My Grandsons will be eating their hearts out. xx

This week has been one of frustration and sheer joy and achievement and it all started on the day that the digger man never turned up and we waited and waited and waited. I could see that Mike was getting fed up and tired of being let down. During the wait I called Car Glass for the umpteen time to get the windscreen replaced on the camper and I was assured that it would all happen on Friday. And happily it did. I reminded the engineer that he had to be kind to me, as I had been battling with this problem since the 10^th February and he was very kind, quick, considerate and apologetic. 

                                                                

We then started to investigate our sewage system here at the house and whilst we did not want to go out in case digger fella should turn up we took the lids off the tanks that appeared to be part of our cess pit and decided that it all looked a bit iffy, though it didn’t smell, and called the suction lorry people in to explain how this all worked and if it still did work. The digger man called to say he was only going to call us on Wednesday to say when he would start and a huge communication complication unravelled itself and a new plan was put into place, again.

We now had the rest of the week to fill as the work for the vans was on hold until Monday.

On Thursday the water board turned up to lay on the supply for the vans and it took over the whole road, with a mini digger two tipper trucks five men, and we saw a couple of bottles of wine in there as well and then they drove the digger over my lawn with out a by or leave as to the effect this might have on my nervous system. I gritted my teeth and tried not to grumble too much. It was all over by 3:00 and this included a two hour lunch but they were gone and the road was clear and we have water on site, which is a result.

I have a nice little routine in the mornings. I walk HOSS once around the garden, turn on my Mac, switch  the kettle on for a cuppa and then in the quiet and calm of a morning in Brevands I sit at my screen to watch Face Book and catch up with e-mails but on Thursday, to my horror, the internet was down, no lights flashing “good morning” on the router, no blipping icons to say that we were connected, nothing. I called customer services and spoke to Florence who was probably sitting on the Ivory Coast drinking pina calarda because she was extremely chilled out about my disaster and bounced a signal to my box climbed into it, as they seem to be able to do these days and pronounced it dead. OK, so this meant a trip to St Lo and a scary visit to the Orange shop where the sales assistant once shouted across the shop, ‘I don’t deal with English People’ and I had to jump in very quickly to keep my place in the queue and prove that I could also be very stroppy and spoke French well enough to cope with her. This time Mike had a cunning plan to drop me off at the door so that I could get my number and join the queue whilst he found a parking space. I was left stranded on the pavement, Orange router box in my arms too afraid to face the English hating witch from hell,  but there was no queue and I strolled straight into the engineering department where the engineer remembered me because I nearly cried on his shoulder last time and he replaced my box,  lit it up and put in all my pass words to configure it. He spoke very slowly to me and made me laugh which was a bonus and we walked out like a couple of happy customers.

The weather is amazing and we have been catching up with  silly little jobs like making a  hole for the new rotary clothes dryer, boring,  but essential, and replacing a set of precariously positioned tiles on the tractor shed that have been threatening to drop off for the past four years.

We only had a few spares and Mike had to mix and match and even screw up a broken one to make good. I watched and passed him his tools and noticed that these tiles were made in Carentan when the tile factory was where the new swimming pool is now, all that home spun economy, gone, but we still have a roof full to show for it

Well the digger arrived Sunday morning and the work begins Monday. It is an old bucket of a machine but in a very fetching shade of yellow and I know it is going to be fun to watch. The plants at the front of the picture are the flowers I transplanted out of the allotment all starting to acclimatise to their new position.  I have flowers already and the promise of a bright display.

Well you have to do it don’t you, when was the last time any of you sat in the seat of a digger this size, my Grandsons will be eating their hearts out. xx