A Marathon Weekend....

This weekend was Jarnac Marathon weekend, we had 9 runners staying with us on Friday evening, and they all needed breakfast at 6:30am on Saturday morning so no lay-ins for us on Saturday either. So having feed the runners and waved them off at 7:30 we cleaned out the rooms ready for our marathon run on the washing machine, and I got to work trying to install the new ceiling for the new bathroom I am working on.

I worked the whole day Saturday until the light ran out and it really did not look like I had done a great deal, but as they say it is all in the preparation. Bogdan our builder told me on Friday afternoon I needed to double up on the insulation I had put up which meant lowering the ceiling by installing ceiling rails that hung from the existing wooden roof struts. He told me I was putting them in the wrong way, I was fixing the rails along the roofing struts instead of across them, but this worked out better for installing the marine plasterboard. By the end of the day my arms and my shoulders were really suffering, I find it hard work working above my head for a whole day, marine plasterboard may only be 1.5mm thicker than normal plaster board, but that still makes it a lot heavier than the normal stuff, so I collapsed in bed around 9:00pm and slept quite soundly.

Sunday was tidying up day and cake making day, it is Fleurs birthday next weekend, so we needed to make cakes for school and for her party on Saturday afternoon. Fleur and I did the tidying up together, we tidied up the mess I left from yesterdays work and the mess that Bogdan left on Friday, I’d rather tidy up for him, then I get a bit more real work from him for my hard earned Euros.

The cake making was nothing short of a disaster, for someone who spent a year making them professionally. It came down to not knowing your ingredients, or at least trying to match an English recipe to French ingredients, and then learning the French way of doing things. The first two cakes I made did not rise a millimeter, then I discovered that although I had got flour for patisserie it was not self raising flour. Then it was trying to get the amount of baking power right, which I failed to do on the third cake and I think only just got right on the 4th cake, so finally after 4 hours of cooking we managed one dubious cake for decorating, I then discovered that my ready rolled lazy persons icing had gone missing, so Fleur and I made our own, and finally we managed to get one cake decorated. (you can see the results on Franca's blog). Franca is going to have a go at another cake during the week, using a French recipe, and I think that is the key, trying to use French ingredients with an English recipe does not always go smoothly, as we have discovered more than already.

So its Monday morning in the rain, which has fallen for most of the weekend, and I am at Bordeaux airport waiting for my Easyjet flight back to Luton, November is nightmare flight month, as everything is expensive (half term holidays), the winter time tables have started, and the best time slots have been given to winter destinations, so I am on a 12:20pm flight back to the UK and on Friday the return takes off at just after 9:00am so I am loosing a lot of billable time, luckily over the last few weeks I’ve built up a lot of additional hours credit to tide me over.