Mother’s Day

It’s Mother’s Day on this side of the Atlantic.  What a nice day I’ve had!  It started with a Skype Breakfast in Bed with my daughters… they had set their Dad up to bring me breakfast in bed along with the iPad so they could Skype me – how sweet is that?  After a lovely chat & lie-in, with hyper-terriers curled up beside me in non-hyper mode, it was time to haul myself out of bed…

It was a beautiful warm spring day and we decided to walk up to Reillanne market with the hyper-terriers.  There are lots of teeny-tiny flowers starting to appear everywhere – I think we are going to have a very verdant spring here after all the rain we’ve had, it should make for some nice photos.

After lunch (potato and jalapeno soup YUM, my favourite!) we went up to see the horses and gave them both a good scrub for a photo shoot.  Aero is moulting like mad, Flurry not so much, but it won’t be long before he joins in as well.  Sneak preview of the photo shoot :

You’ll find out more about this during the week!

Cinnamon had a go at horse-riding.  She had read the book and she knew that she should first introduce herself to the horse :

(by the way this is NOT my gobsmacked face)

Well, actually, it was more like Flurry saying :

HELLO!  YOU’RE VERY SMALL! CAN I EAT YOU?

and yeah, she snapped at him right after this photo.  He’ll know not to try eating Small Brown Dog paw again…

Once I put her on his back, she was surprisingly not too petrified.

and I was even able to step away from her

I suspect if I was sitting on Flurry as well she’d be quite comfy, snuggled into me. I don’t know that she’ll ever match Frances Taylor’s BeAnneDuvet, though!

After fun & games with the horses, we came home to find dinner had dried out, but fortunately it hadn’t actually reached cremation point yet, so once I chucked a bit of hot water into it, it kind of reconstituted itself – duck cassoulet with lentils (and a glass of white wine….. ahhhh).

The weather has turned a corner and I reckon Spring is just a breath away.  No more excuses, it’s time to get my saggy butt back in the saddle.  It WILL happen this week, and keep happening thereafter.

For those who have been waiting with bated breath (all two of you) here is The Gobsmacked Face :

Poor Aero thought I was going to assault him and ducked.  Bless.

(all photos in this post are courtesy of The LSH)

Sunday Stills – Potluck

I’ve been missing from Sunday Stills for the past couple of weeks – life got ahead of me! This week, the theme is Potluck – whatever we want, so when we took a walk to see the floodwaters of the Calavon river, I took a few shots which I will share here.

First of all, here’s one I took for “The Number Seven” a couple of weeks (eek actually four!) ago and didn’t get around to posting.  I was quite pleased with this…

…I just didn’t have TIME to blog! (Get it? Get it??)

We’ve had three days of heavy rain since I came back from Ireland on Tuesday and the rivers and streams are all running at full spate.  We walked to Le Saute du Moin to see the waterfall and sure enough it was a lot fuller than it was on our last visit (and a lot less frozen)

This is one of the tributaries that flow into the pool which feeds the waterfall.  This was running pretty fast too, and I had to keep a close eye on Cinnamon to make sure she didn’t decide to go swimming.

A much more peaceful point of view :

And finally, this is a ford across the Calavon at the North end of the Gorge d’Oppedette.  Normally, there is just a trickle of water here and you can walk across it in ordinary shoes.  Not today.

Virtual Friends?

Part of the reason I started this blog was to keep in touch with family and friends back in Ireland, but a side-effect has been a whole pile of new on-line friends – there’s all the gang at Haynet for starters, there’s a load of Facebook friends, there’s the folk at A Matter of Horse and then there’s the twenty-five people who have taken the time to click the “follow” button here at blogspot.com. Some of you keep your thoughts to yourselves, but it’s nice to know that you all enjoy reading of our adventures here in Provençe.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting two “virtual friends” in the last couple of weeks.  First of all there was Sara, from Le Petit Village.  Sara is a weeny bit younger than me (a year or two, y’know) but we have a lot in common – an Irish mother, dogs, rugby, Provence, and Barry’s tea.  Well, of course we hit it off.  Cinny and Cookie took to her straight away, and then we went to visit the Boyz, who were appropriately attired in mud for the occasion.  Sara didn’t seem to mind the mud, or their extreme enthusiasm when being offered apples, so yeah, I think we’ll be meeting again, if only to bemoan the Irish team’s performance…

Máire & Ben

Then there was Máire, whose blog I found when I was researching barefoot horses a year and a half ago.  Well, it’s a small, small world – it turns out that Máire lives literally a stones throw from my mother, so when I was in Ireland last week I called down to see her.  We talked horse… and talked horse… and talked horse… and my poor mother was bored to distraction, I’m sure, but she kept smiling and nodding!  It was so lovely to meet Máire, Ben and Cloud, and of course, the two-legged family members, and I think Máire enjoyed hearing about “how it used to be ” by the lake!

Cloud

Who will be next to make the transformation from virtual friend to real friend?  It looked like it would be Stella at Cavalier Attitude – there was a plan to meet at Equisud in Montpelier on Sunday, but circumstances have conspired against both of us, so that plan was shelved, but I suspect we might manage to meet up during the summer.  It now looks like the next virtual friend I will meet is Sharon from La Fiaba. The LSH and I have booked in for a three day Transumanza at Easter and we are looking forward to meeting Sharon, Lorenzo and all their four-legged friends.

What’s a Transumanza?  Yeah, I didn’t know what it was either.

I first came across the French word Transhumance last year when I bought a children’s book to try and help myself and the LSH increase our vocabulary. The word was used to specifically refer to the droving of sheep from their summer pasture high in the Alps to their winter grazing in the low-lying valleys, so naturally enough I thought it was only used with reference to sheep.  This year, though, I learned that it means a long-distance drove of sheep, cattle or horses and, within days of figuring that out, I came across the La Fiaba blog post announcing an Easter-time Transhumanza, moving young horses from their winter home to their summer home.  It turns out that we’re only a six hour drive away from La Fiaba, the LSH is very enthusiastic about the whole concept and our dogs are welcome to come too.

So that’s our plan for Easter weekend, what’s anybody else up to?

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