Day: February 19, 2013

We’ve had a glorious past couple of days. Today I saw 15 degrees Centigrade on my car temperature gauge and although it’s forecast to get a bit cooler by the week-end, I’ve got a sneaky feeling that Winter really is almost behind us. On Sunday I saw my first butterfly of the season and bees were buzzing around the end wall of my house that had been warmed up by the sun. Yesterday I saw one of Benjamin and Aurelie’s cats playing with a small animal of some sort. It turned out to be one of the lizards that hang on my house walls sunning themselves when it’s hot. Evidently this one had been tempted out by the sunshine but was moving a bit slowly as the temperature is still a bit low for it and became easy prey for the cat. When I put it back on the wall it quickly scuttled away and disappeared.

The fine weather has also helped me by allowing work to proceed far more quickly on my fireplace. I’m now really pleased to be able to say that I finally completed the job early this evening. By completed, I mean the building work. Now I intend to let it stand, dry out and cure for a short while before treating the new tiles to make them water-repellant and shiny. Once that’s been done, I’ll be able to begin to tie things up by installing my new wood-burner. I can’t wait for that, believe me 🙂

I’m pleased with how the job’s come out. Here are a couple of pics showing ‘before’ and ‘after’, the latter taken just after I’d finished off grouting today. I tried to make it as ‘French’ as I reasonably could and in keeping with the style of my house and I think I’ve succeeded, although time will tell when visitors are able to tell me what they think.

I’m feeling pretty tired just at the moment after completing the work, some of which has been quite heavy, so I’m looking forward to being able to take it a bit more easy for a day or so. It’ll now give me a chance to turn my attention to X-Air stuff and I’ll be thinking about the coming flying season, what lies ahead and what needs to be done. And about time too 😀