Just a Saturday

    1.  8h00  Get up, long bath , breakfast , get dressed

    2.   Check on the leak going into the small apt rental that happened after the last big rain.   Remind myself to come back later and clean the leaves from the drain.

    3.   10h00 Go with hubby out to Basika to buy a mattress for the guest bed.  The old one smells like mildew and is really uncomfortable.   Bring the mattress ( anti mildew, anti bacteria) home and slide it into the garage for now.

    4.  11h00 Get back in the car to head for downtown Nice.

  Everything is festive.  There are hundreds of  Christmas trees with flocking and stands set up by the fire department for a fund raiser.  There is great music playing or maybe it is a real someone singing.  Lots of activity.  Lots of people.   Remind myself to come back and take some pics for my blog.

    5.  12h00 Go to Galerie Lafayette and buy some green stockings (Absinthe).  Check out the short black skirts.  One hundred and eighty five euros is too much for the Agnes B skirt.  Refuse to be tempted.  I can find one in San REmo or the old town for less.

    6.  Buy some inserts for my tennis shoes at a brand new running shop on Felix Faure. Now I can do the treadmill at the gym without my right foot hurting.

    7.  Join my husband who has done the food shopping and bought the weekend papers and we go home in our rental car.

    8.  13h00  Serve and eat lunch together, clean up.  The best thing are the olives he found at the Italian store and the buffalo mozzarella which I never tire of.  The rest is left-overs.

    9. 14h00 It is sunny so I do two loads of wash and change the bed clothes.  Hang out the clothes on the line.

   10.  Time to cut the grape vine.  First though, I need to go back and clean leaves on the terrace next door .  Do that.  I finally can see what the neighbor's pool looks like since I am up so high.  It is really dirty.  I am so glad I don't have a pool to clean.

   11.  15h00 Spend time on the yard: raking cherry and grape leaves, cutting the grape-vine, starting on the plumbago which needs to be cut back.  Sweeping up from the last land slide behind the house.

   12.  17h00 Come inside and have a nice cup of green tea and two almond cookies.  The outdoors was nice and exhilaratingly cold but now my toes are frozen.   Take off garden shoes and clean my pruning shears like a good girl.  

  13.  REad a bit of The Element by  Ken Robinson.   It talks about different kinds of IQ and how we have varied sorts of creativity.  I found it in the bookstore in SEattle and am just getting around to it.  I like to know that the standard tests we had in school were a " crock"....   Especially the STanford-Binet which was never intended to identify degrees of intelligence but was used for that when I was a kid.

 14. 18h00  My husband and I go downstairs to set up the new bed.  We identify a bit of mildew on the boards of the futon but not the tatami.  Whew.  That just means cleaning the slats underneath and putting it back together.  We get it wrong 5 times and drop the slats on my foot!   But finally we align it and make up the new bed.    We are ready for the next house guest who is due in about a week or so.

 15.  I check my email and make sure that Martine got my order for the art supplies we wanted for engraving.   I answer someone on Facebook and delete four mails.

 16. 19h00 I eat a piece of unleavened bread ( Essene) , 2 pieces of celery with peanut butter.  Old habits die hard.  Yes, I do have a jar of peanut  butter in my fridge.   I guess I am a native American after all.

 17.  Decide that I should probably not post every day on my blog so that I get in a few more things.  But will miss posting to my 3 readers in the Soviet Union as well as all the rest of you .

18,  Maybe a dvd now or a book...have a good evening.