My blog seems to have had plenty of rock and roll, lately. But today we just have rock. Lots of rock:When this rock was dumped in front of our house a few weeks ago, I was VERY happy and relieved. Our errant local landscaper (his previous exploits prominently featured here) had left us in somewhat of a lurch.
After industriously removing all cover off the slopes around the edge of our driveway, he made the bare slopes steeper....
.....and then disappeared again.

I was really beginning to worry that he'd taken our advance money and scampered off, never to be seen again in this life..
He'd signed papers when he took the money, of course, but I was beginning to envision a lawsuit. And the idea of initiating a lawsuit in France, against a guy who is the son of our ex-neighbors who live in the village, made me quake in my bottines.

I'd call him and ask when work would start and he'd assure me that the rocks would be delivered on a certain day, say Tuesday. Then I'd call the local rock and gravel place and ask if it was true.
Or if he'd even called them at all.
And it turned out it wasn't and he hadn't.
Then I'd call him and hear the most unlikely fantasies unfold...Well, they were lies, really, but why be mean about it?
He told me, for example, that the reason the office had no trace of a call from him was that he hadn't called the main office at all , but just talked to the owner's son.
Well, I CALLED the boss's son...and he said that he hadn't heard from the guy.

When confronted with this, my creative landscaper told me that the fellow had been DRUNK when they talked and must have forgotten.....

I felt like I was living in an alternate universe - a particularly nasty one inhabited mainly by compulsive liars.

And meanwhile, the dirt kept washing down the driveway.

But finally, this happened:
It was a huge relief to finally have the key element, which we'd already paid for, present.
I was finally able to start sleeping well at night again.
Not that all is a bed or roses, or even rocks, now.
The pile has now been sitting there for over three weeks. When I call the landscaper, I hear more creative fabrications that might even be entertaining ... if it weren't all so frustrating...

My yard is still slowly eroding down my driveway and into the Menoge River at the bottom of the valley, though.

Which kind of sucks.

But I do have rocks AND I'm going to be in the USA in one week! So, I have to say that I'm relatively happy, despite my small miseries....