Time for a c(h)at?

Mondays tend to be a bit odd here. Often I think that I will start the week with gusto to find that what I wanted to get on with isn’t possible. Strangely the banks are all closed every Monday, yes really, and so things that are financially related can get complicated.

Given that it is almost the end of the month I needed to organise my cotisations, the tax that I pay monthly on turnover of my business. Filling in the return on line and submitting it is relatively straight forward. It is then necessary to authorise for the payment to be taken from my bank account again relatively straight forward. The tricky element is trying to work out how much money is actually in my bank account. Unlike my UK account the online balance is not real time which can make calculating what is in the account really difficult. In the end I made sense of what was happening and all was sorted.

First thing this morning my husband had gone to meet a friend at our gite d’etape and they were supposed to be plumbing in a new water tank ready for the electrician to come and connect it up. At the moment we don’t have sufficient water capacity for the number of rooms that we have, so we cannot advertise all of them. After about 2 hours they returned and told me that they needed my opinion on something. So we all went and stared at the space and the pipe work. After about an hour we were back to where we started and decided that the new tank would have to go where we had initially decided that it should. The one issue though that had come to light was that the tank has to be 40cm off the floor; therefore my husband needs now to build a cradle for the tank. So lack of wood stopped play.

In the cottage we have what we call the piggery, we believe that was what it was used for years ago. It is now our utility room and has been tiled and has power and light. At the moment however we have a problem with mice. A couple of weeks ago they were up in the loft. A humane mouse trap caught two and they were release at the far end of our field. We appear to have no more problems. The trap has been moved to the piggery however there is clear evidence that the mice are having a riot and they are ignoring the trap. I have been trying to persuade my husband for some time that we need a cat. We chatted about it today but he still doesn’t want one, yet he prefers them to dogs! I don’t want mice. We gave the piggery a really good tidy and clean and the trap has been re-set and baited. We will wait to see what happens next. Watch this space with regards to a cat.

On a final note, a friend is having a wood burning cooker fitted in two days’ time and I bought a tumble dryer yesterday. It was 23 ̊C today and the sky was cloudless. Let’s hope this bodes well for the next few months.