10. the bats are gone

It is a hugely frustrating to be physically in one place and yearning to be in another. Every waking moment is spent thinking about what I could be doing at the school or in the garden. And when spoken to I cannot refrain from blabbering about how frustrated and unhappy I am to be here doing nothing instead of there weeding, digging, building things (I know, that does sound wrong even to me but it's rude to point it out) and scouring the brocantes for furniture.
So instead of enjoying being stuck at home for the second day because of the snow, I look like I reverted to my The Cure listening, Bram Stocker reading, chronically incapable of smiling, chain smoking, arguments picking adolescent self, moodily looking at the window while my thoughts turn yet again to the school.

And this morning my concern is about a couple of bats we spotted in the cellar on our second visit last October. Papa and I were trying to make sense of all the pipes and of a flexi-tube slightly buried in the gravel when he asked me to look just above my head. At first I could see nothing, I was still looking for yet more pipes, and then I caught sight of them. They looked like two hairy ping-pong balls in bondage outfit hanging from a beam. And the sexual connotation isn't out of place as I've learned since then that at the time their reproductive period was in full swing (forgive the pun).

When we came back for the signature of the Acte de Vente in December they were nowhere to be seen, neither were they when we came back for Christmas. I thought we might have disturbed them and, feeling threatened, that they had left. That did upset me a little, so I went online to try to find out more about the little leather fetishists look-alike.
The good news is that their absence is most certainly due to them hibernating somewhere else and that, being sedentary, at least one of them, the male, should be coming back next March. I'm just hoping that our living in the school, after 16 years of being uninhabited, won't deter them from staying.