Happy Days are Here Again

We got back from Paris to discover that our neighbours had cut down their mahonia tree. I'm not at all surprised, it's never recovered from the heavy snows a couple of years back and has been a bit threadbare ever since. And I certainly won't miss stepping on those desperately spiky leaves in my bare feet, or the crushed berries on the patio, or the flowers getting everywhere. BUT, it was where I hung all my bird feeders. So, off to the shops to buy a bird-feeding station. I'll have to get another one some time when I've persuaded C that one isn't enough. The peanut feeder is tied on at the moment as there aren't enough hanging hooks for everything. In any case, it didn't take long for all the birds to find it, and we've been seeing the greenfinches, goldfinches, sparrows and dunnocks and all the varieties of tit. The only missing ones are the redpolls - I hope they'll come back some time. It's been funny to see one goldfinch having a decided preference for sunflower seeds whereas another one goes straight to the niger seeds.
It took a little adjusting to get the seed tray at a suitable height where I could actually see it from the house and the pigeons couldn't use it as a convenient stand to help themselves from the main seed feeder, but once I got it right, the dunnocks and robins are enjoying it. Hopefully the chaffinches, another ground-feeder - will too, when they find it.
A robin has also been visiting the back door again after a break - and today when I was standing there waiting to shut the back gate after C went out, we had a very welcome little visitor.

Jardin du Luxembourg

The Jardin du Luxembourg is only about three minutes walk from the hotel we normally stay in, so we always spend a fair amount of time there, no matter what time of year. Often we sit and watch the tennis, but with the French Open on this time there wasn't a lot of good tennis being played on the courts.
There is a training centre for bee keepers, and it's the first time we've seen them in action - lots of smoke in the air and a small area around the hives roped off. There was an enormous stack of frames in a gazebo, but that photo was a bit blurred.

We often see dogs, too - but it's the first time we've seen a ferret. We wondered if it was a gift for somebody - you can see a single pink rosebud in the pet-carrier, and after he'd let the ferret have a little walk through the undergrowth and given it a drink, he carefully wiped it down with a damp cloth before returning it to the carrier.

This is the Senate building. I know it looks grey - but actually it was 8.30 in the evening and beautifully warm. At lunchtime there hadn't been a single vacant chair. In the dry weather it is very dusty - you can just see it on these park keepers, getting ready to close up and go home,  and after walking through  at lunchtime with our suitcases we were both noticeably dusty!

We had a picnic lunch in the garden on our anniversary - sandwiches and patisserie from the local bakery, strawberries, little coffee desserts and a bottle of sweet Breton cider.

On our last day it was a bit windier - much more fun for all the kids sailing boats on the central pond. The second view looks over towards the Pantheon.

p.s. - the sign with the Eiffel tower in an earlier post - I think it was someone having fun with a no left turn sign, and adding their own spin to it!

Paris!!

Every time we go to Paris we walk down the boulevard St Michel and I look in the window of this shop. The display is always so beautiful to look at. This time we didn't just look, we went in on our last afternoon and  I got an umbrella as the second installment of my birthday present from C. It's the same design as the white and black one in the window with the Eiffel Tower on it, but it's a collapsible compact one. I'd have loved the regular one, but it was just a bit too expensive in our current circumstances. Maybe another time! A bonus of the compact one is that the ribs aren't metal at all, they're some fancy new type of flexible plastic and hopefully will stand up much better to wind.

Paris - signs

 

Graffiti

We're just back from a short trip to Paris to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. It's going to take a while to go through the photos, but the ones with graffiti in them were easy to pick out...

This one was at the top of Rue Edgar Quinet. We were checking the opening hours of our favourite restaurant and then picking up a metro straight over to the Trocadero. We arrived just before a weekly art market finished - my favourite was a stand with metal sculptures, but we were also attracted by some music-themed paintings. The artist used to be a professional sax teacher and musician, who had taken up painting in his retirement.

Favourites from May

Some favourite picks (non Christmas!) from May. It seems this was a creative month, hard to narrow the choice down...

And the two extremes that take me out of my comfort zone:

Orange

From the Botanic Gardens last Saturday. My own escholzia is a very pale buttery yellow.

Cormorant

Greenfinches

We've been seeing quite a lot of greenfinches recently - here's one adult, and  one very fearless young one I spotted yesterday.

Heron