Mon dimanche

Walt is scheduled to come back to Saint-Aignan on Friday. We talked on the phone yesterday morning. The apartment where Walt is staying in Albany NY doesn't have its own wifi connection, so for him communications and blogging are limited. I'm glad he isn't flying today, because we've now had 12 hours of extremely windy weather. The gusty winds aren't supposed to die down much before Thursday, but the worst is over... I think. The roof tiles were clattering during the night, as I could feel the air moving up in the loft.

I went grocery shopping yesterday for the first time in a while. Above is the lunch I made for myself, just to keep my strength up. The steak is the cut of beef called rumsteak (a.k.a. pièce à fondue), which is tender. As a side dish, I made peas and carrots with butter, onions, and bell peppers. I also bought myself a couple of baguettes (loaves of French bread). What I do is cut them up and put them in plastic bags in the freezer so that I don't have to go out in the car every day just to buy bread.

I hated to leave Tasha at home alone yesterday, because she has been showing signs of stress since Walt suddenly departed. I found her hiding under the bed in the guest room on Thursday evening, the day Walt left. She's better now, I think, because she realizes that I'll go out with her for the regular two walks a day, and I'll give her her food at the regular hours. She's used to Walt serving her her lunch. When I got back from shopping, Tasha and Bertie were sitting together and looking out through the sliding glass door in the living room, just waiting to see what was going to happen next.

Toward four p.m., I looked outside to see if it was raining. It was getting to be time for the afternoon sortie. Even though the regular hunting season for hares and game birds is over for the season, there was some kind of organized hunt, une battue ("beating the bushes" to flush out game), going on out in the vineyard. They might have been hunting foxes. There would be no walk out there while that was going on.

When we got back from taking a short walk and settled in for the evening, I started feeling a little bit hungry. I'd bought some croissants when I went shopping in the morning, and I had some ham and cheese in the refrigerator, so I decided to make myself a croissant au jambon. That's a funny name, because it's really more of a croissant au fromage. It's a standard French café treat. If you look carefully, you can just see the ham that goes inside the split-open croissant, along with grated cheese (Comté), before it gets baked in the oven for a few minutes.