Freezing fog

It's a good thing I went grocery shopping yesterday. The roads were dry and frost-free. I came home with a lot of food for our daily consumption. It was and still is very cold outside. We might be holed up for a while.

 
Early this morning when I went downstairs to let Tasha out to pee and poop, I was surprised to see an inch or two of snow on the ground. Yesterday afternoon was sunny, and when the sun went down we had no reason to expect overnight snow. It has stuck to the gravel driveway on our property, which means it has probably stuck on the paved road we take down a very steep hill to get to local businesses and nearby towns to do our shopping.

Today I'm posting a few photos of the freezing fog we had the day before yesterday just to continue working with the ergonomic mouse I ordered last week and received Sunday afternoon. So far so good. I haven't yet taken any photos of this morning's snow because it's still pitch dark outside.

A test post

This is what the vineyard just south of our hamlet has looked like this week. We had one day of (frigid) sunshine, but the other six days have been really cold and gray. Freezing fog moved in a few days ago, so everything is coated in frost. Plus we had a pretty moon rise a couple of days ago.

 
Our morning temperatures have been below freezing — as low as –9ºC (in Blois) and –8ºC (in several towns and villages closer to Saint-Aignan). That's about +15ºF.

P.S. Why am I posting on the blog today? It's because I acquired a "vertical ergonomic" mouse and it wanted to give it a workout. It's supposed to support your wrist better and cause you less pain. So far, I'm not really sure it works.

Taking a wintertime break

I've decided to take a break in January. Don't be surprised if you don't get posts on a daily basis. I'm finding it harder and harder to work with the Blogger software. There isn't enough time in the day to write and format blog posts and keep up with all the other things going on in our lives here in Saint-Aignan.

Besides, while my arthritis is much reduced most days, but I feel like I'm developing carpal tunnel disease because I spend so much time searching for and processing photos to post. My multi-tasking skills are not as sharp as they used to be, and that's frustrating. About the only thing I really enjoy doing is cooking, including shopping and meal planning.

Maybe in the spring, when the weather gets better, I'll start to get out a little more and take more photos. In December and January there's often not enough light for me to enjoy taking photos, and my fingers get really cold when I use the camera I'm afraid of dropping it.

There's a ton of work to do out in the yard, but it's too cold to do much outdoors. I guess we got spoiled by the warm winters of the past five years. At the same time, weather forecasters and meteorologists point out that the temperatures this winter are not really extreme by historical standards. It's just that we're not used to them now.

À bientôt ! Et bonne année !

Une chienne et une deux chevaux

This is a photo I took on December 30, 2008. The dog was called Callie. She was a border collie and she died in 2017 at the age of 10.

The car is a Citroën 2CV, meaning "two horses" — the term refers not to so-called "real" horsepower, but is a tax term used to set the cost of registering the vehicle by its first owner. My year 2000 Peugeot 206, for example, is a 5CV car in fiscal terms but it has a 90 HP engine. There is a formula for converting the two French terms (real vs. fiscal "horses") but it is too complicated for me to wrap my mind around it.

I was surprised to learn that the first 2CV cars rolled off the assembly line in 1948. I've always imagined it was earlier than that.