A week in the void

Well you'd have thought, being guest free, that I'd have knuckled down and got a few more jobs crossed off the list. This is not actually the case at all as I somehow aimlessly slipped into a void for an entire week. In this incredibly dark place I was both mentally and physically tortured by 3 monsters who were running riot for the duration. To compound the torture I also took 3 days out from my intravenous alcohol drip making me the most delightful person to be around.

Yesterday I finally escaped the darkest depths of the black hole by taking flight on my "tracteur tondeuse" for 5 hours. No mowing trip is ever an enjoyable one though as, once again I broke the mower, twice, and the rain continued to dampen my great escape. Prior to the mowing Peter and I got on and pruned all the trees in the back garden so that I could get around without having to duck every 5 minutes. This was when I realised there was an issue with the chain saw. As well as stalling every thirty seconds, it was billowing great foggy clouds of smoke. All the multiple starts were finally too much for it as the pull chord came off in my hand. DOH DOH DOH

This mornings job was to carry out chainsaw repairs and see if I could identify the cause of the problem . Billowing smoke would suggest too much oil in the mix so I went to the fuel can to see what the two-stroke was like. As I glanced into the can it looked decidedly pink and far more viscous than I would have expected. Further investigation revealed an empty tub of two stroke oil adjacent to the petrol can and that pretty much answered everything ""PETER"".

We are once again blessed with typical Norman summer weather. All I can say is that I am so glad I finished the roof when I did as we must have had 4 inches of rain over the last week. The news to brighten any dull day though is that the kids are finally back to school in just over a weeks time. Jane has sorted all of their books ready for the new school year and Josh, although a little nervous, is really looking forward to starting college.

You may be wondering about the picture, well I haven't taken any in a while so found this tasty looking feller from a couple of months back.

And then there were none

We are finally guest free having just shipped my mum, along with my niece and nephews, off to the port this morning. It's been a manic few weeks, with the first guests arriving at the end of July and numbers peaking at over 35 during our softball weekend. Fortunately the peace and tranquillity will be short lived with the arrival of Steve and Laura in 8 sleeps time.

Not a lot else has been happening here since I finished the roof. I've started the gradual clearing up process and have been returning all the tools and equipment to it's designated locations. The scaffold tower has been erected at the end of the hose so that I can replace some of the stonework around the perlins that I changed on the roof. This will be a two person job so I shall save it until the arrival of Stevey.

Another job complete

After an awful lot of rain stopping play on numerous occasions over the last couple of months. Today I Finally managed to complete phase 1 of the roof project. My knees, ankles and fingers are suffering from the steep angle and the sharp tiles and clips. We've had Adam Harry and Hollie here for the last week so I set them to work cutting and moving tiles for me, making the last stage of the job run very smoothly.

We've been continuing with the gradual wind down from the softball weekend. Last night we were down to 12 of us here and tonight we will get down to 9. It seems a lifetime since there were just 5 of us here, but come Thursday we'll be alone again. Thankfully not for too long as we have Steve, Laura, Maddi and Eleanor arriving at the end of the month.

I have to decide which job to start next. Thankfully Jeremy crossed one job off the list for me by re-puttying a whole load of the windows. Louise and I crossed another job off by digging 9 trailer loads of saw dust out of the log shed. Kirsty and Hollie mucked out the horse and donkeys stable and Adam and Harry have dug up all the compost heaps. Over the last 3 weeks I've neglected the veg patch some what, but Jane waded in to the jungle yesterday and managed to locate some of the crops amongst the 4 foot high weeds.

The Parties Over

Our annual summer softball event is slowly drawing to a close. There are a few guests here stil I feel a very big down coming after this enormous high. Once again I have made new friends and rekindled ties with old friends. All I can say is that if your wealth was measured by how great your friends are, I'm a very rich man.

This year, much humour has arisen from the use of sat navs and tom toms. Probably at the time, for the people concerned. it was highly stressful and infuriating but looking back over the events has been incredibly funny. Keith and Sue came in to one of the Northern ports and planned a leisurely drive down to us. Their sat nav was programmed to bring them here avoiding toll roads, but the main road out of Bologne was closed and things went rapidly down hill from there onwards. After a few hours of aimless driving around in circles they decided to reprogram the sat nav using tolls. The first words uttered from the sat nav were "please board the ferry" Not knowing where they were, they found themselves on the wrong side of the road with the disembarking traffic from the ferry coming straight at them. Luckily it was not a cross channel ferry otherwise they'd still be on route to us now. Boarding the ferry with no idea of it's destination Keith adopted the classic head in hands rocking position quite often seen in metal establishments. They finally arrived with us early evening, having taken 8 hours after landing in France.

The weekend has brought us the normal array of weather for this area of France in the middle of summer. Drizzle, rain, scorching sunshine, gale force winds, thunder, lightning, scorching sunshine . Did I metion torrential rain? The weather did however pinnacle on Sunday night with one of the biggest, brightest rainbows I've seen in a very long time. Even with all the rain, spirits were not dampened and we partyed on like the Brits that we are.

Depressingly the amount of softball played may have reached an all time low. We did give four softball virgins a baptism of fire on Saturday, straight into a game with no training at all. I'm sure if we'd had better weather we'd have got them playing pretty well by the end of the weekend but it was not to be. To help fill in time between showers, our virgins knocked out a pub quiz. Teams were drawn from a hat and the best team name was "Halal, is it meat you're looking for?" I'd love to tell you who won but I'd had a couple of beers by that point.

We had quite a few occasions of people sloping off to bed early. Not all of them with the intentions of sleeping. Darren managed to squeeze in a 4 hour power nap before having an early night. Trish passed out on the bed just after 10 both nights having vowed that she'd go the distance Sunday. She had been incredibly funny all through Sunday evenings French lesson. She decided it would be good to teach the french some of the more popular english language in return for them teaching her some french. No messing about and with a strong Northern accent she came out with "cunnnttt" Not once, twice or three times, maybe 20 after which I think they got the message. She then made the effort to learn some french so I told her the worst thing she could say to a French person was "moissoneuse batteuse" she thought this was great and used it lots. Every time she told tthe frenchies, they were laughing so she thought it must be a great word. Bsically translated it means "combine harvester" but no ones telling Trish that.

After years of suspicion, Russel and I are convinced that Charlotte works for MI5. She endured a 2 hour long interrogation where she refused to tell us anything, sticking to the story that she was a computer programmer for BA. She was cross examined by Nigel on some highly technical programming terms and she was not convincing with her answers. Even when she was asked "What do you call M in the pub" and "where's the button that makes your number plate rotate" she was giving nothing away.

Sunday lunch and dinner sort of rolled into one long eating fest with a very breif game of softball squeezed inbetween. Once again the pizza oven worked well, cooking over 50 pizzas to feed the troops. My band of avid workers did the most excellent job of prepping everything for the meals and once again I took the credit for all the hard work.

Time for me to get back to some tidying up now. Thanks to everyone for making the effort to get hear and, as always, making the party at Chateau Larcombe an event to remember. Looking forward to seeing you all again very soon.

Love me xx