What have we been doing???

The answer to that question is:  THIS and THAT!!  

It is summer here in France.  That may sound evident.  But for those of you that don't know or don't remember, everything slows down to a crawl here.  People take their 5 weeks of vacation.  Life is slow and even when the weather isn't the best, nothing happens.  So what have I been doing. . . watching the flowers grow.

                                       

We have been enjoying the beautiful weather.  The longer we live in Normandy, the more we like it.  The weather is perfect.  You just learn to always have an umbrella with you.  You can have a beautiful  morning and 2 hours later it is pouring down rain.  And by evening it is beautiful again.  Our average temperatures this summer have hovered around 76° and that is including the several hot days we've had.

I have been sitting outside in the mornings to have my devotions, read or work on cross stitch.  It has been so nice.  

A ULM flew over when I was out one morning.

Last week when it was raining I scrubbed our front yard.  Yep!!  You read that right.  Our front yard is tiled.  It was pretty dirty and in some places there was even mold growing.  I took a scrub brush and scrubbed the whole thing in the rain.  It came off fairly easy.  And it looks really nice now.  

Then another day I cut the bushes in front of the house.  They were getting quite tall and bushy so I cut their heads off and trimmed the fronts.  The yard looks so much better now.  I still need to do the bushes in the back.  But we've learned to take it a little bit at a time.  

Notice the clean tiles.

In the spring I planted 6 tomato plants and two pepper plants in flower pots.  Because of the cold spring and very rainy summer they didn't do as well as I expected but we have enjoyed a few tomatoes and some peppers.  They taste so much better than store bought veggies.

At the end of last week, we had a heat wave.  We had temperatures that went up into the 90's which is very unusual for our area.  Our temps here in Normandy have cooled off and we are back to normal temps.  But the rest of France is still in the heatwave for the rest of the week.  So for three or four days we "worked" at trying to stay cool. 

This week we are making a trip to Reims.  We need to see another real estate agency.  And we need to trim the hedges around the house.  Hopefully it will be cooler by Wednesday so that we can get all of the work done.

Have a great week.