Today was the last full changeover for the gites. Because we finished the cleaning quickly and the new guests arrived in good time we went armed with a wicker basket and the
Edible Mushroom Guide and we all ventured out to some local woods mushroom picking. Unfortunately, not a very successful fungus foray, only bagging a couple of edible mushrooms. The most frequent find was the Common earthball (
Scleroderma citrinum), also known in the U.S.A. as 'pigskin poison puffball', marked as poisonous in my book. The other specimens looked like Chanterelles (
Cantharellus cibarius) or Autumn chanterelle (
Cantharellus tubiformis), both edible, but we couldn't make a
positive id considering the number of lookalikes. We have been told that in France you can take a mushroom to the pharmacy and they will identify it for you.
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9:00:19 PM 
Mushroom hunting
With the builders due to arrive in a couple of weeks we thought it was time to double check the plans, paying particular attention to waste and water supplies. The first job of the builders is to break up the existing floor and lay a new concrete floor with the necessary waste pipes buried in the floor ready to take all the foul water out to the new septic tank. The positions of the pipes protuding from the floor is critical as that is where the downstairs toilets, kitchens and shower will be sited. We have moved a few things around, partly for asethetic and practical reasons, so that necessitated lots of Tipex, redrawing, photocopying, moving cut-out beds and kitchens around etc. We also reorganised some of the upstairs rooms to make the path for the waste pipes easier. Moving one small thing has a knock-on to lots of other things. I wished we had an electronic copy of the original architect's drawings as it took an awfully long time jiggling about.
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8:59:47 PM Planning for the Fosse Septic
Saturday, September 18, 2004
