Chicken little, chicken large!!!

OUCH!!!!!! You may remember we bought some chickens last Spring well I think one of them is overeating!!! We get 4 eggs nearly every day from 4 chickens which in itself is excellent but then we got an absolute whopper of an egg. Basically two full size eggs in one.

Oh and as an aside to this fascinating egg fact I have managed about 1000 words of wip 2. Just thought I would slip that in, wouldn't want anyone to think that I was actually writing again!!

And thanks to Debs for telling me how to link to previous posts although I haven't mastered the photos yet but will keep trying.

Anyway have to go now and decide how to cook my monster egg.

Snow and writing friends!

The first photo was taken on the 29th January' from my study window. An unexpected fall of snow, luckily it was gone by the next day. Unfortunately I was out running when it started snowing so I was somewhat bedraggled by the time I got home. But I don't get wet very often so I can't complain. The second photo shows my furry friends who sit in my study and keep me company while I try to write. They are very undemanding and non- critical. This is particularly useful as I am reading my wip into my laptop using Dragon software and I don't want any sniggering in the background.

What I have noticed is how useful it is to read aloud what I have written, it really shows where some passages are not working.

The down side is there will be an awful lot of rewriting to do!!! And now the sun is shining and I may just have to do some very important work in the garden.

New year, new study, new impetus!

I would be doing this post with my new Dragon software but I am watching the T Twenty cricket[England v the Aussies] so it's too noisy, but so far I am impressed and looking forward to making progress on my new wip and the second draft of wip no.1. I also have a new study, the first time I have had a place I can call my own, and it's great. No excuses now other than all the usual ones that we mega procrastinators can call up at any time, but I shall try to be good. And I have got the wifi on my laptop sorted out, we popped into the local computer shop and they tweaked a few nobs and hey presto my wifi is working properly. So now I can sit in my armchair, watching tele while blogging instead of sitting at my desk writing. Real progress there then!!!!!So the photos, in reverse order, show the original kitchen when we bought this old house in 2005.

By April of this year we had moved to part of the new kitchen so we could start demolishing the old kitchen. I have to say it was not a moment too soon, the old kitchen was really beginning to depress me and when we uncovered the old water heater we were extremely relieved that no major disaster had occurred!!!! I think you will agree that my study is a vast improvement on the kitchen and my old desk at the top of the house. See My window on the world. Although the view is not as impressive, this morning I was visited by a red squirrel who was checking on the availability of almonds on our Almond tree. Of course no camera to hand!

For my next post I will try and sort out why I can't get photos in between the text and how to link to other posts . Any advice will be very gratefully received as I am still a technophobe and require instructions in words of one syllable or less. Now I must concentrate on the cricket, I mean writing.

Blog birthday, four years old today!

Happy New Year to all the Novel Racers and everyone else who pops by from time to time.
I can hardly believe where the time has gone. 4 years since my first blog. I have been a bad blogger recently but one of my goals for 2011 is to be more consistant in everything I do, including blogging.
I am still having sleep problems but over-indulging over Xmas and the New Year has not helped. I am hoping that a regime in January of 'healthy' food and 'much' less wine will improve things. For Xmas I treated myself to Dragon speech recognition software. I have had a little play with it and I think it is going to help me enormously. It is much quicker than my typing and more accurate. My bugbear now is that the wifi on my laptop keeps dropping out, so at the moment my laptop is connected to the router by a cable in the kitchen, where I am standing up instead of sitting comfortably at my new desk in my new study. Over the weekend we are going to try to sort this out and then I will post some photos of my fabulous new work area. Where writing will be so much easier!!!!!! No more excuses either.
So that's it for now as it is time for my Saturday run, but please come by again next week and see how I am getting on with Dragon.

Insomnia rules KO'D Xmas 2010

Sorry for the long silence but I have been struggling with serious insomnia for some months now and I haven't been able to string more than a couple of coherent sentences together. So no writing or anything creative for a long time. Now I am seeing a Doctor and am having acupuncture and taking homeopathic medicines and I think sleep is slowly returning. I am hopeful, no determined, that the New year will see me return to my writing and blogging, so if anyone still comes to look at this blog from time to time then please come back after the 8th January.

In the meantime I hope y0u all have a Happy Christmas and a creative New Year. See you in 2011.

La Rentree and dreams of Wildfires!

Time for children to start a new school year, in France it's called La Rentree and the supermarket aisles have been filled, since the middle of August, with all the paraphanalia associated with school. The sight of all those pens and pencils and notebooks has fired my desire to start writing again. I have spent the summer lazing around, I am tanned from reading indulgently in the sun, but now my fingers are itching and ideas are floating around in my head.

I can sit outside in the early evening as the heat dissipates with the setting sun, it's quiet with just the occasional sound of a car or a dog barking disconsolately.

Although on Saturday it was a very different story. It started at about 3.30pm with the sound of a small plane circling overhead, nothing particularly unusual about that but soon it was joined by other planes flying over our house. It was then that I noticed the smoke over the hill behind our house. I called the OH to come and look. As the planes came low over the house we could identify them as Canadairs, the planes the French use to fight wild fires. It was obvious there was a fire in the hills behind our house, how close we didn't know but the smoke had dissappeared so we guessed it wasn't too close. But we spent an interesting time watching the planes coming low over the house. We found out later that about 40 hectares of garrigue[quite some distance from us] had been destroyed but no properties had been threatened. It is something that happens quite regularly in this part of southern France during the summer months, and unfortunately the fires are sometimes started deliberately. It didn't occur to me to take any photos until the 'excitement' was nearly over, I wouldn't make a very good journalist, and I missed the 4 planes all flying over together!!! So all I have is a rather grainy photo of what could be any plane. What is perhaps more interesting is that a week or so ago I had a dream/nightmare where there was a wildfire raging behind our house and we were trying to keep our house and our neighbours house hosed down with water. The house on the hill behind us was ablaze. As someone who very rarely remembers their dreams this was unusual to say the least. Premonition or what?

So tomorrow will see me back at my desk, pen in hand and notebook at the ready. I just hope I can remember some of the ideas I have had recently!!!

Oh and well done to Jackie for spotting the sheep hiding in the dining room. I am busy laying floor tiles at the moment so there may be more photos soon. Of course Jackie you could see the progress for yourself!!!!!!

And I really do intend to be a more diligent blogger this Autumn.

August is a Wicked Month!

Half way through August already, the sun keeps shining and I am reminding myself to enjoy this glorious weather. We have been to the sea to swim and have lunch, there has been free music in the local villages plus a Folk Festival and visits to friends for BBQ's and generally having a good time. And on Saturday we had a party to celebrate our wedding anniversary. All good fun. Summer is a busy time in the south of France and we are doing our best to fit in as much as possible.

And just to prove that we are still fitting in a bit of DIY the photo is our new dining room. This is part of one of the two extensions we have had built. The furniture and contents have been in store since we moved here more than two years ago, so it was good fun to open some more boxes. We are still working on the kitchen with the floor tiles due to be delivered at the end of August, then we can really make progress. We are also working on the study[old kitchen] which will mean that I can finally get all my books out.

The title of this post refers to a book by Edna O'Brian. I have been re-reading an assortment of books out of neccessity, although last week we cycled to Quillan to our friends book stall and I found two books I wanted to read: Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits her first novel which for some reason I had not read, it's an amazing book. She is a real story teller with a remarquable style, I could barely put it down. The other book was by Margaret Forster: The Diary of an Ordinary Woman. If you get the chance to read this book do not make my mistake which was to read the Authors Note at the end of the book as it rather coloured my enjoyment. Nevertheless another excellent book from this Author. We shall cycle to Quillan again tomorrow so I can change my books, hopefully I can find some more gems. And I am beginning to feel like picking up my pen again after rather a long break when I just could not feel inspired. Sometimes you just have to accept that. Now I think it's time to sit in the sun and see if I can come up with some ideas for the wip. Oh it's a hard life sometimes but someone's got to do it.