April Showers.

The rain has come as promised, so clearing the orchard has had to be postponed yet again. The ground is also too wet for me to continue with the weeding so I am holed up inside and wondering what to do.

I can’t plant any more seeds as my tiny greenhouse space is already full, I can’t get on with the kitchen as the plumbing work isn’t finished and I can’t get on with putting stuff away until the kitchen is finished!

So it’s time to go through my expenditure over last month. Keeping out of the shops and then tallying what I do spend has really helped curb my spending. I still have days when the shopping bill is high but at least it’s down to one or two a month, not one or two a week. Having the goal, and expense, of getting the paddock fenced in the next month is also helping me concentrate my effort on cost cutting as well.

I would really like to change my telephone and Internet provider, currently I’m paying around 50€ a month, excluding calls which are extra. I could get an all in package with another provider that would give me free calls as well for about 30€ a month. So why don’t I do it…well, my neighbour has done that and has been without telephone or Internet for about a week and a half. Before that it wasn’t working in the evenings. When I got this connection it took nearly 6 weeks to get it up and running. Add to that, here in France they charge you a disconnection fee to leave a contract and the oft repeated problem of leaving France Telecom, which is the state provider, to go to someone else usually results in FT throwing toys out of the pram and your line (which they own) failing and not being repaired very quickly – hence my neighbours problem.

Still I might have a go after my summer visitors have left. Planning on when a 2 month break without Internet or telephone is not the easiest of things to do when you are an Internet addict like me.