I quite enjoy skiing but get bored after two days. This is proof that I am not French. If I were really French, I would rent a chalet or, even better, stay in a relation's chalet or even a friend's chalet, with them, for a week. As I do not have the money to rent chalets and am sadly lacking in friends and relations I can abuse, I just don't go skiing. It would also kill me to have to wear my excruciatingly painful ski boots for more than two days. I think that this, added to the boredom factor, nails it on the French factor. Oh well.
One of the things I would do if I were very rich would be to have custom-made ski boots. They would be moulded to my feet and lined with something soft and warm. I'm not keen enough though to make it happen...
In the meantime, not skiing and having no boys in the house means I have total control of the tele remote. I haven't noticed anything particularly worthy of attention on French tele recently now that Monroe has finished (no surprise there), so I have been able to devote myself entirely to iPlayer and my Sky digibox.
This week's viewing goes something like this: Mr Selfridge, Broadchurch, Mayday, catch-up Death in Paradise, Doc Martin and last week's Mr Selfridge, Saturday Kitchen, odd episodes of Poirot, Rosemary & Thyme, Murder She Wrote, and so on. I made some ginger snaps, and have them handy with a cup of tea, my feet up under a black furry blanket and totally hog the tele when I come in from work. Luxury!
Other plans for the week because I don't just watch tele you know:
- lunch with friend - check (yesterday)
- buy a new bread machine because my current one is on its last legs - check. I found one in the local small ads on le Bon Coin down the road, a Riviera & Bar model for €50 (retails at €150 - bargain or what!). Check out this little beauty (currently preparing some dough):
- write a Slim the Ogre word game app on the difference between lose/loose, they're/their/there, where/were/we're, etc. (any others?) or rather maybe split it up into two or three apps to make more money. They're dead cheap so it's no big deal.
- sort out all the printed recipes from the internet into folders for meat/fish/vegetarian etc. as I now have so many I have to look through it seems like hundreds of papers to find a particular recipe. It's currently quicker to look it up on the internet again.
- chuck out crappy old recipe books I haven't used in ten years.
- eat fish suppers that my boys would moan about, like sardines and mackerel.
I'm also reading a gripping thriller on my Kindle about a mad scientist who plans to let off a nuclear bomb under the Pacific somewhere which will result in a temperature rise of 1.8°C over America's bread basket region, leading to drought, starvation, civil unrest and so on, just for his personal amusement. It's a bit far-fetched but he's so awful I keep reading. Set in Italy, it also has a rather suave Italian Bond-type figure, Dante Passoni, whose job it becomes to save the world when he's not engaging in a little light romance with a beautiful woman. It's called SAVE ITALY! by Tommy Vilar.
By the way, the latest issue of BBBmidi magazine is out with articles on what to do if your Kindle dies, a book series review of the thrilling and intriguing, action-packed Rizwan Sabir stories (page 15) and all sorts of Languedoc-related bits and bobs. Some great artwork in there too, do pop on over.
