It's that time of year again

Ascension Day here in France and businesses are shut for the day, along with most supermarkets and schools. Because it's a Thursday, many businesses and most of the schools have taken the eminently sensible decision to faire le pont, which for our youngest two means that it's a five day break as they don't have school on Wednesdays anyway. Chances are the roads, the big ones at least, are full (relatively speaking, for France) of travellers on short breaks. I wouldn't know; I worked the Wednesday and we're not going away, too many things to do on the home front, and with UPL hors de combat for a while, a lot falls to me.

One of those things was cutting the grass, and this year I'm doing it the lazy way. This does not mean we've got ourselves a wallaby, however. Cutting the grass is a tedious chore that is not improved by the mower having lost its squeeze-the-bar-and-go-forward ability, so now it's just push-and-swear, and that, along with the thought of emptying the grass collector every two minutes (there's a lot of grass and it's long) made me choose to just cut-and-leave. The result looks a little like the garden's got some weird disease, but it's good for the grass to have its cuttings left in situ, apparently. I also chose not to clear up whereever the dogs had done those things they need to do, though I did try to remove sticks, stones and various toys as and before I got to them. Mind you, there were still plenty of one-legged Action Men and their 3 wheel drives out there to save from further carnage and destruction.

Time was saved; one and a half hours this time, compared with the three it has taken in previous years. Still, the way the damn stuff grows in spring and summer, it will need doing again soon, but we'll give it a chance to grow a bit before then. Next on the agenda is the pool and the pesky leak in the bottom...