We've mortared in the beam that we installed last week and added another support beam at the end of the room. The floor used to sit in a slot in the wall, but we though an extra beam would be more secure..

We've been laying the conduits for the electric cables behind the stone walls (difficult), behind the stud walls, and over the roof struts. The installation is fundamentally different than that in England, and uses a radial system rather than a ringmain. This means that there are considerably more conduits and wiring to install. It makes English electricians very upset - trust me on that one. The plug sockets have been fixed to wooden supports. It's a lot stronger than just fixing them into the plaster board.

Our neice, Jennie, visited this week. She's the younger sister to Erin of Macungie Kibutz fame. In celebration of the visit and of Bastille Day, we had a holiday on monday. After that, of course, it was business as usual. Jennie volunteered to stain the jigsaw puzzle of a staircase olive/sage green. It took four coats on every piece of wood to get the right effect. Shaker style is the general theme here. Jennie completed the lot in two days...a feat of Zen detachment, I'd say, and saved me the boring task. Ta luv. Below is the lovely Jen at work and rest with the results of the travail.

Other than our pleasant evenings with Jen, nothing much to report regarding general stuff. We did have a general clean up and re-organising day and now have what looks like a real authentic woodstore. We also got a load of tomato plants from Shirley and Alan, who live down the road and have a luxuriant and prolific veg plot. I managed, finally, to plant them up in a makeshift veg plot, so hopefully we'll get the benefit of home grown toms. There's also a few cucumber plants donated by Ritchie. Nature rich and verdant, until the fat orange slugs, the size of bananas, get going.

Ray and Anne have been featuring strongly in the last few weeks. Well they do send me pics after all. Here's a few pics from the Moules et Frites evening at Prissac Lake, not far from here. They also told me about a really amazing place called Guédelon up in Burgundy. It's an attempt to build a medieval castle using all the original techniques. If you're interested, have a look: Guédelon. There's some photos of the place at the bottom of the page.