La goutte...

...qui a fait déborder le vase ! The proverbial last straw. AAACCKK! When I got up this morning — at 5:00 a.m. because it was too warm to try to sleep any longer — I came downstairs and turned on the TV to see the news. Nothing. The satellite box seems to be deader than a doornail.

Another photo from the Château d'Angillon

Okay, I'll miss not seeing the news and the weather reports on Télématin, but I'll survive. I'll just turn on my little wifi internet radio, I thought, and listen to France Inter for news. Guess again! It wouldn't work. When I started up the TuneIn radio application, it just reported an error. I turned the radio device off and rebooted it. Still the same error. In frustration, I cursed it and turned it off again.

Lily pads in the lake at La Chapelle-d'Angillon

I got TuneIn radio working on one of my tablets, but it was completely unstable. I'd hear the radio for two minutes, and then there would be two minutes of silence. It kept losing the connection, or just churning. Okay, the DSL modem is the problem, I thought. I turned that off, let it rest for a minute or two, and turned it back on. Then I thought I ought to do a blog post, and I realized that my computer upstairs, where all the photos are stored, was off-line. Not to be found on the network. Damn.

Is this a gremlin?

By now, Walt was up too. "Are you okay?" is what he said when he came into the living room. I wasn't, so I told him about everything that was happening. Or not happening. Oh, I forgot to add that I had run the washing machine overnight, and when I went downstairs to feed the cat and take the laundry out of the machine, guess what the first thing that fell out was. Go ahead — guess. A camera battery! I had washed one of the the new camera batteries I bought a couple of weeks ago. Left it in the pocket of my dog-walking jeans, which I had finally decided to wash again.

How does the garden grow? Well, it's late this year but it is growing.

Walt went to check the wireless weather station that records our high and low temperatures every day, and it reported that the high yesterday was 36.9ºC. Normal human body temperature is 37ºC, so yesterday must have been a pretty hot day. Well, we know it wasn't that hot. It was 25ºC at the most. What kind of gremlin got into the weather station?

Collards, nasturtiums, and tomato plants

Now that I've written all this, I'm not sure what that dernière goutte or last straw was. There are plenty to choose from. Meanwhile, on the plus side, my ribs are nearly completely healed now. I can move freely and painlessly, even when turning over in bed. My bruised, scraped knee is healing too. All the devices in the house except the satellite TV box are working again. The house itself is a mess, because of the work going on in Walt's office room. There's stuff from that room in odd locations, all over the place. It's almost more mess than I can stand. But the garden is growing, as you can see from the pictures in this post.