We've had a couple of fraught days on behalf of our daughter Bella. On Wednesday Kevin Rudd (recycled Aussie PM) announced that the current regime of Fringe Benefit Tax arrangements was to change with immediate effect. Bella's company's reason for existence was more or less wiped out instantly, so on Thursday the staff were told 74 of 150 would lose their jobs the next day.
Early this morning we had a cheering call from Bella that she had made the cut and still had employment. A great relief to us, her and no doubt Nic. One tiny downside was that if she'd lost her job, she might have come out to see us, however we can wait!
Normally we keep pretty well away from news, just looking online at the Nelson Mail every few days to keep some vague handle on what is going on. It's one of the nice things about being here. NZ and Aussie politics are so far away as to be meaningless, and we can't understand French politics, so it all works out well most of the time. It's amazing how much time it saves not having news to watch. At the moment, the only TV we watch is a couple of hours of Tour de France in the afternoons, otherwise it is reading.
Preparations are well under way for the weekend's Sardanes dance festival. We will have 3 days of ear-piercing oboes, strange slow circular dances and lovely costumes. It will be fun like all the festivals, but from experience we know the high-pitched oboe gets to you after three days. The best bit is the concert on Sunday night straight down below us, where we can drink our wine and watch for free from our balconies. The seats have been waiting for days, and the stage went up today.
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| Our apartment is the top level of the middle building (3 windows, 2 are lit) |
I've just had a call from either France Telecom or Free to arrange a time to have our telephone line checked. I coped really well with the language and set a time and date with them, so Free can go ahead and deliver the FreeBox that will give us internet and wifi (and automatically an absurd 195 channels of French TV). There are a couple of English-language news channels and we can add BBC news for the silly sum of 0.25€/month. At some point I will get up on the roof and shift the satellite dish so we can pick up some more channels from the UK, but we don't feel any urgency at the moment. Having decent internet will be a great relief. Sitting doing work with the laptop balanced on the dishwasher (best wifi reception) is not all that much fun.
Another win on the telecommunications front is that my phone has decided it will accept texts from New Zealand, a mere fortnight after I ticked the various boxes online to tell it to do so. A good supply of patience can be very useful to have in France. New Zealand deserves its reputation as a very easy place to do business - so much can be done instantly, online or by phone, when the equivalent here is letters, many phone calls, and poorly designed websites.
We walked up to Hermitage San Ferreol this morning. Seemed quite a long way up today, but seemed a very long way down. We've had afternoon rain for the last week, and the humidity has risen, though temperatures have begun to drop too. A good thunderstorm this afternoon again, but back to clear skies.
