He bit me!

Hey everyone!

I know it’s been a while since I last wrote, okay about 3 weeks (I’m really sorry I didn’t realise it’d been so long!)… and I have no excuse :-P. But since I’ve been going ice-skating I’ve been meeting French people so I’ve been whiling away my week days by learning French. I know a lot of words, thousands, it’s just the difficulty I’m having with understanding everyone!

I think it’s the speed they can talk at or the accent because I can understand my dad perfectly when he speaks French to me… then again it could be because my dad and I know generally about the same amount of words so we know each others limits on the language :-P.

So back to posting properly now :-P. I will try write more this week, but I just can’t really see much point in it since I’m having no responses /:- … Aww well it’ll do for my own reference. You know you guys just don’t have to kiss a real fish I’ll also be pleased with… Okay for instance my dad’s friend is going to go kiss Belfast’s Blue Fish for me and take a picture when he has the time to do it. It’s a giant sculpture of a mosaic sort of fish in… would you ever guess, Belfast :-P! I’ll put an image up of it.

Now back to blogging, I last left off on my story of how I became to be in this exact place in south west France where we’d just moved into our first, temporary house in France. Yes it had a lot of downsides but also nice upsides too. The landlady was… well she was very nice, but not so organised with things. A few weeks before we were going to move she decided to get some builders to make the windows in the house double-glazing. Now first off it was summer time so what exactly was the point of double-glazing now and secondly why choose now when we were just going to move out before winter and she could have had them do it then!

They didn’t even finish the job and so for a week Venetia and I were left windowless, thank goodness for French shutters :-P! Eventually though they did finish it but a week later we moved :-P.

On the 26th of August it was my dad’s birthday. We just had a lazy day but went for a walk later on in the evening. We said hi to Billy the Billy goat, oh yes, back to how original my naming system is :-P. Billy was very sweet, he lived in the sanctuary close by and you could see him when you walked along the road, he’d come running over and if you went to scratch him he would push his head against the bars so that you could get to him! Gizmo wasn’t much of a fan of Billy. Every time we put Gizmo on the wall to see him, Billy would bash the bars and give Gizmo a heart-attack.

This particular evening a guy was feeding Billy some berries in his little area and so he came over and spoke to us (the guy, not Billy :-P)… yes, of course in French. Apparently though Billy is actually called Michel, meh I still prefer Billy :-P.

The guy asked us if we wanted to have a look around and of course we accepted. He introduced us to his wife and began the tour, their property was absolutely gorgeous. They had horses and cats and dogs and goats and donkeys and Shetland ponies and pigs and even an African grey Parrot (my all-time favourite bird that I’ve wanted since we had to leave Nando (my first parrot) behind in South Africa when we moved to Ireland). Nando was a green ring neck though and he’d just began talking as well :-(! The picture below is of me when I was two years old with Nando at our property in Zimbabwe.
So anyway they showed us around and then brought us into Billy’s little area… he began to bite my jeans and head butt me. The guy said he was just playing and wanted me to push him away. It was really funny, when I did Billy stood up on his hind legs, acted as if he was about to ram me and then just fell back down again. The pig was sleeping under a pile of hay so I only really saw one of his ears that was sticking out and nothing more…

The horse stables were built into their house, like they had the stables that if you went up a few stairs there was a dining room and then up more stairs was a door to the rest of their house. At the stable area they let out an absolute monster of a horse, I mean he was extremely stunning, he had a platinum mane and a dark golden body but was far too big for my liking to be around. What made it worse was that he just wouldn’t go back in, so I kept my distance until he was safely locked up again :-P.

When we were in the field with two black horses outside, a cat wandered up and the woman began telling us how the cat loved to come here and rub herself up against the horses legs… crazy cat I’d say :-P but they were very friendly horses, that liked to sneeze, maybe they have cat allergies like me :-P.

Oh! A cat adopted my sister and I the other day when we were taking Gizmo for a walk. She appeared out of nowhere and then just began to follow us. After two minutes we played with her for a while with a piece of grass and then kept on walking. She kept following us then began climbing the neighbour’s rocks so we brought Gizmo inside, I went out the back and called “Ici, chat, chat, chat! Ici chat, chat, chat!” (Here kitty, kitty, kitty! Here kitty, kitty, kitty :-P) just incase it wasn’t obvious :-P. I made a few cat noises and she came running, we played with her in the garden for an hour or so, she even spotted a little red squirrel in the tree, so that was nice to see.

Later on we went walked her back to the road she’d followed us on, and went back inside. Later that night though when I let Gizmo out, guess who was waiting there! Yes, the cat. So we let her in, she wandered around for a bit and the was off again.

An hour or so later she came in through the basement window! So we gave her some milk, let Gizmo downstairs, which was actually really funny! Gizmo has this thing about toilet roll tubes… and socks… but anyway I threw one for him when he was downstairs and because the cat was there and he wanted to show off he fetched it looked to see if she was watching, brought it back and did it quite a few times. Usually he would just run off and hide :-P.

Anyway after a while of playing like this the cat began stalking him so he began stalking her, they went around in a circle watching each other for a few minutes and then she decided she’d had enough and began looking up at the windows so we let her out but haven’t seen her since :-(
I’m sure she’ll be around though, she was absolutely gorgeous like honey coloured. The only problem is though that I have allergies and the whole night I couldn’t sleep properly because I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t even touch her!

Oh right, back to the sanctuary place :-P. Yes, so it was very nice of them to just let us in and have a look around. We said our goodbyes and then were off home again. To be moving into the new house the next week :-)! I’m going to leave it at that… back to French now!

Hoping to hear from you all soon!!!

- Bianca