Harry Bear

Last week saw the last of our summer visitors and what a super week it was. The sun shone and we spent the week visiting various rivers around here, lazing around with the dinghy, watching Oliver fishing and the dragonflies whizzing by. The little ones also spent quite a lot of time in the pool.  Our youngest grandchild, Harry, proved to be a bit of an ace shot with the water guns as our friend Sue found out.
Sadly all good things must come to an end and we took them back to the airport on Monday. It seems a little dispiriting now, we know that it will be next year before they are back. Still at least we have a short visit to England to see them all to look forward to.



It has been incredibly hot and humid this week and we are on an orange alert for the canicule (heatwave). We have gone from eating outside for every meal to just having breakfast outdoors. The plants in the garden are struggling and it is taking up a lot of time to keep them watered - on the plus side the weeds have stopped growing.

The one that got away

The gite is fully booked until the middle of October so I live in hope that everyone vacates early on a Saturday morning so that I can do the cleaning while it is still a little bit cooler. We have thunderstorms predicted for tomorrow so it may be a little better after that.

Last weekend was fete weekend in our village and after giving Friday night a miss we were ready to party on Saturday. (We are getting too old for 2 consecutive nights). We were invited to a neighbours/friends house for aperitifs before going down to the village hall and Harry and Oliver kept everyone entertained and even managed to teach them a little english.  The next day when we asked Oliver "what do you want to do today" he answered "go back to the party".



Bryan is still working on the roof. It seems to be taking forever to finish, but hopefully by the end of the weekend we will be done, except for the hips - we need cooler weather for these so it will have to wait until after our holiday in September. The windows are ready to be delivered when the factory goes back to work from their summer break, we just need to find a front door that we both like. Maybe thats a job for next week. With a bit of luck and some hard work we hope to get the doors and windows fit before our holiday.

Dragonfly

We ventured into Beziers yesterday to the Sous Prefecture to try and sort the paperwork out for importing the motorbikes over here - we needed to know if the certificate of conformity we can get would be acceptable - surprisingly it is -  its now on order, but I'm not counting my chickens that its going to be as easy as the lady said, its only taken 8 months to get most of the paperwork sorted. Watch this space. On the way home I spotted the first machine out in the vineyards - the vendanges has started. I don't think I have known it be so early, still it means that we will be able to help with the grape picking before our holiday.