Frosty + fog = freezing fog

Life seen through a back window. That's our life right now. Each of us bundles up and goes out every day for a walk with the dog (Tasha) but not for too much else besides groceries. Over the past few weeks, sometimes we see the sun rise, but mostly we don't (despite the fact that I get up at five a.m. every morning. Even when we see the sun rise, often a dense fog forms and blocks it out an hour or two later. Temperatures hover around the freezing point. Sometimes we get freezing fog.

My trip to La Gourmandière was therapeutic. I was worried about black ice (du verglas in French) on the roads, but I didn't notice any. The woman who was on duty at the winery wished me a happy new year and a lot more sunshine this year than we had last year. She said morale is low out here in the countryside because skies are too often gray. I've been known to say that most of the color in our environment at this time of year is in the kitchen. Today I'm making choucroute garnie, sauerkraut with beautiful smoked meats. I'll take pictures.

La Gourmandière, une cave à vins

...près du Château de Chenonceau. That puts it less than 15 miles west of Saint-Aignan. I'm going there this morning, unless I find the roads too icy for me to do the drive safely. I guess I'll wait a little while for the sun to come up and warm up the pavement. La Gourmandière is one of several big wine companies and wine shops (cave à vins) in the eastern part of what used to be the Touraine province in the Loire Valley. It's worth the drive for the variety and quality of the wines it makes and then sells at very reasonable prices La Gourmandière used to be a wine co-op with a membership of several hundred grape-growers, but it was sold to a new owner a few years ago.

La Gourmandière produces and sells "still" (not sparkling) red, rosé, and white wines as well as white and rosé sparkling wines in bottles. It also sells non-sparkling red, white, and rosé wines in bag-in-box containers as well as in bulK (en vrac). In other words, you can bring your own containers to the winery and the staff fill them for you with wine that is stored in huge stainless-steel vats. The wines I'm interested in today are red Côt (a.k.a. Malbec) and Cabernet Franc wines sold in ten-liter bag-in-box containers for two euros per liter. That would be the equivalent of thirteen 75cl bottles for about $22 U.S. Here's a link to the company's web site.

P.S. I just published this post after not being able to do so yesterday. I don't know why. It posted partially, but the result was a post that didn't allow comments and didn't display the blog's sidebar. I hope this one is working today.

This is a test....

....just a test.

Notre cuisine

We spend a lot of time in the kitchen at this time of year, because we don't spend a lot of time outdoors. Years ago — I think it was in 2008 — we painted the kitchen walls. We took the doors off the wall-mounted kitchen cabinets because we had decided to re-paint them. As it turned out, we never put them back on their hinges. We didn't need them; they were just in the way. Here's what the cabinets look like.

Back even earlier, we had bought and installed what I guess is called a pot rail. Now we have two of them, in fact. Ours is not an eat-in kitchen, but just a work/fun space. It's nice that everything is visible instead of hidden. Visibility encourages neatness, I'd say. Yesterday I cooked a French classic called canard aux navets — duck with turnips. That was fun but I forgot to take any pictures.

January moonset

Our temperature is just below the freezing point this morning. I think that's the first time that's happened this winter. Accuweather says our temperature right now is -3ºC (+26ºF). Predictions are for even colder temperatures tomorrow morning, down as low as 21F.

I took this photo yesterday morning (Jan. 12) as the moon was setting out over the vineyard.

I've been slowly working with my new micro PC. I'm really tempted to install Windows 10 on it but Microsoft will be ending support for that operating system later this year. I'm getting too old to learn the new tricks of a new interface, I guess. The micro-computer is model no. N97 and is produced by a Chinese company called GMKtec. Here's a link to a Youtube video about it.

A growing habit

For the past few months, and maybe longer, I've been eating a croissant every morning with my daily cup of tea. I started doing so because I realized one day that even though I've been living in France for more than 20 years now, I was probably eating no more than half a dozen croissants a year. By the way, croissant is the French word for crescent. It's also the present participle of the verb croître, to grow, and means "growing."

I put skimmed milk and sugar in my tea in the morning, but I eat my croissants plain. I admit to buying them, more often than not, at the supermarket. They are baked in the store every morning, so they are fresh. And they are made with butter, not margarine. Butter, flour, a pinch of salt, and a little bit of sugar; those are the ingredients. The croissants I get from the supermarket weigh about 52 grams each. That's less than two ounces.

You-know-who... that would be Tasha the Sheltie... loves croissants as much as I do. I share mine with her. I'm not sure I knew that, at least according to legend, Marie-Antoinette brought the croissant, along with the recipe, to France from Austria in about 1770. Living here, it's a shame not to enjoy one every day. For a special treat, when I'm out and about early enough, I buy a few croissants in one of the half-dozen or so bakeries in the Saint-Aignan area that bake and sell them, just to see how good they really are compared to my everyday croissants.

Snow... but just showers

We didn't get much but it was snowing at this time yesterday morning. The temperature outside, according to our thermometer, was 3.9ºC. It was raining. Then the temperature dropped to 3.1ºC and the rain turned into sleet and snow. About an hour later, the temperature went back up to 3.9º and the snowflakes turned back into raindrops. The temperature is 2.5 this morning and there are patchy clouds. I can see the moon, which is beautiful.

Yesterday's hour of snowshowers was enough to keep me inside rather than on the road on the way to the supermarket. Tasha's back was covered with snow after our sunrise walk.

Greenery

Yesterday Walt posted a photo of part of our hedge after all of it had been pruned back. Here are two photos I took of the long section of the hedge that runs along the road on the south side of our property — one from out back and one from inside the house. You can see that it really needed to be pruned. What you can't see is all the honeysuckle and blackberry vines that were cut out of it. In total, the hedge is about 500 feet (150m) long. It's also very wide and a lot of it is very tall.

And here are two photos of our lunch yesterday. I bought this very fresh, very big head of escarole (scarole in French) at the supermarket (mug for scale). It will make us salads for days. If it starts to wilt, I will cook it as greens or as a soup. Yesterday's salad, with a Caesar-style dressing, was served with diced bacon, hard-boiled eggs, and steamed new potatoes. Not to mention French bread and red wine.

Hoping

I'm here this morning hoping that our friend Diogenes and his house are nowhere near the L.A. fires I'm seeing reports about on MSNBC.

I didn't get anything done on the micro computer yesterday. I'm trying to think of anything I did accomplish, besides some grocery shopping and cooking lunch. Not much, I guess.

It rained all day and all night. We had heavy squalls earlier this morning. We also had very strong winds. I lay awake in bed for a few hours listening to the sound of raindrops slapping roof tiles and skylight (Velux) windows, and wind howling and whistling under the eaves of the house. Finally, at 4:30 I couldn't stand it any more and I got up.

I'm also having serious security problems with my Windows laptop. I finally was able to log in to Gmail a couple of minutes ago after a dozen attempts. I was closed out of Blogger for a while, but I just got it back. I think Google has gone crazy. This is my post for the day.

Following up

Three items today: the landscaping crew showed up yesterday morning at about 8:30 (that's when the sun comes up here in Saint-Aignan right now) and the hedge trimming job is all done. It looks great! It's hard to believe they could do all the trimming and clean up all the trimmings in one day's work. There were three of them.

We got the Peugeot back yesterday morning. According to the woman who runs the mechanic's shop, the timing belt replacement went without a hitch. I wanted to take a drive yesterday just to make sure everything is working but I decided to stay in and start setting up the new "toy" computer (micro PC).

And that went without a hitch too, so far. It will take a while for me to get it all set up, working on it an hour or two every day in between my other daily activities, like writing a blog post, processing some photos, cooking in the morning, walking the dog, watching a movie on Netflix or one of the hundreds of films I have recorded.

As I was typing this post, everything suddenly went dark. Yesterday's internet outage was planned and announced, and all went well as far as I know. This power outage was not announced. I hope we won't start having daily electrical outages for the next few months, as happened a year or two ago.

I'll take some photos of the trimmed hedge once the sun comes up this morning. That'll be about three hours from now.

A happy surprise

We got a surprise over the weekend. It was an e-mail from the guy who runs the landscaping service we've been using for the past 10 years or so for hedge trimming taking down dead trees. He had told us a few months ago that he would send out his crew to trim our tall, wide bay laurel hedge in December. And then we didn't hear from him for a while. Suddenly he contacted us again a couple of days ago and said he'd send out the crew on Monday morning. And he did.

Problem was, the weather was lousy. We were having high winds and heavy rain showers. He said it wasn't possible to do the work under those conditions. It was too dangerous. So now he's supposed to show up this morning to start the job. We hope to see him at 8:30 or so.

Meanwhile, we took the Peugeot to our car mechanic's shop yesterday morning at nine o'clock. I had made the appointment before Christmas. The car, my 24-year-old Peugeot 206, needed a new timing belt. It's a maintenance job that needs to be done every ten years or one hundred thousand kilometers. Our Peugeot 206 has just 200,000 kilometers (125,000 miles) on it, but this will be its third timing belt job since I bought it (used) in 2003.

In French, the timing belt job is called la courroie de distribution, and having a new one put in costs about five hundred euros. That includes putting in a new water pump. I had the Citroën C4's belt changed last year, which was a couple of years early. But I felt better having the job done, since the Citroën is already 17 years old. It has just 103,000 kilometers (64,000 miles) on it. I bought it used in February 2015 — nine years ago already. It looks and drives like a new car. We don't drive much, compared to all the miles I drove when we lived in California, where I had a long daily commute.

If the timing belt breaks, the result can be a trashed engine, and replacing the engine would cost a lot more than 500 euros. In fact, many cars don't have timing belts. They have timing chains instead. The chains aren't really susceptible to breaking, but they do require periodic inspection and maintenance (lubrication). They are noisier and heavier than timing belts, which are made of reinforced rubber. Compared to cars with belts, cars with chains get lower mileage.

My other occupations right now, besides cooking and laundry, have to do with the new micro computer I just bought. It was delivered yesterday, but I haven't had time to plug it in yet. The winds have died down since yesterday afternoon, so I'll work on that today. I don't want the little computer to be damaged by a power surge. Yesterday, we had short power outages several time over the course of the day.

A new toy

Well, I hope it will be more than a toy. I bought myself a new computer yesterday. It's a micro-PC. The box is a cube that measures 3 inches wide by three inches deep by 2 inches high. I'm going to use it to watch American television over the internet. We mostly watch French TV, which comes in through our fiber optic connection. The pictures below show the new PC next to my morning mug of tea and then next to Walt's smartphone. The third picture shows the back of the PC and the connections it offers.

The new PC has 12 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD boot disk, and Windows 11 installed. I think I've got all that right. I won't really know until I plug the machine in and turn it on later today. Oh, I bought the new toy on Amazon.fr for 156 euros.

Interruptions

This is what our walks in the vineyard look like this winter. The weather is weird. Yesterday the morning low temperature was minus 3ºC (26.6ºF). This morning it's plus 11ºC (51.8ºF). Day before yesterday, there was a heavy white frost over everything. Then yesterday it rained all day and the temperature shot up.

Here's a photo of two more houses in our hamlet. The one with the fancy iron fence and the two car garage is an AirBnB vacation rental. It sleeps 8 or 10 people. The rent is high, and it's not occupied very often — especially in winter. Nobody ever seems to stay there for more than one or two nights. I think most of them are just going to spend a day at the Beauval Zoo, Saint-Aignan's big attraction. The house next to the AirBnB is lived in by a woman and her two children, plus several dogs and goats.

The two pictures just above show you how I feel about the environment we live in these days . By the way, we've been notified that we will have an internet outage starting tomorrow (Monday) evening and ending Tuesday morning (maybe later than that). Not so long ago, that would have meant no telephone service and no television for us. But now that we have smartphones, we'll be able to work off the cell phone network instead of off our fiber optic cable.

Une fleur

I'm not sure how long we've had this jade plant. At least 10 years, probably. Maybe 15. I'm also not sure if it has ever had a flower on it before. Maybe not. I happened to notice the tiny flower a couple of days ago. I was admiring the plant's deep, bright green leaves. We have to bring it into the house in autumn when there's a danger of frost and we put it back outside on the terrace in the spring. It seems happy in an east-facing window.

Our late friend Charles-Henry, who passed away nearly a year ago now, said he would describe our jade plant as a bonsaï. I'm not sure if it would officially be described that way, but I agree that it resembles a bonsaï in some ways. I wish more flowers would appear on it. French Wikipédia says the name of the plant in French is arbre de jade and says jade plants préfèrent un endroit ensoleillé. Surtout en hiver, il est judicieux de placer la plante devant une fenêtre. Pendant les mois d'été, il fait très chaud derrière une fenêtre orientée au sud. Il est préférable de placer la plante d'intérieur jusqu'à 3 mètres derrière la fenêtre.

Dinner on New Year's Day

Do you recognize these? They are duck legs (including thighs) that I cooked for our January 01, 2025, dinner. They aren't confites (slow-cooked) but quick-cooked in our air fryer. They fit two at a time in the fryer basket. One nice thing about the air fryer is that there's no waste and very little clean up required. The duck fat that the legs release as they cook stays in bottom of the fryer basket (a drawer really) and doesn't scorch. You can save it for making biscuits, sautéing potatoes, and seasoning beans and greens. As you can see, I also air-fried two Toulouse-style pork sausages before I turned the air-fryer off.

Speaking of beans and greens, I cooked black-eyed peas and greens to go with the duck and sausages. I "sweated" some chopped garlic, celery, and shallot in a wok before putting in the beans, some bean liquid, and a couple of bay leaves along with the beans, which (chef's secret) came out of a can imported from Portugal. I haven't been able to find fresh or dried black-eyes for a while, but the canned ones are good. I also flavored some greens — in this case they were cooked curly endive (salade frisée) but I could have used kale or spinach — with the mixture of duck fat and aromatic vegetables.

Hamlet houses, etc. (2)

This is a view from our back gate. The house on the left above is much larger than it looks to be in my photo. It's lived in by people who bought it three or four years ago. The house on the right is also a big house. It's owned by a woman who lives in the Paris suburbs. She comes down here less and less frequently these days. I think she finds the weather here too depressing. She also owns an apartment down on the Côte d'Azur, where she spent a couple of months last summer. She has two adult children. I don't know if either one or both of them would be happy to inherit and live in the house at some point. More pictures below...

Houses like these would probably sell for about 250,000 euros. Each is on at least half an acre of land. There's another house of similar size and style behind them, on even more land. All three of the houses I'm writing about have been nicely remodeled inside over the past few years. They are sort of jammed together on a big piece of land.

As I've mentioned, a lot of vineyard parcels out back have been dug up over the past year or two. The parcels are a muddy mess nowadays, since we've had so much rain over the past year or so. One day they will be replanted and the owners, who live about a mile from us and own some 75 acres of vineyard land around the area, will start making and selling wine with the new grapes. They'll probably be planted with Sauvignon Blanc grapes, which seem to be replacing other varietals around here.

Here's a late-December view of the dirt road, which is a public right-of-way, runs for a mile or two through vineyards before connecting with another paved road. The dirt road is full of pot holes (nids de poule) because of all the rain we've been having.

Happy New Year from our house to yours

Et bonne année ! It was 22 years ago — Dec. 2002) that we first saw this house. I don't know what kind of house we expected to find in France when we started our search. As it turned out, we saw and considered 15 houses in four days back then. But we knew immediately that this house was the one we wanted. We hadn't even decided whether or not we would move to France once we bought it. We hadn't yet put our house in San Francisco on the market.

At that point, it only took us a few days to figure out that it was time for us to get out of California. By mid-March, our SF house was sold. In April '02, we paid cash for our house in Saint-Aignan. It didn't hurt that we sold the SF place for nearly seven times more than we paid for the St-Aignan place. In June '02, we got on a plane and, well, here we were, visas in hand. By July, we were all moved in, and by August we had bought a car, a used Peugeot that we still have. We were on our way. The two photos above show the back side of the house, which faces the yard.

You can vaguely see our house despite the fog we've been living with for the last week. It's at the end of the dirt road that runs through a vineyard. A paved road takes us to Saint-Aignan, all of 2 miles away. Today's weather forecast says to expect wind and rain now for a few days. We don't need the rain, but at least it will be a little warmer outside.

Coming to the house on the paved road that ends near our back gate, this is what you see.The photo on the right just above is our garden shed.

 

Citroën cars, a greenhouse, and two wood piles

These are the last of my sunshine pictures. It was sunny for one day: last Thursday. On the next three days it was damp, misty, foggy, and cloudy. Today's predictions: more of the same miserable weather in northern France, including Saint-Aignan, for the rest of the week.

The top three cars sold until recently in France have been (1) Renaults, (2) Peugeots, and (3) Citroëns. Now German cars like Audis, VWs, and Mercedes are getting more popular, especially among younger people. French cars used to have a bad reputation for reliability. Well, I'm still driving a 24-year-old Peugeot that runs great and is fun to drive. And I also drive a 2007 Citroën, which looks like a new car and is very comfortable. I see so many Citroëns on the road these days. And they don't look or ride like the old 2CV cars.

(Above) three Citroëns, ours on the right under the carport (we also have a garage where we park our other car); one greenhouse that needs to be emptied out and re-organized (when the weather gets warmer and drier); two piles of oak logs that gradually get fed into our wood-burning stove (we also have central heat — a boiler and radiators).

It's wood-burning season. We ordered and stacked a truckload of firewood a month or two ago (Walt did most of the stacking). We had a scare with the wood-burning stove around that time, but we found a company that could send us the replacement part we needed. It took them a month to get it to us, but it only cost 50 euros and fit perfectly. Having a wood fire nearly every day as a heating supplement is very nice and atmospheric. Besides, wood is much less expensive than the fuel oil we have to buy to run the boiler.

Other news: the dollar is soaring. Right now the U.S. dollar will get you 96 eurocents. That means $1,000 U.S.will get you €960.00 (euros). That's almost parity. The dollar hasn't been this strong in 20 years. Also, let me say that according to a French weather site I track, we have had about 28 hours of sunshine this month. That would be about 4 days with sunshine out of 31. Tomorrow I'll post some pictures I've taken on our foggy days.

Winter around the house and yard

   Sunny wintertime pictures. Some of what you see: our wisteria plant needs a good pruning. A lot of raking or leaf-blowing needs to be done too. It's just been too wet and/or too cold. Maybe in spring we'll be able to get some plants potted up... At least the inside of the house is warm and comfortable.