The pont & the peony

My peony bloomed yesterday and smells divine. Isn't it amazing? I didn't know they were of Japanese origin. The things you learn when you inherit a little old lady's neglected garden.

It's a holiday in France, the Ascension, and we're doing the pont, which means Thursday is the holiday but *yawn* why bother getting up on Friday French people. Little S did have school today, probably the only school in France to have classes, or so rumour has-it. It's because of their circus class. My four year old child has more outings than I do. You saw the photos in my previous post with the bus? Well every Friday until the end of the school year they take that bus to circus class where they practice all these acrobatics in funny dress up clothes. I'm not really sure what all they do in fact because I haven't been able to go as an assisting parent but it sounds really fun.

For us the pont and the weekend will be spent bulldozing our garden and ripping out tree stumps. Seb actually rented a bulldozer. The neighbors will love him. He burned our twelve foot high pile of garden cuttings last night for six hours. You could hear neighbors slamming their windows, grumbling all evening, "mais mer-dah!" *slam*.

And speaking of windows we have the sleazy window guy coming by today to do some final measuring for our doors and windows. We've finally decided. I still can't believe we're putting in pvc windows. I never thought we'd end up doing that but the wood windows are rotting, difficult to close and eaten in some places by little carpenter ants (with little hammers on their belts),... and then we found another set of old rotten windows in the basement so obviously they'd already been replaced once. Wood isn't good in the damp, balmy Parisian countryside. But this guy who sells pvc windows,--snake oil anyone? He's always trying to get us to add these awful features on to the windows, like really sporty chrome handles which are completely modern and whenn I said I'd miss the wrought iron on our old front door he suggested this huge iron grill in the shape of a sunflower. He has absolutely no taste but he's really confident about his choices when he suggests something, and he's very cocky about it. Scary guy. I'm not looking forward to spending two hours today with him.