Small Things

Mr B's birthday today. After Katherine's riding lesson this morning, we headed off to have a picnic and a bit of a walk - though it was a bit hot for the latter. With Conor poorly we couldn't go far anyway. He was quite delighted to find this though which, I've been assured by a very reliable source* is the smallest snail shell in the world ever. Sadly just after this shot was taken he dropped it on the ground while showing it off to his sister, and couldn't find it again.

After the picnic I had appointments for the kids at their new doctor - who turned out to be a lovely woman who speaks just enough English to be reassuring to the kids, but not so much that I can be lazy and not learn medical French. I had presumed that Conor just had a bit of a cold, and that had made his asthma flare up a bit - but this morning he had woken with a hugely swollen face which was a new one on us. The doctor says he has bronchitis, an ear infection and needs much stronger asthma medicine. He is also allergic to something in the air (pollen?) so now has six medicines to take at various points through the day. With no health insurance here yet we were a bit wary about how much all that was going to cost, but it came in at about 40 Euros - which is a small price to pay for a well boy.

Straight after the doctors, Mr B and I raced down to our lawyer's office yet again for a last ditch attempt to salvage the siging on Friday. With a very small amount of bending of professional ethics, we've been given information that satisfies us that the risk we run in signing is really very very small, and we would only really be scuppered by someone a bit mad and capricious. So, we'll finally own our broken ruin on Friday afternoon!

Of course we can only own it if we can pay for it, so we raced to the nearest branch of our bank to see if they could do a wire transfer by Friday, but no joy there. We can apparently do the payment another day, but they couldn't deal with that at 5.27pm (closing at 5.30) so we bought cakes and headed home instead.

Late on, Mr B remembered that he'd read that we were due a lunar eclipse tonight. After several clear nights in a row it was, of course, cloudy tonight. The cloud lifted in time to see the eclipse waning and of course I got out the tripod and tried a few shots. I think the bottle of lovely wine to celebrate Mr B's birthday might have impeded progress somewhat, but I'll have a look at the shots later and see if any are worth of viewing.

*Conor