You may have noticed my radio silence recently… While I am partial to taking occasional breaks from social media, this latest break has not been voluntary!
Like so many people, we rely pretty heavily on the internet for our work. Knowing this – and just to be sure we weren’t left stranded in the countryside, disconnected, at a time when our work lives were super crazy busy – we organized for the internet to be connected a few weeks in advance of our arrival back to France.
Well, that was over a month ago, we’ve been back in France for 10 days, and we still can’t get online. Justin has been describing the past week as a very stressful, unwanted, enforced ‘vacation’. To everyone else out there who has experienced a similarly maddening period of groundhog-day relentlessness, you have my complete commiserations.
We’ve had 6 technicians fail to show up to their scheduled appointments, each with an achingly inconvenient 5 hour waiting window. Justin, poor Justin, has cumulatively spent over 610 minutes on the phone to our service provider trying to beg / plead / cajole / bribe / understand what could possibly be going wrong. We’ve spent so much time waiting, we’ve had time to add up his time on the phone. We’re starting to genuinely wonder if there’s a local vendetta we don’t know about...
Rosie has become so familiar with the sound of our service provider’s hold music being played on speakerphone that she’s started unconsciously humming the tune.
And then, quite literally as I am typing this in Word, an Internet technician fairy appears outside the kitchen window. He’s unscheduled, unexpected, and terrifically grumpy, but he fixes our internet.
Justin, having given up hope, misses the whole miracle while driving to the nearest town to buy us a mobile hotspot. What a week!
--- BELLES ---
We had a most delicious lunch at The Woodspeen Restaurant. This desert of blackberry and apple mille feuille, lemon jelly, and sorrel sorbet was delicious.
Unexpected snow in Salisbury in Spring!
Justin's Mum has kept some sweet storybooks from his childhood. It was fun reading them to Rosie on our recent visit, especially this story featuring a kangaroo.
A pine cone from the tree in our garden.
--- & WHISTLES ---
Rosie's great-grandmother gave her this adorable toy chick hatching out of an egg. She absolutely loves it, and it would make a perfect last-minute Easter gift.
Craving curry, I discovered this blog of healthy, authentic Indian recipes and I'm very tempted to make their chicken korma. The butter chicken looks wonderful too, but involves many more steps.
Contemplating baby #2 at some point in the future, I read this interesting article about baby spacing. It covers the pros and cons of different age gaps. Who knew that 3 years was 'nature's preferred pattern'?
I read this article on marriage after kids (via Cup of Jo) and sent it to all my best girlfriends, and my husband!