Jun/091
Life marches on
Spring inter-season is finally over here in Chamonix. Over the past few months I've been both resting after skiing all winter and working very hard to develop my business in the down time. I haven't written much about business recently, but that will all change soon enough.
I judge summer season to have started properly because the lifts are running again this week. I bought my summer pass and took my new bike up on Le Tour lift for the first time. Brilliant. I know it's dangerous and I'm probably going to break my collar bone before the summer is out, but downhill mountain biking is such a buzz.
I'm wearing full body armor: shin guards, gloves, helmet & full upper body protection with a back plate. I've got a decent bike with suspension and most importantly I've got a lift pass and live right at the bottom of the the Le Tour lift system which access not only the Domain De Balme, but also Vallorcine, the Col Des Montets and there are even tracks right down to Trient in Switzerland. I've found my sport for the summer. It's not quite as much fun as skiing, but it'll keep my adrenaline levels up until the snow comes back.
The vegetable garden is going great guns and I've even started to eat the first produce. The radishes are amazing little buggers - from seed to table in about 3 weeks. The radishes and some beautiful baby spinach leaves have been the first food I've grown and eaten. All from seed. I'm actually quite proud of my veg patch. I'm always banging on about it in the pub and anyone who comes round the chalet is immediately given the tour.
First produce from my kitchen garden
In other news: I blew up my van. Bugger. It's not as bad as it sounds (or looks) I hope. I think I just ruptured a coolant hose and all the horrible, corrosive, nasty cooling water spewed out at 100 degrees C all over myself and the van's paintwork. It's in the garage in Les Houches getting sorted and I'll probably pick it up in a day or two. I'm quite looking forward to the 20km bike ride (almost all down hill) to go and pick it up.
May/091
Time to earth up the potatoes?
I'm loving taking short breaks from working, sitting out in the sun watching the garden grow. I like that with gardening you don't need to do everything as soon as you think of it. You can just kind of gestate the ideas for a few days before getting round to actually doing it. If the pak choi seedlings look like they're getting a bit pot-bound and need planting out, then they won't change much over the couple of days it takes me to get round to it.
It's all growing so fast now that the temperature has gone up. Plenty of rain has helped too. The potatoes are going so well I think they need earthing up. I'm assuming that out of the people who read this blog, I'm going to be the one who knows the least about growing veg as it's my first attempt - so maybe I can ask the audience here?
Should I earth up the spuds?
What do you think? Should I earth them up? I reckon I also need to break up the top soil crust a little bit too. What's that called? hoeing perhaps?
May/090
So winter's all finished then?
I haven't quite got back into the habit of writing my blog yet, but I will. Every time I start writing I get distracted by twitter. It's very addictive.
So a quick catch up. The ski season is over, my ski boots are firmly hung up till next winter and everyone has buggered off, leaving the valley very quiet indeed. Yay. My girlfriend is about to leave to go on tour for practically the whole summer. Boo. I've started working properly again this week. Yay (I get a bit antsy if I don't work for too long).
Most importantly I've finally finished preparing the ground for the kitchen garden. It was bloody hard work. I was digging out boulders so big that it needed two of us to lift the buggers out. That pile of rocks in the distance of the picture below all came out of the tiny 20m2 patch I've prepared. The soil does look good, despite what the other families in the chalet think. I've enriched it a little with some organic guano fertiliser and a shitload of horse manure.
There's some debate about when to plant out - especially up here at altitude where it's much colder and the seasonal change is a few weeks behind the norm. I reckon it's time to get some of the larger seedlings in. The potatoes and onions which have been growing in pots are definately ready and the berlotti and french beans are getting so big they need to start climbing up something.
Planting. This is the bit I've been looking forward to all along and I'm glad to get the chance to share that pleasure with my girlfriend before she heads off to work.
Kitchen Garden, Le Tour
Feb/090
Warm again
Our week of being cold ended yesterday with the delivery of 2000 litres of heating oil. The 80 Litres of ordinary car diesel we chucked in the tank gave us enough fuel to heat the water, so the week wasn't a total hardship, but having to wear full ski gear inside all the time got old very quickly.
Now that we've got the hang of the heating system properly we won't be making that mistake again. The current tank full should last through until November, at which time I'll top up the tank again for next winter before the snow arrives again.
Feb/091
The Heating Crisis
We're in crisis mode here in the mountains this weekend. We ran out of heating oil. It was partly our own fault for not knowing how to use the boiler efficiently, but quand meme , I was still a little bit surprised by the oil delivery company's refusal to deliver before the 20th Feb. That's nearly a week away and we've got no hot water and a house rapidly falling to the ambient temperature of below freezing. Handily, ski clothes work just as well indoors as they do out of them.
Apparently if we'd owned young children, the oil company would have considered it an emergency and come sooner. So as we sit here blowing on our hands, typing this post, we do feel somewhat discriminated against for our choice not to contribute to over-population.
But every one's been very helpful and nice to be fair. We've borrowed 80 litres of Jerry cans from a mate, and apparently we can buy industrial grade diesel in bulk at one of the garages in town, so we'll hopefully at least have enough fuel to run the hot water till the truck comes and delivers the 2000 litres we ordered next Friday.
And before next Friday we'll have to dig a path from the road through the 6 foot deep snow in our garden so the geezer can get the hose up to the pipe to fill our oil tank. Sarah's made a start already & I reckon a good couple of hours of work should do the trick. And it'll certainly help keep us warm.
No where did I put my gym membership card? I feel the need for a sauna.
Dec/080
A quiet Sunday
Yesterday was a beautifully sunny day, perfect for the opening of the Le Tour ski area - the lift I can walk to from my house. I was due to take some photos for AMP in the afternoon, but realised I'd forgotten my camera. No problem. I skied home at lunch time, had a bit of pasta, picked up my camera and was back skiing an hour later. I think I'll be spending a lot of time skiing in Le Tour this year.
Not today though. The foehn wind has been blowing a hoolie all day & it's arctic. So I stayed at home, did some house work, listened to the the archers omnibus & nursed my cold. A nice quiet Sunday.
Nov/081
The art of moving my arse
Taking it slowly. Yeh right. Weeks later and I'm still trying to move in. Hampered by the fact that the snow is waist deep in my garden, my office furniture has been sitting in the back of my van for days waiting for me to unload it. Hampered by the snow and the mother of all hangovers I gave myself with a couple of house-warming parties over the weekend I suppose. I'm so over moving house now, but at least by the end of today I'll have set up my office again and I can get back to work.
So how do you move sofa beds & desks etc through 100 yards of deep snow? You can't use the trolley like before. And if you're trying to carry something heavy up hill in snow you do risk falling and injuring yourself. Which would be heart-breaking at this stage of the winter. The answer?
Put crampons on your snow boots of course.
Nov/080
The reality of winter
The promised snow storm arrived yesterday. Shed-loads of snow. 50cm at least in my back garden. It was a bit of a race for me to get down the valley to Carrefour to do a big food shop before I got snowed in. A race I lost in fact. My van (which is full of office furniture) got stuck on the road from Argentiere to Le Tour and I had to put the chains on just to get home. I'm rubbish at putting chains on, it's a dirty horrible business which you invariably do at the side of the road, inappropriately dressed in a snow storm. But I got home in time to cook a meal for my first dinner guests.
The reality of living in Le Tour - officially the snowiest village in the French Alps - is sinking in. This is what my van looked like this morning.
So rather than digging it out, I thought I'd ski down to Argentiere instead. It didn't take long. It's around 5km and gravity was on my side. The buses are running, so I didn't even have to skin back up, which I think would have tested my enthusiasm a little. As the first ski of the season it was an unusual one. I didn't get many turns in - only when I got to a stretch of road with a nice flattened covering. At that point I even overtook a struggling van. Chuckling as I did so I might add. Skiing began as a mode of transport & today it proved to be the best form of transport available to me. That and the bus for getting back up the hill.
Nov/080
Moving in. Finally
It's been a slog, but I finally moved into the new chalet last night. I thought it was going to be when the internet worked that I would feel I'd moved, but it turns out it was installing the cat that finally made it happen. There's still a few more runs up and down the valley to do but I'll be finished by the weekend. I've driven at least 700km to do this move, spent a fair bit of wedge and generally feel like I've worked quite hard for it. But it's worth it.
I've got lots of good things to get used to. Things I've been living without for a long time. Here's a few of them... a kitchen that I can actually cook in, a real bed, proper oil-fired central heating that isn't expensive and isn't wasteful of energy, plenty of room for visitors & guests, a shower, a freezer - even a dishwasher & washing machine. But most importantly - plenty of space and some peace and quiet.
The cat loves it, and so do I.
Nov/080
An extra day in my favor
A few days ago I woke up convinced it was Saturday. I'd gone to bed the night before thinking it was Friday night and that the week hadn't gone too badly. So I was pretty amazed that Radio 4, my computer'scalendar and even my iPhone told me it was, in fact, still Friday. I'd got the day wrong in my favor for once.
It had been a fairly productive week up until that point, and the extra day made it even more so. I finished it off with a trip down the valley to BUT (a kind of pikey French alternative to Ikea) where I spent a couple of grand on a cooker, freezer, dish washer, washing machine, bed and a few extra sticks of furniture. I also managed to fully empty my lock-up storage box and close that down. I was back in town in time for Friday evening apperros.
So that gave me the whole weekend to spend time up in Le Tour putting together flat-pack furniture and setting the place up. It's nearly there. There's still some significant work to be done, but I think I should have it all done by the end of this week, and movepermanently up to my mountain village retreat by the end of this week. I hope so - I've got my first dinner guests coming on Friday and I want to be ready.
