Weather break

The temperature peaked at 35 degrees here on Monday afternoon, and we got the thunderstorms the same
night as the weather broke.

I like thunderstorms and so I went out to enjoy the lightning and the cool, sitting on a little garden chair in the middle of the courtyard from where I took the picture of the clouds.  At ground level, the sun had set but the upper parts were still illuminated and the sheet lightning added its own fireworks, all accompanied by kettledrum thunder. The picure doesn't quite catch the purple bruise colour of the clouds, nor their rate of change in the turbulence.

We only got the edge of the storm and so I enjoyed the light rain, the wind, and feeling cool for the first time in weeks.   It looked to me that the centre must have passed over Thorigné, a small village a couple of kilometers away.  I confirmed this today as I drove past - the church roof had been holed by a direct lightning strike, the local roofer had already put a tarpaulin over it and a tractor was driving away with a trailer full of broken slates and shattered wood.

Rhythms

We have just got to the end of a 5-weekend stretch of having clients every weekend, and we now have a small pause of 3 weekends before the next group arrive.  We are grateful for the break.

The gîte has beds for 30 people, and the ideal number is about 25, more if there's a big contingent of children.  Our main clients are therefore family groups; people who get together to celebrate gran's (and sometimes grandad's) 50th wedding anniversary, or brothers and sisters who get together once a year for a party, etc.

It's easy to imagine that since they only stay for the weekend, that the job is part-time.  That's only true insofar as we don't rent out every weekend, but the typical rhythm is a good solid week of work per group. They typically arrive on Friday evening, for dinner, and stay until late afternoon on Sunday, or with one day extra if it is one of the many long weekend bank holidays.  We serve breakfasts and the evening meals, and lunch also if required.

So a typical weekly rhythm starts on the Friday afternoon with the preparation of the evening meal, and welcoming the new guests.  We're usually up until 10:30 or so serving and cleaning up after.  We get up to prepare breakfast around 7:00 or 7:30 the next morning, and again, we're up late that evening.  If we're not making lunch we do get a mid-day break.

The Sunday (or Monday) after they're gone, we strip the beds, take the linens to the collection point for them to be washed by Blanchisserie du Maine, empty the dustbins, lock up the gîte and jump in the pool.  We have been known to have a glass or two of wine at this point.

Monday is gîte cleaning day; by the evening the place is clean, floors mopped, bathrooms done and the place generally rendered a hostile environment for bugs and creepies of all kinds.

Tuesdays Anita plans the meals for the next group and prepares the shopping lists.  I do gardening as necessary, ususally I mow the grass; it's kind of our day off. Anita also works in the garden whenever she has time during the week.

Wednesday we make the beds and make sure that the place is in a good state to welcome the next group, doing any repairs, replacements, etc.

Thursday is shopping day when we take the Espace to Promocash and the other shops in Laval and fill up with the meal ingredients as necessary.

Friday morning I prepare the pool, making sure it is clean and healthy for the arrivals.  Friday evening they arrive.

This is a tolerable schedule if taken steadily, but after five weeks of this I am thoroughly grateful for a break.

So here's a few shots of the garden.  This wave of high temperatures has dried the soil out at the surface, but I haven't needed to water very much yet.  I am hoping that the predicted thunderstorms will do the work for me.  There isn't a huge amount of colour right now, we're between the Spring and Autumn flowers.   The best are the Canna Lillies, Gladioli and Day Lillies, plus the sundry annuals like Nasturtiums and French Marigolds.  There are even a few early Dahlias, but they will be at their best around September or October.

I have been a bit negatvie towards roses in the past, especially if they need spraying or have had the scent bred out of them   But I think I might try to find a few that have healthy foliage and smell nice, to add some colour at this time.   And if they look really good, I might be prepared to forgo the scent.

I don't know what the little white flowers are called, nor the ones that look like pink jellyfish swimming towards the surface, which is unforgivable since I grew them both from commercial packets of seed.

A swarm of bees

A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a pile of hay.

A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon.

A swarm of bees in July
Isn't worth a fly.

This swarm of bees arrived in my garden, just by our front door in fact, today, Sunday the 7th July.  Whoopee.  I spoke to our local bee-keeping lady and she told me that they should be gone in a couple of days or so.  Well, I hope so  - I don't really need them here when we have guests.

Update: Tuesday morning, they've gone, except for a few lost-looking ones.

Iris rhizome splitting and replanting

There's plenty of Iris in my garden - they like the limey soil and the hot Mayenne sun and so they flower profusely and spread rapidly.  They make a magnificent display when they're going strong, but after about three years or so they get overcrowded and become less vigorous.  At this point they need to be dug up, separated and replanted in fresh soil.

The time to do this is, according to the books, 6-8 weeks after they have finished flowering, so they can build up their reserves during the rest of the year for next Spring's display.  I am perhaps a bit early, but on the other hand, Spring was cold and late here, so I'm going for it.

Each original plant will have produced 10 or more offspring, and there's a limit to how many I can keep in my garden, so the result of this excercise is a large number of Iris plants that need good homes.  Unfortunately I regard them in a similar way to the kittens produced by a domestic cat - I have to find them a good home.  So there's some for Leo, some for the lady gardener who works at the music school, some for Marie down the road.  Those I can't get rid of end up in a box in the car park up the road with a notice "Free to good home".  They all seem to go in the end.

Here's what you do. The hard part is preparing the new bed, that should get at least 6 hours of sun per day, when it's not raining that is.  Here in my garden it involves pick-axeing the stones out of the ground, getting the perrennial weed roots out and adding a slow fertiliser to the soil.   When the bed is ready, dig up the clump that needs splitting, and separate the rhizomes into individual plants.  You can trim back the leaves to help with their stabilty once planted.   Then plant in your sunny location and water them when it gets too dry.   Give the spare ones away.

Roses

I grow quite a lot of roses from cuttings.   Half-ripe cuttings planted out in the Autumn seem to be the most reliable. They take very well in this soil: I used to put them in little lines in the veg patch and then transplant them if they took.  I don't bother with this any more, I just put the cuttings into the ground where I want the plant to be.  Usually they succeed, and it saves the effort and the damage to the plant arising from transplanting.

These blue climbing roses are vigorous and disease-free, and also free of charge thanks to Leo who gave me the cuttings from the plant growing up the side of his house.  There are seven plants here in all, climbing up the back of my shed.  Even though the individual flowers are barely more than an inch in diameter, there are so many of them that the effect is impressive.  I am hoping that over time they will flop over onto the tiled roof as well.

These orange climbers are also from cuttings, again courtesy of Leo.  These ones are not yet big enough to climb, but they are intended to cover the back wall of the lodge.  I like the way that they change in colour from bright orange to nearly white.

And here's some free rose pics.

Out of Nowhere - 2

Some time ago I posted here about my strange memory of being conscious before I was born - in fact, a memory of the very start of my self-awareness.   Now you either believe that what I have detailed might be true, or you have me classified along with those who claim to have been abducted by aliens.  Well fine, each to his own, but it for me, forms the axiomatic basis of some my beliefs regarding consciousness.

I might add that I have (fragmented) memories that extend from this point into early childhood.  I can remember being bored before I was born, and, one time, moving about a lot to try to make something happen, until I ran out of energy.   I remember waking up during the birth process, aware that there was a lot of "fuss" going on, and that I was physically constrained in a way that I had never been before.  I remember my fight for life afterwards, the pain, the flight from pain, the view through death's door and the fear that resulted (no more me), the adrenaline rush that I held on to to stay alive.  Then, what I thought was my final surrender (to sleep, I guess) and the surprise on waking again.

I remember being in a cot, and trying to work out the repeats in the tartan pattern.  I remember my father bouncing me on his knee asking "why don"t you talk?"  (Because I don't have to).  And a short time later (A few days, a week?) surprising my mother with my first words (Bored out of my skull, in some kind of baby bouncer suspended in the kitchen doorway while she cooked, "I want some food" or something like that, in response to which she stopped what she was doing and came and asked "What did you say?")  I remember the concentration it took to form words and how if I didn't bother and made baby noises instead, I was being "silly".

I can remember not being able to crawl, but rolling myself to my objective, noting that since I was tapered I had to aim a short way off to compensate for the curve.  I can remember the frustration of my arms giving out as I crawled.  The way the bricks I stacked didn't conform to the image in my mind's eye, but were all higgledy-piggledy and how the last one I put on caused the pile to spray sideways because I lacked fine motor control; and telling myself to be patient.

Perhaps it is these experiences that have led me to be fascinated by the idea of consciousness, the idea of "I", and also the ideas that other people have on the subject.  One of the researchers in this area, and also an author of some books on the subject is Douglas Hofstadter, who comes across to me as a man of fierce intelligence and boundless curiosity.  His book "Gödel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid" discusses the idea of emergent behaviour in self-referencing systems, in a playful, interesting and accessible style.  I am currently reading his book "I Am A Strange Loop" that discusses consciousness as an emergent behaviour more explicitly.  I would thoroughly recommend these two books to anyone with an enquiring mind and (at least) an 'A' level scientific background.

There are some conclusions that I can draw from my experiences that are at odds with a small subset of what he says.  My very first awareness of "I" arose from my being aware that I had been conscious before, several times, fleetingly, and that I could remember having been so.  My "I" self was the memory-based connection through time of these moments or periods of consciousness.  These didn't need any external stimulus in order to happen, as far as I am aware, and emerged (I think) solely in response to the functioning of my brain.  "I" needed three things: awareness, memory and the idea of time. (The idea of memory is of course intimately linked with that of time).  I deduce therefore that consciousness is an emergent behaviour of a functioning brain imbued with some axiomatic programming, and is therefore coded genetically in DNA.  Perhaps it occurs when the loops within the brain are finally "tight" or "strong" enough, a bit like when a laser suddenly fires when the light energy produced/light energy lost moves from 0.999 to 1.001

So, in his book "I Am A Strange Loop", under the sub-heading "Baby Feedback Loops and Baby "I"s" much of what Mr Hofstadter states is, at least in my experience-based view, wrong, including "the building-up of a self-symbol is still far in the future for a baby".  No it's not, it's right there, from day 1 - in fact, from before Day 1.

Red in tooth and claw

Here is an Adder, or Viper if you prefer, eating one of the lizards that seem to thrive around here.

Now as a child living in the countryside, I got a bit of advice about snakes in general and Adders in particular.  The first thing to know is that Adders are poisonous and you don't want them to bite you.  The books say that their strikes are not usually fatal to healthy adults, but I figure that this means that they sometimes are, and so at the very best, they probably hurt quite a lot.  Best avoided.

They are apparently recognised by their particular zig-zag pattern on the back, and a V- or A- shaped mark on the head. Well I have to say that I'm pretty sure the snake in the picture is an Adder, but I wouldn't say that the pattern on its back is a zig-zag.  Ok, yes, there's a V on its head.   Or a > or  <  or ^ depending on which way you look.

The second bit of advice I got was to always pick it up by holding it just behind the head, so it can't turn round and bite you.  This advice presupposes that you are going to pick it up in the first place, which is probably not a good idea (see above).  Nobody ever told me that if I was going to use this technique I should approach the head from behind, which seems to me to be too important a thing to have left out.

The other advice was to use a forked stick to hold it down, again, placing the fork of the stick just behind the Adder's head.   But then, I wonder, what do you do with the snake?  You're not supposed to kill them because they're rare and protected, so presumably you are going to move it somewhere, which probably involves picking it up, and the forked stick is now where you want to put your fingers.   Plus, since the stick is forcing the snake against the ground, preventing it from moving and possibly strangling it, the snake, by now, is annoyed.

It did strike me (maybe that's not the phrase to use) that if I wanted to pick up an Adder, the best time to do it might be when it's got its gums round a lizard: the poison sacks might be less full than normal, and it might have less mouth movement available to bite.  It is an opportunity that I shall forever regret passing over.

In the end, Adders are shy, and will slither away if left alone.  Good plan.