Elbow-room, the fire update,

Well, I am a crabby girl today. Ah well. Short tempered maybe would be most accurate. I also had my first real bout of European claustrophobia. That is an exaggeration, but I have always eventually found the narrowness of the sidewalks and the streets and the number of people, and the walled yards lead me to feeling a little bit tied in, bound up, hemmed in, pick your cliche. Anyway, today was the day. Walking along with the kids and the man and the dog, I ended up feeling a very strong urge for more


R O O M


It was better on the beach, but it was one of those days when both girls talked continuously and simultaneously to me, and held onto me or some part of me apparently all the time. Urgh. Lovely big open spaces of the beach and the sea, but still no elbow-room. Anyway, hopefully this will pass, it is one of the challenges I knew I would have to face here, and I am surprised it has taken this long to hit me.

I think it is something about a beach that does it to them. We would arrive on some deserted spectacular 3 mile long beach in the Bahamas, with not another soul for miles, and an uninterrupted view of the Atlantic, and the two of them would sit practically, if not actually, on top of me. After living with 4 people in a 27 foot boat, this was occasionally a touch frustrating. And hilarious.

Update on the local forest fire. They had emergency vehicles up there for most of the night, but it didn't flare up again. Looking at it today, I honestly cannot really tell that there was a fire. Very strange. I'm going to walk over on Tuesday with Chuck to check it out. It is presumably still off-limits to the public, and I have to work tomorrow morning, so I won't have enough time before the girls come back from lunch.

Oh, and on another note, wimpy dog redeemed himself today. He walked under the bridge on the way down with nothing more than an increased pace, as opposed to his previous extreme skittishness, and on the way back, walked through all by himself! Well, I had the lead, but I didn't have to carry him anyway. Thank goodness. He was a little hunkered down and moving fast, but he did it. It was very impressive in fact.

We had pancakes this morning, as we often do, and instead of my usual white flour pancakes, I made wonderful French buckwheat pancakes, that are supposed to be made with 1 egg, 1 cup of beer(!) 1 cup of milk and the flour. I skipped the beer. They were awesome. Thanks Nomad They had the most wonderful smokey taste, the kids thought they tasted a bit like bacon. I had not had pancakes like them before, although where we stay in the summers in Canada, the woman there makes some delicious flavourful interesting pancakes. The kids like to alternate those with my usual white flour pancakes though. Nothing quite like white flour and white sugar, eh? We do put some lemon juice with that to redeem it; and to make it taste better.

I misread my watch this evening and we ended up having dinner an hour earlier than usual, so the girls are happily drawing, the man is reading and I am blogging in the evening interval of peace and contentment.