Of Trees, Cats and Neanderthals

Timber

It’s tree pruning and felling season again and over the past month we’ve taken down a lot of wood, cut it, stacked it and shredded the unusable bits. As you might imagine, cutting down sizable trees with a chainsaw is not a risk-free business. For some years I’ve been intending to buy a hard hat but haven’t got round to it. So this year I diligently added ‘hard hat’ to our shopping list. Blow me down but the very next day a tree trunk fell on my head! It’s true! It was quite a small one really but capable of doing a bit of damage. What a pity I hadn’t been to the shops since I wrote ‘hard hat’ on the list. So the damage – a mere scalp wound – was done. But guess what; I’ve got a hard hat now!


Terminator 2 – The Liquid Phase

We’re pleased to report that Maisie has now settled in. She has now realised that this is in fact her house and at the slightest sign of boredom or hunger, one or both of the human occupants will drop everything to attend to her needs. She’s been very gracious in allowing to keep our old bedroom and to get a few hours sleep each night but otherwise she’s a hard taskmistress.

She was quite poorly over Christmas and New Year with a really horrid cold (although this didn’t stop her beating the living daylights out of the Blessèd Virgin Mary on the Christmas tree on a daily basis – a true Protestant our cat. The poor old BVM must have been relieved when she was returned to her box on 6 January. As the photo shows, Maisie ‘helped’ us to take down the decorations).




She spent days sneezing over everybody and everything in sight, a truly organic experience. Eventually she had to have some hideously expensive trips to the vet. Unfortunately, the antibiotics designed to dry her up at the front had the opposite effect at the other end! We preferred the exploding nose to the erupting rear. Happily she’s fine now and utterly adorable (a considerable shock for the previously cat-indifferent Mr A and a huge change from her predecessor).


Gymknacka

Thanks to our local free monthly ‘Creuse News’ we discovered that a new gym has opened in our local town. This, we felt, was really good news.

In England we’d been members of an excellent gym for 10 years or so and we found it great for keeping fit and for managing stress. Although we thought that a gym would be unnecessary here – our outside work keeps us reasonably fit and stress is not exactly present at the same levels as before – we did try the municipal gym a few years ago. This was not a success. Not only were many of the machines in poor repair, some of them could only be used when a member of staff was present. Since this amounted to only about 10 hours a week, that wasn’t much use to us. The final factor was the clientele. All gyms have them, the young male body-builders. You know the type, the mouth-breathers with the ridge over the eyes and the knuckles scraping the ground. Unfortunately, this gym had a preponderance of them and, frankly, they’re a bit off-putting, especially to Mrs A.

The opening of a new, well-equipped gym with a membership comprising mostly homo sapiens sapiens was therefore of some interest, especially to me as I don’t get out much these days. So I took out a month’s trial membership and off I went. I was quite nervous since it’s a good 6 years since I did any serious aerobic exercise but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I could do. I soon returned to a routine of 3 visits per week doing 40 minutes of running, skiing, cycling and rowing per session. And it didn’t take long before this healthy exercise began make its mark. I’m now sitting at home with a calf strain. B*gger!