Weather, lights, and refrigeration

It's downright chilly this morning. What a change! Last night before I went to bed I closed up the house, at least downstairs, just to be sure that it would stay warm. I'm not ready yet to give up on wearing just shorts and a T-shirt. Yesterday it was really windy all afternoon, but it wasn't a chilly wind. It was actually pretty pleasant. During the night, though, both of us had to cover up with bed spreads and blankets. The wind felt frigid. I just checked the thermometer — it's 15ºC outside. That's slightly below 60ºF.

Our house and the neighbors' seen from far out in the vineyard...

We're headed to Tours this morning to do some shopping. We need a new light fixture for Walt's office, which was refurbished in late June, and we need a new lampshade for an old floor lamp that we've taken out of storage to put in the same room. And we need LED light bulbs for many fixtures around the house. All those things are to be had at the IKEA store.

Do other countries use bayonet light bulbs? Do you know what I mean? They're bulbs that don't screw into a socket, but have two little posts that hold the bulb in a spring-loaded socket. Like flashlight bulbs. They are the old-style bulbs in France, and a lot of our light fixtures require them. Like much of the electrical infrastructure in France, it's pretty complicated. We have two at least four kinds of light fixtures and three kinds of wall outlets. We constantly have to find adapters or different kinds of plugs, power strips, and bulbs for different parts of the house.

...and a closer view taken as Callie and I head out for a morning walk

The other thing we have to do is go to the Darty home appliance and electronics store over in Tours to see if we can actually see, live and "in person," the refrigerator we have found on the store's web site. There's another complication involved in refrigerators and freezers. There are three types: froid statique, froid brassé, and froid ventilé. I'm not talking about brands but about technologies. Here's a web page in French that explains it all.

There are also fridges in different widths, going from 50 cm (20 inches) to 85 cm (34 inches) or wider. The standard width, if there is one, is 60 cm (about 24 inches) in France, compared to 30 or 36 inches in the U.S. We need and want a fridge between 70 and 75 cm (28 to 32 inches) wide.

The sky yesterday morning, just before we had a brief thunder shower

In the U.S., you can get frost-free fridges and freezers, or you can get the kind that you have to defrost, manually. When we arrived here in 2003, we wanted a refrigerator-freezer like the one we had in California — frost-free with the freezer on the bottom. We couldn't find a model like that, but we did find a Samsung model with the freezer on the top that was frost-free. In other (French) words, both the refrigerator and freezer compartments use the froid ventilé — "ventilated cooling" — system.

We need a good freezer to preserve all the good produce we hope to get from our 2015 vegetable garden.

We've had it for 12 years now, and it has been a good appliance. The time has come to replace it. We wouldn't want to end up with a freezer compartment that needs defrosting (froid statique). And we especially don't want a refrigerator that has to be manually defrosted (froid statique or froid brassé — brassé means "stirred" or "mixed"). If you are British, please tell me whether you have all three of these cooling technologies and what they are called in English. Thanks.