Primevères

It was again a hard rain beating against the roof tiles and skylight windows up in the loft that woke me up at 5:30 this morning. It looks like we'll end up with 200 mm of precipitation — 8 inches, and all of it rain — for the first two months of 2014. Another storm is crossing the southern part of England this morning. A heavy squall just knocked out our satellite TV signal.

The gardening guy on Télématin announced a few minutes ago that since our 2014 weather is three weeks in advance compared to the calendar, it is now Springtime. Le printemps. That doesn't mean it's particularly warm outside, but it's certainly not cold. South of us, though, in the central mountains, it's snowing.

There are flowers all around the hamlet now. Camelias. Plum and peach blossoms. Cyclamen. Forsythia. Primroses (as in these photos I took in our side yard over the course of the week). And on and on. The primroses are domesticated "escapees" — the woman who sold us this house said that whenever she had a little pot of them from the florist's, she would plant them out in the yard at the end of springtime.

The kitchen work is almost done — at least the contractor's part of it. He'll come back this morning and put a last coat of paint on the ceiling. Then our work begins. We'll spend this afternoon and a good portion of tomorrow cleaning. I guess "spring cleaning" is the right name for it.

The walls over the stove need a good wiping. All the horizontal surfaces in the room (especially the top of the refrigerator) need to be scrubbed. The tile floor needs a thorough mopping. The curtains have to go back up, and the light fixture. Then we can start moving all the stuff back into the room and resume our normal organized life.