39 + 14 = 53

Friday was a dream of a day: a yoga class followed by a shiatsu for Olivier, lunch (cooked by him), a bit of music together... and my local market. I chatted ad nauseum to Françoise on her dairy stand, both of us insouciant at holding up the next customer. I am une vraie française!

Juan then arrived home with a gorgeous bouquet:

... in honour of our 14th wedding anniversary. Midweek, on the 19th, it had passed with us almost forgeting, to our shame. My birthday followed 5 days later. So the whole weekend was a kind of late/early double celebration.

After our epic exertion last weekend we chose to stay home this time. On the Saturday morning we footled around, posing for a joint photo in sombre light:

As usual, summer has been a no-go time for gardening (impossible to contemplate planting in the heatwave). Now, with the garden refreshed by rain, our thoughts turned to a long-planned project, extending the flower bed by the veggie patch:

... a sweaty, exhausting job involving removing ridiculous volumes of stones. In the afternoon I was cream-crackered (by my crazy war against horrid, invasive chien dent weed) and basked in the idyllic late afternoon sun:

Creating the new bed starting us thinking about the overall garden design, and possible repositioning of the rockery. Reading up on rockeries in an ancient Reader's Digest book I found these gems of information: "no attempt should be made to copy an actual mountain in a garden" (thank you, I was seriously thinking of replicating one of our local 3000m peaks close by the house) and "on a 5m x 3m site 1.5 to 2 tons of rock should be sufficient". Hmm... 2 tons... that's gonna be quite a few trips to our local stream with the wheelbarrow.

A plant fair at Uriage gave us a timely excuse to acquire several plants, mostly aridity-tolerant, the experience of this summer a lesson on the subject. Juan was excited to find Sternbergia lutea (aka autumn-flowering crocus) bulbs. I hope he won't be disaapointed - bulbs are very hit and miss chez nous.

On the Saturday evening we tried out a local restaurant, Le Manoir, and had a pleasant meal. But - modesty apart - the chocolate cake I cooked for birthday dessert on Sunday (using 2 large bars of 70% cocoa-solids chocolate) was better than either of our restaurant puddings.

On the 24th, my birthday, I was blasted from sleep at 5am by cracking thunder as a massive storm hit Vaulnaveys. It was a day of worthy domestic chores: I got to the bottom of the ironing pile while listening to Rupert Everett on Radio 4 recounting his miss-spent high-celeb days; then attacked the hem of the curtains destined for Juan's flat.

At tea-time I celebrated with Katrina and Joseph, Sunday's cake given a facelift with edible flowers and frog-green icing kindly sent by mum. Joseph was beyond doubt the man for the job:

In the evening I was with the aikido club, mum's "Happy Birthday" candles ablaze above a huge empanada/coca that everyone insisted in refering to as pizza.

A good day.