've got another twelve hours to go.

In the background, you can see the plant pot hanging system I've rigged up. I'm very pleased with it. Here's a close up:

Very pleased with my plants in general. My passion fruit plant is like slow-motion fireworks at the moment. Almost every day there's a new, glorious flower somewhere. They're so beautiful and delicate and bold.

Damn. Woodworm...

So it's a lovely sunny day here. I was out for dinner with friends last night, had nice English muffins for breakfast (a neighbour who's gone away for a week left them on my doorstep yesterday along with a pineapple and some bananas), and I have woodworm in my cool little telephone table. Darn.
Not too much, but it means buying and applying more chemicals and keeping my fingers crossed that the little buggers haven't had time to get into anything else in the flat.

Art & asparagus

I've had a very chilled weekend with a focus on me. As in treats. For breakfast, I went to the boulangerie for a demi-baguette yesterday (not very glam but oh-so-good with raspberry jam) and for a delicious chausson pomme today, and I also went all-out on dinner. I bought a roast chicken from the butcher last night and ate it with asparagus and mustard, then tonight I had it cold with more asparagus and scrumptious sweet-potato mash and loads of sea salt and black pepper. Still more left for tomorrow night, probably in a risotto with the stock that's simmering away on the stove at the moment.

Apart from a looong walk with S today (a weekend ritual), I've not seen anyone. Instead, I spent last night making this gem:

Too cool, no? I've been eyeing it up for weeks and decided to just BUY the kit yesterday and sod the "oh, but it's a bit silly to spend money on something like that" anxieties. I primed it because I wanted it white and I already had the primer out to do a third shelf for my bedroom and then spent a merry couple of hours trying to put the damn thing together. Not easy. But very engaging.

I spent this afternoon playing with a linocut. Not sure how it'll turn out - I don't have ink at home so I'll have to wait until my next class to print - but it was fun. Off to do some more now.

Oh, and my flowers are growing madly and looking mighty fine. :)

Busy having fun

It's been a busy few weeks. Lots of work (no surprise there), but also lots of socialising and even a few days away.

Flat-wise, the stripping continues:

Flower-wise, the impatiens in my kitchen window are (I know this sounds uber-cheesy but I'll say it anyway).... delightful. Really:

Friend-wise, I had one of my favourite former colleagues and her equally lovely husband staying for a few days on a quick stopover in Paris between travelling in Asia and hiking across Spain. I so enjoyed hanging out with them, especially as the friend is none other than the Casual Baker and she decided to whip up some delicious strawberry yoghurt muffins one sunny afternoon:

Holiday-wise, I and another friend set off with S&R to join them for the first few days hiking through the Pyrennes. Damn but it was GOOD. The weather was phenomenal, the jinks were high, and the walking was just right:

Wisteria in the alley

Another flower-centric weekend. The wisteria in the alley has bloomed:

And I came home on Friday night to find the vacant shop across from my flat has turned into a florist! Super-pleased. I bought some flowers to celebrate.

Although it's been beautifully sunny, I've spent most of the weekend inside, stripping paint from the kitchen window. I worked from 10pm to 1:30am last night and from 11am to 4pm today and only have the central strip to show for my efforts (although it is the most fiddly part, because of the metal). It's not even perfectly finished, as this photo shows. Such hard work - I was already grateful for my parents' work on my bedroom but I now really understand how much my Dad had to do to get such a good finish on the bedroom window.
Oh, and it seems I'm doomed with shelving. I screwed the shelves to the brackets, did some polyfilla-ing and painting to cover the screwheads, and loaded them up with books... to find that I'd forgotten to take account of the added height of the books when working out where to position the shelves on the wall so they look a bit too high now. :(

Shamefree shelving

I managed to borrow an extension lead from work so I put up my shelves this afternoon. I had a day off (my old school friend was over for the weekend and left this afternoon) - holy smoke but it felt good to have a three-day weekend, especially because I had a few sleepless nights last week, finding myself hopping out of bed in the middle of the night to check that my wall wasn't collapsing... hem.
I need to buy some little wood screws to attach the shelves to the brackets before I load them up, and I also want to cover and paint the screws, but the hard bit's out of the way. They're nothing special but I'm pleased.

The hole in the wall...

...just got bigger.
Back in September, I excavated a chunk of my bathroom-kitchen wall. Other than pointing out the hole in the wall to interested visitors, I haven't really thought about it much since then. For some reason, however, the words "dry rot" lodged themselves in my brain last weekend and ended up keeping me awake half the night on Sunday and Monday. I know dry rot smells, and that the absence of a smell meant I was probably in the clear, but I couldn't get past the niggling thought that something dark and dangerous and possibly very expensive was going on behind my bathroom tiles. So I decided to reduce my chances of something rotten by removing at least one potential culprit, namely the rest of the wooden supports.

It was all so rotten I was able to do all this while I was waiting for my washing to go round in the laundrette. The big panel was so flimsily held in place that it just lifted out. All that remains is to get rid of the evidence. It's almost dark enough now for a trip down to the bins...

Fantastic flowers: part II

Just looked up from my computer and found this lovely surprise sitting across the room from me:

It must just have opened in the last ten minutes or so.

I bought this passion flower yesterday but the earth in the flower pot I want to use is so water-logged I can't plant it out yet. Certainly didn't expect to be seeing any flowers on a chilly April evening among the paint pots. :)

Fantastic flowers

I spent the weekend catching up with friends so I didn't get anything done in the flat. Thought I'd share the remarkable shelf-life of these flowers though. I bought them for 4 euros the Saturday after my parents left, as in on the 1st of March. And they're still going strong! Five weeks later!! (Well, strongish - they're no longer on top form but until about a week ago they were still good enough that I would probably have bought them in a flower shop).

Don't know what variety they are, but I'm certainly impressed. Oh, and in all that time I've topped up the water once. I think they must break some kind of record for low maintenance...