04.19.07
Posted in Parties and dinners, Garden, Valbonne at 10:23 am by tesstess
Yesterday was the first time I celebrated my birthday away from home, without swedish birthday song in the morning and without anemones (vitsippor).
In the morning I got these beautiful roses from my love together with a gift card for walking shoes from Alti Coop in Nice.
Karin saved the anemone part for me by making me a beautiful birthday card.
I spent all day cleaning, using my normal strategy: starting on one place where a lot needs to be done, then taking one of the small things and carry it to another place where it should be and put it in place, then I’ll se that in this place a lot needs to be done, so I start there and picks up a new thing that should be in a third place, and then I continue cleaning in this third place. Someone else having the same strategy?
In the evening we had invited some of our friends for a small but tasty BBQ. The first BBQ of the year! But definitely not the last.
Here is Pierre (the cook) and Delphine, and to the right the beautiful bouquet from Sebastien.
Pierre takes care of the meat. The menu this day was porc ribbs in two variations, one chinese marinade and one with chili and honey (and some more things I don’t remember now). To this we ate pastasallad and the dessert was the giant easter rabbit in chocolat that we got in Etzling.
The meat was so good we all sat silient for a long, long time just enjoying it. Alice was running around all evening, so much energy in this small body!
All in all I had a wonderfull birthday and I want to thank everyone that made it so happy! Not least the parents of Anthony who had ordered flowers for me! I was so surprised when the flower shop called me and said they would come and deliver flowers to me, first time in my life I get flowers like this. And the parents had scanned a handwritten greeting for me.
Thank you, thank you, thank you 
Posted in Garden, Valbonne at 9:25 am by tesstess
This weekend we started the spring work in the garden with buying new flowers and planting them. Last week I cut the grass for the first time, it took me three hours since it was so high and I had to dig out some small, nasty plants with needles on.
In order to be fit for fight for a long day of gardening I did a warming up, washing both cars. Anthony didn’t understand what I got all my energy from I perfectly well understand where it comes from: But hey, we’re going shopping! Flowers!
We have a big gardening store only some minutes by car from here so this Sunday we went there two times to buy things.
The digging was harder than expected. First all the pine had to be carefully removed and cleaned from ground and leaves, then the good ground lifted out and then really hard digging to get away some of the mud. We wanted to get the flower bed deeper to make the flowers happier.
When we got the deepness we wanted we filled again with old ground mixed with ground we bought.
This winter I managed to kill our last Pelargonias, plus two other plants that we put in the small studio we’re using to store things. Anthony’s analysis is that I gave them to little water. But now we bought new Pelargoinas to have outside the bedroom window. Anthony promises that they will grow a lot and hang down beautifully over the edge.
All those previous pictures are from last Sunday, which was the fiftenth of April, and also our celebration day of seven months together. And look what appeared in Anthony’s coffe!
Anthony had a good eye for seing where each plant should be put.
Here is the plan for the part of the flowerbed closest to the door.
And now comes the result:
Those are our favourites, so intensive red! They close at night and opens up the morning after.
The four small ones in the front doesn’t look so much to the world yet, but they are supposed to grow along the ground and be full of small flowers, flowering from May to October. Sorry, Karin, but I don’t remember the name of all those flowers, and in any case they would be in french if I remembered them.
Isn’t it beautiful?!
And some herbs: persil and siboulette (gräslök alltså).
There wasn’t room for all plants we bought, but we are planning to extend the flower bed on the other side of the terrasse, so they will all get happy homes in the ground this coming weekend.
These small friends were also supposed to go in the ground, but now when I see them like this I think I will keep them in the pot. Just hope they don’t want to grow too much.
This last picture is a link to the next post I will write, because the day I finished the planting was the 18th = my birthday and I cleaned all day to get the garden, terrasse and inside ready for the first BBQ of the year.
04.15.07
Posted in Etzling, Hollidays at 9:06 am by tesstess
Last week we spent a wonderful easter holliday with Anthony’s parents. I made a
link to google maps so you can se where Etzling is.
The weather was fantastic with sun all the time, I got more color (hm, read red)
than I did down here in the south.
The first day we stayed in the flat near Mulhouse where Johnny, Anthony’s dad, works and the next morning we went out on tourist expedition in Alsace.
First we went to the Ecomuseum, a constructed village with old, traditional houses from Alsace.
Anthony, me and Johnny.
There were lots of storkar on the roofs and we came just in the time of this funny dance they’re doing when they clap their beeks and throw their heads back to impress on the partner. Very funny to see.
As you can see, we aslso found other more or less sweet animals
After the Ecomuseum we drove through lots of small villages/towns in Alsace. It is a rich region, known for its wine. We stopped at a couple of towns to look around and feel the atmosphere.
Almost all windows had easter decoration
Here we were. And on the left is a speciallity, a super-thin pizza with cheese. I thought I would get hungry after half an hour eating only this, but I stayed full for many hours, very surprising.
And everywhere those for the region caracteristic houses.
I borrowed the digital system camera from Fabienne, so funny to take pictures with a real camera, and Anthony was the obvious motif for most of my pictures.
Our next to last stop was to taste and buy wine from a famous producer.
In the evening Johnny invited us to a one star resturang. This is an extremely luxury resturant, to get a picture I can tell that we counted the three star resturants in France and they are between 20 or 30 of them!
This is my starter, it is shells in the middle (one muscle of one shell devided into two or three slices), on the left is tomatoes and on the left a string of curry-mayonaise with dill.
In between each meal there was a tiny thing to eat, and everything was so nicely laid out on the plates. My main dish was liver (not of cow, don’t remember now from which animal) and it was very very good.
Here is my me and my desert, a creme brulé, do I need to say it was the best one I ever ate? And below is the starter and dessert of Anthony.
Then we came home to Etzling, and from that day I only wanted to stay in this beautiful garden! Take a look at some of the flowers!
This is the most beautiful garden I have ever seen and it was a luxury to have the opportunity to spend almost one week in it. I got lots of inspiration to go home and do gardening in our own garden.
This is a Magnolia.
One of the days we went mushroom hunting. But this is a secret, so don’t tell anyone!
The forest was full, not of mushrooms, but of blue flowers. And later we also found Anemone (vitsippor), wich made me so happy because a spring is not a spring for me without them. In total we found five small, but apparently very good, mushrooms. Anthony was the one who found all of them, they are very hard to spot. He tried to teach me how to find them so when he found one he told me in which square meter it was and asked me to search, and it took me several minutes to find it!
The guys were very happy to be able to drive Johnny’s fancy sports car for the mushroom picking
Most of the time we rested and read magazines. I found out that Fabienne has tons of decoration and home magazines so I was very buzy reading them. I got so much inspiration and began to long for a work so I will get money to buy things, for example to decorate a table beautifully for a dinner.
It was so warm, we had lunch on the terasse almost all days! The lunch on the pictures is a sallad with small bits of fried meet. I think it is some kind of stomach, but I tried not to think of that while eating, it was a delicious meal. And of corse wine was served to the lunch, and to the dinner. All days. We’re having a week without alcohol now when we’re back home.
We had time to visit both sets of grandparents, for a dinner at each place.
Here is at the place of meme and pepe (mormor och morfar).
I told them about snapsvisor and they proved they had this in France too, and everyone sang. One of them had a refrain “glup glup glup glup…” and this is the one I’m doing on the picture. Everyone sings to one person at at time who has to stand up, and put the glas where the song tells you: on the front, on the nose on the stomach etc, and then comes the glup glup and you have to empty your glas. I sang “Helan går” for them and they tried the best they could to sing with me.
The last evening we went to mami and papi (farmor och farfar), and to our surprise the brother of Johnny and his wife were there too.
We got an easter-rabbit
