La Girade

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I am learning more and more about La Girade as we go. Again, La Girade is the house where I am working, and the eventual home of the Tylers.

Mark Tyler bought the property from the Carrive family; it had been on the market for twelve years, and eventually the family decided to sell it to the Tylers (about a year ago).

The house was home to Jean Carrive and his wife for most of the last century. Jean Carrive was an artist, a painter among other things, and he was part of the Surrealist Movement in France during the earlier part of the twentieth century. He is one of the original signers of Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. Pretty cool!!

During the second world war, a painter named Balthus (also known as Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola) lived there as well; he was a close friend of the Carrive family and was well -known for his paintings of young women (who himself was close friends with Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet).

I am no sort of expert on these people, I just googled their names when Mark told me the story. If you are interested you should google them and see what you find!!

Working....

Working has been really interesting and I think I am learning a lot (what is more, I am learning how many things there are about the work that I don’t know). It is the little things that impress me about the guys I work with; like how fast they can wash out a wheelbarrow that has been used for concrete. Or how inventive they are when trying to lift something through a door that is two feet off the ground. A thousand small bits of knowledge that one can only know by doing it…….and by doing it wrong at least once.

I make so many mistakes throughout the workday. For instance, today I forgot to wash out the concrete mixer before lunch (I though we only had to do it at the end of the day!) and when I got back the remnant concrete had dried in the thing. But because of my mistake, I learned how to clean dried concrete out of the mixer: rocks!! We threw a dozen or so large stones in the mixer, and a pail of water, and let the thing run for a few minutes. When we emptied it, it was all clean.

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