The Wayfaring Wordhack

Wow.  Where did the summer go?  It has been such a blessing to be back in France for the past 2.5 months, in our own home,* and I can't believe it's almost over.  The kids can't either, and I'm a bit disturbed to say that they're not excited to go back to Lebanon because they love it so much here. (Ti'Loup is getting a little excited, so that is something.)

I myself feel so torn about being here, living this kind of neither-here-nor-there experience.  I knew I wouldn't be able to invest in things like having a garden and raising chickens again, but I didn't count on the feeling of not stretching into and filling the corners of our home because we won't be here that long.**. The sense of temporary looms over everything I do.  Why clean out all the cobwebs and wash the windows when I know that they will just be there again/dirty when I get back next time?  I know the value of doing those things, but I have so many other, more-pressing-to-my-mind (read: interesting or fun) things to do.

And my involvement in my art class (which was "officially" on break for the summer but still very active) took up a lot of time and energy.  I participated in the July challenge and did 10 paintings, all done with water-soluble oils in a limited palette to continue working on the idea of color temperature.  I'll share a link to a collage.  All except the last one used a mix of Titanium White, French Ultramarine Blue, Ivory Black, and either Yellow Ochre or Cadmium Orange as the warm color. The last one had Prussian Blue instead of the ultramarine.  I  painted the last three en plein air, which was way more fun than I thought it would be.  I have ordered myself an easel for outdoor painting to take back to Lebanon and hope it arrives in time.

We have plans to come back here for Christmas, even though it will be a very short stay, and next year, I think we will wait until the end of June to return in hopes that I might miss the allergy season and actually enjoy the first month back.  That way we'll save on tissue paper and allergy meds. LOL.  I also don't plan on doing any more art courses during that time (though who can say what will arise), so maybe I will have more spoons to take care of house and garden.  And maybe the tendinitis I have been suffering from for the past two years will be well and fully healed; not being able to use my left arm fully (and I, being a lefty) was also a major cause of me not doing much, including driving places.

We did do a lot more cultural stuff than usual, though, really trying to be "tourists," and if I were a better blogger, I'd upload some photos to illustrate all this [please refer to the (-Time) portion of my subject line].

In Clermont, we went to the Henri LeCoq museum (natural history) a couple of times and hung out in the beautiful park of the same name, and once visited Bargouin Museum (archeology; and usually textile, but that part was closed. ARGH. That's the reason we went, and it was supposed to still be open).  We also spent two days at a science festival called Nuées Ardentes at the foot of the Puy de Dôme that had concerts and theater as well as all the science exhibits. 

We went to Carcassonne to visit family and see the famous Bastille Day firework display over the fortified city. 

We got summer passes to Vulcania, where the kids rode the little rollercoaster countless times (makes me wish I could take them to an amusement park with serious rollercoasters) and saw a show with birds of prey and Vulcania's pyrotechnic show, which we had never stayed for before.  Vulcania also has a new planetarium, which was the reason I sprung for the very-expensive passes, and we caught all the shows. 

We also went back to the Fête du Pain,*** but the weather and my head (budding migraine) wasn't on our side, so we didn't stay long.  On the social scene, we attended two birthday parties and had friends come over to hang out with us, as well as hosting an apéritif dinatoire for 30 of our neighbors.

All in all, it has been a very eventful, fun summer.

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*I have been back in France during summer for long stretches of time spent in other people's houses, and it is NOT the same. :P
** I cringe every time I say "not long" knowing that three months of vacation is an extreme luxury, but it is relative to the amount of time needed to accomplish certain things.
***Hilariously, it was another friend from that "hour away" group who let me know the festival was going on again this year.  Guess I didn't learn how to pay attention to local goings-on.

Forgive the hodgepodge nature of this entry, but there has been so much going on this week

- It seems wrong to include this first category in an entry with more trivial stuff, but it has shaped my week and affected me more than the rest, so:

This week, we have been notified of three deaths : the doula who helped bring Farmer Boy and Ti'Loup into the world lost her husband. He died in the night in Cairo, we know not of what. A friend's son, who had been paralyzed and in a coma last year after falling from a roof, made a miraculous recovery only to die a few days ago of a brain aneurysm. Another friend's 20-year-old daughter was in a fatal car wreck on Thursday.  So much grief. So many questions about how well are we loving those around us when we have no idea when our lives on this earth will come to an end. So much anger at myself every time I lose my temper with my own lively, hyper-alive kids.

- Our broody duck is down from 4 duck eggs and 3 goose eggs to one duck egg and 2 goose eggs. I thought the drake was stealing them from her because I saw him in the nest with her. We were prepared to harvest him because we can't have an animal that eats the eggs or young and it woluld be too hard to house him alone and only let him with the others for breeding purposes. So, we separated them and then discovered it was the mother duck eating the eggs. :( She is still on the three, and I don't know whether to take them from her and put them in the incubator (which I detest)or just leave them and see what happens. Sprout is devasted because it is her duck, and of course, what is good for the gander...or drake, in this case, is good for the duck. 

The reason I haven't just moved them to the incubator---besides hating the thing--is that it is still occupied by one egg, which leads me to my next topic:

--Mr. Crude (as I call the man from whom J bought the duck eggs because of his penchant for sexual innuendo, which i often overhear) is either dishonest or not at all careful of his duck breeding. J asked him for Khaki Campbell eggs, and instead of saying he didn't know what that was or saying that he has a mixed flock, he sold J a dozen eggs, only 4 of which were viable.  ( Granted, he was not selling them as hatching eggs, but J was very clear that that is what he meant to do with them.)  Two ducklings hatched on the 11th, one hatched today, and the other should hatch tomorrow (it didn't make it out of the shell) from the look of things, and so far, of the three, none of them appear to be KC ducks.  Two could be Rouen or Rouen crosses, and one could either be a Cayuga or a Swedish cross...or something else entirely. Looks like if I want Khaki Campbells, we are going to have to drive an hour and a half one way and pay 2euros per egg for them.

- Just when I told rimturse  that our hens were doing great on the hatching front, our latest clutch only produced 4 chicks out of 9 eggs. Two chicks were crushed under the mom, two mysteriously disappeared (no sign of them or their shells), and one egg never developped. Then  the mom pretty much rejected them for the first day. The kids babysat the chicks in the warm greenhouse until we could convice the hen to mother  them. All is well now. 

- We finally got some rain, brought in on those lovely dark clouds looming over our daisy-studded field,

The final papers have been approved.

No one has exercised their right to pre-empt the sale.

The money has changed hands.

Now all is needed is a signature next week, and the house will be ours.

A couple of years ago I shared this naive, folk art watercolor I did of our dream home:



And this is the facade of our dream-come-true home:( under a cut because it's big ) We have rolling hills, prairie, woods, nearby mountains, all seasons with white winters... the sea is far away, but we can live with that. Now all we have to do is cultivate the rest of the dream.

I can't wait. When is the moving company going to deliver the boxes!?

Hello and Happy New Year.

2016 was a busy year, full of good and bad. Too much to sum up, even. A few things in no particular order because how can one classify things like this:

We gave birth to Ti'Loup, who is now 7.5 months old.
My mother was diagnosed with esphogal cancer.
My grandmother died.
I wrote a Middle Grade fantasy novel.
We found a house to buy in France (our offer was accepted on New Year's Eve; we have yet to sign the papers).

2017 is the year we leave Egypt and come home, the year we have to declare that we are unschooling Sprout, the year I need to get my picture book finished...

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We're in France now, and everyone is sick, so I don't have much energy. I looked back through LJ, but I don't have the energy to comment on everything. Sending good vibes and get well wishes to those of you who need them.

I wanted to post a snippet last night, but we had an electrical storm, which kept me offline.

I was going to post earlier today and then learned about our car being stolen. That kind of knocked the wind out of my posting sails.

I'm going to do it now, though, late though it may be, because I want to look at something pretty before I go to bed.

I haven't taken many pictures in Egypt, but being back in France makes me want to capture all the nature I can, a digital hoard to take back with me to the desert.  So this week, I took some whimsical photos of flora:

When we arrived in France last week, I was struck by all the flowers in bloom. My first thought was of how different places have different spring colors. The very next day, asakiyume posted about the very same thing.

Here is a sampling of spring on this side of the Black Mountains:

Our Internet service was suspended (at our request) earlier than planned, last Sunday, so I wasn't able to post before we left Egypt. Due to our airline engaging in gambling, yesterday's travels could have been hell.* But we overcame. Once the initial anger engendered by the "oops, we overbooked and you are screwed" faded, we kept our calm and did our best to stay in a good mood despite having to travel for 14 hours instead of 7 with a baby and small child.

Now we are in France and life is good.  Last night and this morning, I could literally feel tension melting out of me. Even the muscles in my hands loosened. Amazing feeling. This morning we had breakfast by a lake, and Sprout fed wild ducks and cavorted in the water. We took a nap in the grass under the trees. We listened to silence and birdsong, and even Sprout remarked several times, "there aren't any klaxons here!"

Oh yes, life is good. Will be here and there for the rest of the summer.  Be well, my friends.

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* I'm busy relaxing, so I really don't feel like ranting so I'm not going into details.

A post of this and that:

--> Found out who was messaging me on Yahoo! Turns out it was someone I know, which is a relief.

--> We are going to the Cantal for a couple of days, starting tomorrow. It is an area of France that we really liked when we visited a couple several years back for one of our anniversaries. We might like to settle there, so we're going back to see if the second impression is as good as the first.

--> Our time in France is almost up. I can't believe we have to fly back to Cairo in less than a week. All of us are trying to put that fact out of our minds. Which is sad. Very sad.

--> I didn't forget Snippet Sunday yesterday, but I was feeling a bit ill (I think lunch at the restaurant for my fil's birthday was a bit heavy; something didn't agree with me, in any case).  If I had posted, I would have talk about progress made on the blanket and the lovely time I had attending a fabric-dyeing workshop at a textile museum in a nearby village. A post about that will be forthcoming, I hope.  But first, off to the Cantal...

This a journey through photos post so I shall put it behind a cut.  Come in and walk a while with me.


( If there are road signs, they are few )

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Photos: 1) Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, NM, USA; 2) Kemmerer, WY, USA; 3) Wheatfield near Vinon, France; 4) Capitol Reef, Fruita, UT, USA; Yellowstone, WY, USA; 5) Uyuni Salt Flats, Bolivia; 6) World's deadliest road, Bolivia.

For lunch, we have sourdough pasta, which the Sprout helps roll out.  We take a hilarious video of her weilding the rolling pin; sadly it is not yet edited. Perhaps I will post it along with the recipe for the noodles.


While the Sprout snoozes, I slip through the shadows, down hills and up, to our special spot on the coast.


Amongst the things I see there is this:


Can you guess what it is? Find out in part 3.