Birthdays and lists

Easter Sunday

The rest of Friday and Saturday were overcast and rainy, cold and windy.  Good respite from work anyway and we’ve done a lot of reading and playing chess.  The rain has settled the dust, thank heavens.  I went to the restaurant yesterday to do some emailing but having bought my expensive drink with the last of our cash and settled myself at an uncomfortably high bar table, there was no connection.  Very annoying, and I haven’t enough money to buy bread this morning.  It’s calm today, so back to work.  It remains cloudy and cool but the sun is threatening to come out.

Easter Monday,

It’s Mike’s birthday today.  He’s 61 and has finally caught me up. We went for dinner in the marina restaurant – Mike had a steak with Roquefort sauce and I had duck breast, both cooked rare and totally scrumptious.  It was very pleasant sitting out on the veranda watching the sunset, before large black clouds started roiling in from the west, surrounded by mozzies and listening to frogs croaking.  It could have been anywhere in Africa.  I took my computer along and managed a bit of emailing at the same time.  

Mike has worked like a dog all day yesterday and today with the electric sander and covered himself from head to foot in nasty poisonous red paint (again).  There just seems to be SO MUCH of this bloody paint.  Trouble is, lazy sod, he has just lightly sanded in the past and put another coat over the top.  This time around, we are stripping down to the basics so it’s a lot of hard work.  The job is going slowly and painfully because the circles of sandpaper won’t stick to the electric sander for more than a few minutes before they fly off into the stratosphere and you have to take a new one.  I run around and retrieve the rejected bits of paper and find that the sandy side is hardly used but the other side just won’t stick to the machine anymore.  Bastard.  

I have been working on the rudder (that’s the back bit that slides from side to side to turn the boat from left to right - or port to starboard if you must) scraping old bits of glue filler ready for replacing so we can make it smooth and paint over.  The slight cracks that have developed in the paintwork over the normal design of the rudder have caused panic in some potential buyers (who don’t know what they are looking at) so we are making it all lovely and smooth and clean again.

There are so many things to be done to get the boat ready that I make long copious lists so I won’t forget anything.  I mainly make lists because I just love ticking things off as I get them done.  But the trouble with lists is that as you tick things off so you tend to add new ones, and the worst is when you spend all day labouring and realise that not one of the jobs done was on your list in the first place!  I’m always rather childishly tempted to add them to my list just so I can cross them off again.  Equally unpleasant is having to re-do jobs.  For example, one of my first jobs when we arrived was to scrub and then lightly sand the interior section of the cockpit and then oil the wood with Tung Oil.  We’ve always preferred that rather matt look to the very shiny look of varnished wood.  However, there was a hole in the oil bottle and the oil had become rather thick, so it hasn’t sunk in nicely.  Rather it sits sluggishly on top of the wood looking dull and has this annoying propensity to gather every particle of dust, and there’s plenty about.  So, I have to start again, re-sanding and re-oiling with thinned down oil.  Do I need this kind of aggro?

One item I must put on my list, because I forget to do it every day, is to shave my legs.  A veritable forest has sprouted up which is a bit of a disgrace because I wear knee high pants and my skinny, heavily bewhiskered little calves hang out on show.  Nobody seems to notice but perhaps they are too polite to comment.

Mike is a great scavenger and returns from the rubbish dump with all manner of interesting and useful things – most notably some good quality cockpit cushions and a fan.  It’s amazing what people chuck out, like these very nice cushions.

Tuesday 26 April

After a busy morning (Mike in the engine and me in the laundry) we scrubbed up as best we could, jumped on our bikes and went into town for our appointment with the Société Générale bank.  The gentleman we saw was very nice (I kept my hairy legs well tucked under his table) but he wasn’t happy with our letter of residence from the Marina as this is not our principal residence.  It was his first day at work here and he had never heard of the marina.  However, with proof of our residence in UK he will happily open us an account.  Pas de problème.  So, now we just need our good friend Allan to post us a recent utility bill from home.  We will be pleased as it annoys us to pay huge bank fees every time we draw cash here.

Wednesday 27 April

Market day again and we found some good bargains.  We very cannily arrive late when the stall holders are packing up and want to get rid of as much stuff as possible before they go.  They put bunches of stuff like four sweet red peppers, five beef tomatoes, seven avocados, eight apples, or nine pears in a basket for €1 each.  We buy, lots.  I made my own tomato paste for a Bolognese sauce and it was the best sauce I’ve ever made.

Man of the Year

The delectable young Patrice (our man in the marina), has won, by a wide margin, our Man of the Year award.  Patrice is a marine surveyor by trade and has a business in the marina called Odyssey Marine that specialises in hull treatment.  In spite of being extremely busy, he has found lots of time for us and given us good useful advice on what to do on the boat, as well as lending us the sanding machine and giving us loads of sand paper for which he will take no payment. He’s a darling and we adore him.  Thinking he had no English I have always conversed with him in French which is, of course, so good for me, but yesterday Mike went to see him for something and had a good conversation with him in English!