Good news and bad news

The good news is that my laptop seems to be working fine this morning. I don't understand what happened yesterday. As my late friend Charles-Henry used to say: Ce sont les mystères et les joies de l'électronique. The bad news is that it's raining again. Here are some photos of the neighborhood.

Above left, the vineyard out behind our back gate, with our yard and house in the distance. Above right, the yard north of our house; the reddish-brown tree in the background is a plum tree in our neighbor's yard.

The linden tree (un tilleul) and an apple tree (un pommier) in our back yard. Both are growing leaves now. Blossoms will come later.

The little white flowers are called pâquerettes (Easter daisies) in French — "lawn daisies" in English. They're wild and they grow all around us this time of year. The photo on the left is apparently a bay laurel (as in "bay leaves" or laurier sauce) sporting its springtime flower stalks and clusters.

The neighbors' goats

These are our neighbors' goats. These are chèvres, not boucs (in other words nanny goats, not billy goats). They are not so aggressive. Why are they looking away rather than looking at me and the camera? Because they are keeping an eye on 'Tasha the Shetland sheep dog...

I'm having computer problems this morning. I hope I'll be able to fix them and able to blog tomorrow.

Saturday morning

Yesterday started out as a very pretty day. I'm glad I took my phone out on my walk with 'Tasha early in the morning, because by about 11 o'clock it had started raining. It was a fine, steady rain that lasted for about 10 hours, I think.

On Friday, Walt got the riding mower going again. He wrote about it on his blog yesterday. By Friday afternoon, he had mowed the whole yard. That was a good thing, since rain is predicted off and on all week. The grass might have been knee high by next Saturday if it hadn't had that last-minute mowing.

When we go out our back gate and turn right, this is what we see. The trees downhill from our yard are impressive. One strip of land out there is planted in fruit trees, including plums, quince, and apples. The people who have owned that strip for about five years now live in Brittany, and they haven't come to Saint-Aignan for about two years now. They told us years ago to take what fruit we want from their little orchard. The yellow plums from their trees are delicious. Just ask Evelyn...

Here's a picture that shows what my plum tree looks like right now. It's much bigger than it was 11 years ago, which is when I took the picture of it that I posted yesterday. 'Tasha was nice to strike a pretty pose for yesterday's photo.

Another Prunus among us

Voyez-vous les prunes?

I planted this Prunus tree at least a dozen years ago. If you look carefully at the first and third photos in this post, you can see tiny plums that look like cherries.

I fully expect that the most of the plums you see on this prunier will be devoured by birds rather than by people, as happens most years.

Focus on the prunus

The prunus tree in our back yard is in full bloom right now. Prunus is a genus of flowering trees that includes 340 species,according to the Wikipedia article about them. Just to name a few: plums, cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, and almonds. The one we have in the back yard is an ornamental plant that doesn't produce any fruit.

The last picture in this post shows the trunk of a fir tree whose trunk was covered in ivy until a few days ago. We had a very wet winter that encouraged its growth. I stripped all the ivy off this past week, hoping that the ivy that grows up into the tree branches will now die back. I don't climb on ladders much any more.

I took these photos with my Samsung smart phone's camera.

What things look like these days

Above right: If anybody has a suggestion about how I get the ivy off the exterior walls of our garden shed, I'd love to hear it. The walls are coated in a rough render that can really tear up your hands. We're having new shutters put on the shed window soon. Above left, a springtime sunrise.

Above right, a better picture of the Mahonia plant than the one I posted a few days ago. This one is in our hedge, not the neighors'. Above left, you can see how high the grass is growing. The riding mower's battery has failed. We are expecting a new one to arrive today or tomorrow.

Above: potted succulents. Donkey tails and hens and chicks.

Lentils for lunch

We've had lentils for lunch twice this week. Do you like them? I don't think Americans eat lentils as much as French people do. I read somewhere that the country that consumes the most lentils is India, and that the country that grows the most lentils is Canada. France grows a lot of lentils (called lentilles) too. We enjoyed them one day with Toulouse sausages (pork) and another day with Merguez sausages (beef and lamb).

As our second course one day, we had a very French salad. It's red beets (betteraves) with Belgian endives and a vinaigrette dressing. I know a lot of Americans who won't eat beets, but the French seem to love them. They are often sold cooked and less often raw. On another day, we ate radishes with salt, butter, and bread as our first course and lentils as our second course. Again, very French.

Spring has sprung

On Saturday, our part-time neighbors who live in Blois came down here to mow the grass at their country house across the street from us. In other words, spring has officially started... finally. That's their country house in the picture above, and a picture of Natasha admiring, or at least contemplating the cut grass. The neighbors' property is about twice as big as ours.

So yesterday, Walt got our mower out of the garage to try to get it running. He succeeded, after having to figure out how to pump up the mower's two front tires. We had bought a compressor that runs off a car battery last year, but never tried to use it. Here was the occasion to do so; both the front tires were nearly flat. After tinkering with it for 20 minutes or so, we got it going. The next step was to re-install the mower's battery, which is removed at the end of the mowing season and put in storage. That went well. By late afternoon, Walt was able to mow about one-third of our (tall) grass. The ground had dried out enough for him to be able to mow without making too many ruts. We have about half an acre of land.

All these photos are ones I took with my Lumix ZS8 camera a couple of days ago, with the exception of the photo of the lawnmower. For that one, I used my Samsung smart phone. We bought the mower last year, so it's still new to us.

By the way, not only has the grass been growing, but so have the leaf buds on the grape vines in the vineyard out behind our back gate. That's another sign that spring has finally sprung. It was almost hot outside when I went out for a walk with Tasha yesterday afternoon.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS8 photos

I took these yesterday morning on my walk with the dog using a Lumix ZS8 camera that I bought in the spring of 2012. It was my favorite camera for years. I stopped using it much about 6 months ago when I got my Samsung smartphone and starting using its built-in camera. Actually, I bought two ZS8 cameras back then — one new and one used. Both work great. At the time, I wanted to have a backup ZS8 in case something happened to one of them.

These are some of the things I see when I go out to walk with Natasha the Sheltie early in the morning. The sun was just coming up yesterday morning when we were walking — me snapping and 'Tasha sniffing...

Lumix ZS1 photos [2]

I'm trying to decide which one of my old compact digital cameras I want to keep. Reader Mitch said he saved one of his old cameras for its zoom, which the current smartphone cameras can't match. Right now I'm leaning toward my Lumix ZS1, which has a 12x optical zoom. But I also have two Lumix ZS8 cameras, which have a 16x optial zoom. Now I'm going to have to go out and take some pictures with those.

By the way, yesterday, I did some research in my photo archives to see how many photos I took with the ZS1 camera after I bought it in 2010. In that year, I took about 7,750 photos with the ZS1. In 2011, I took more than 8,500 photos with it. And in 2012, I took more than 4,000. I bought the ZS8 that year and it became my go-to camera.