A nice cool weekend

The weekend rainstorm — we got about 1½ inches in a couple of hours Saturday morning — along with two days of cooler weather, really freshened up the vegetation and the entire look of the countryside. The weather is normal now — cool mornings, comfortably warm afternoons and evenings. More heat is predicted, though.

The generous rain really plumped up
the grapes growing out in the vineyard.

I went on walks with the dog on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. For the first time in a week, poor Callie was happy to have a long promenade. For days, it had been far too hot for her to be comfortable out in the sun. She'd be happy to go out, but lose her nerve after walking just a short distance. Inside the house was where she wanted to be.

This is a blackberry blossom. I hope we get tons of berries.

Bertie modified his schedule for the duration of the heat wave. Instead of coming in at dusk, he would stay outside until after dark — until after we had turned in, actually. At first it bothered me to go to bed and leave the cat out wandering the neighborhood, but I got used to it.

Cornflowers are blooming all around the edges of the vineyard.
This one is just opening up to the early morning sunshine.

Mornings, when I got up, he was usually there, happy to get his daily ration. On one or two mornings I didn't find him in the garage, but I put his food down anyway. Thirty minutes later I would go down and find his bowl empty and, as often as not, he would be sleeping on his bed. During the hot spell, he would sleep away the day in the garage, where it's fairly cool. Late in the afternoon, out he'd go again.

An impossibly blue cornflower

So I concluded that the cat was spending time outside during the cool nighttime hours, and then spending the hot daylight hours indoors. The sun must be hot on the back of a jet black cat.

Tomato flowers were left undamaged by
Saturday's early morning downpour.

After the hard rain Saturday morning, the garden was fairly beaten down. Walt picked up the tomato plants and washed the mud off their leaves, using the gentle spray from a watering can. He was afraid the summer squash plants had suffered a fatal blow, but by afternoon they had perked back up, their wide leaves standing tall again.

I spotted this nice butterfly on my walk Saturday afternoon.
I took the picture by zooming in from quite a distance,
and I'm still surprised it came out so nice.

Sunday we went to spend the afternoon with an English friend at her house in a village six or seven miles south of ours. It was the day of the Wimbledon final — Nadal vs. Berdych — and our friend has English TV via satellite. The match wasn't being shown live on French TV, and even the delayed broadcast was on a pay channel (Canal+) that we don't get.

Walt and Callie arriving at our friend's house
in a village south of Saint-Aignan

Nadal won. I was kind of hoping Berdych might pull off a surprise victory. We spent a nice afternoon watching tennis, sipping a glass of wine, and eating a box of See's chocolates that our recent visitors brought us from California.

Callie was happy to arrive.
She still hates riding in the car.

Did I tell you we now have an ice cream maker? The Englishwoman who left Bertie the Black Cat with us — she went back to work in the U.K. — also left the ice cream machine behind. So far, over the past week, we've made and enjoyed eating batches of lemon ice cream, coconut sorbet, and vanilla ice cream with hot fudge sauce. Today we're going to make cherry frozen yogurt.

Better stretch out those walks with the dog...