The long view

If you're going to have a smelly horse farm, might as well put it on top of a windy hill and have these views. This is where we watched TallGirl's riding lesson from (she's behind me). Outing today to take everyone to see CarbBoy's basketball (they cheered whenever his team scored a basket - which isn't really done in practice sessions, but I think the coaches appreciated the enthusiasm) and then TallGirl's riding. She spent the hour trotting her horse over poles laid on the ground, or sitting around waiting for the other nine students to do the same on their bored-looking mounts. TallGirl is now at the point where she is grumpy at not progressing more quickly. Action may have to be taken... Sigh. More cross conversations in French.

Anyway, pork for dinner and my (new*) signature dessert of vanilla poached pears with ice cream and the richest chocolate sauce. Always guaranteed to be a crowd-pleaser, particularly with those a little challenged in the tooth department. I think today I might have achieved as much as a C+ in the daughter-in-law stakes. Now I just have to keep it going for another few days... Who knows, I may average a C for the week - which would be something.

Lots of attempts to talk to Mr B (skype and facetime seem to be blocked by his hotel wifi) finally succeeded, despite the best attempts of my Mac to crash every 2 minutes today. I have finally worked out that perhaps this is its way of complaining that it's a bit full. Turns out when you move your itunes files to an external hard drive to free up some space (which I did months ago), that it has little effect on your computer until you go that final brave step and delete them from your internal hard drive. Brave step (bolstered by a little red wine) taken. Now, I should probably back up that hard drive somewhere...

*After the old signature chocolate meringue roulade failed (twice) to 'roule'. I did wonder if it's because I cleaned the oven - perhaps I've altered some sort of magic that the burnt on chicken fat was making...