11 February 2020

Saint-Aignan, weather, and memories

It was so windy yesterday that it felt dangerous to walk into or even close to the wooded areas around the vineyard. Over the past five years, a lot of trees have fallen around here. There's no reason to tempt fate. I'm not sure what kinds of wind speeds have been recorded around the Saint-Aignan area, but they haven't been quite as violent as in the U.K. I'd estimate gusts of at least 60 mph, and maybe 75 mph. Down in Corsica, a wind gust of 219 kph was recorded yesterday. That's 130 mph.


I don't have a lot to write about or a lot of photos to post, since I've been mostly housebound for the past few days. My walks with the dog are pretty short, given the dangers presented by howling winds, falling tree, intermittent rainfall, and hordes of hunters (only on Saturdays and Sundays).


I also have had the misfortune of contracting a virus. No, my health is fine — it was a computer virus. It was either a virus or a bad video card driver. I found an undated driver (for the video card I bought in December and then installed in my new computer last week). I also found instructions for the complicated removal from my computer of an infection called the Segurazo virus. I'm not sure which fix was the good one, but whichever it was I'm glad my computer has stopped locking up while idling.


The pictures here are some panoramic shots I took of the château and other buildings in Saint-Aignan on June 21, 2003. We had arrived with our suitcases and our dog Collette exactly two weeks earlier, on June 7, to start cleaning the house we had owned since April. It was a lot of work and the weather was very hot. It was the summer of the great heat wave, la grande canicule, in all of northern France. Our container-load of furniture and other possessions wouldn't arrive until July 10 or so. We camped.


The cleaning up must have been complete. The yard was especially a mess. Wet and warm weather since mid-April that year meant that the grass had grown knee high all around the house. Walt spent many days, first with a weed-eater ("strimmer") and then with a lawn mower, both of which we had to buy immediately upon arrival, while I carried junk out of the house and garage and piled it up in preparation for repeated trips to the dump over on the other side of the Cher River. I scrubbed floors and focused especially on getting the kitchen ready to use.


Anyway, that was nearly 17 years ago. Our house has changed more in that time than has the "skyline" and riverfront of the town of Saint-Aignan (pop. about 3,000). We live about 2 miles from the château and church. The town hasn't grown much either — in fact it has lost population over the past 10 or 12 years, though the area overall has grown. That's not true of our hamlet, however. There are still just nine of us living here in the nine houses that make up the neighborhood. Five of the nine houses are not being lived in by anybody right now. One house is home to four people, a young couple with two small children.

12 comments:

  1. Oh, I don't think that I realized that there was a young couple with children in your hamlet.

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    1. Those neighbors have lived here in the hamlet for four or five years now.

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  2. Beautiful pictures of your beautiful town, thank you. Is the young couple the people who are not friendly?

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    1. They are kind of stand-offish but more friendly than they were at the beginning. They have busy lives, I'm sure, with jobs and kids. And they did invite us over one day last summer when they had a party to introduce their new baby to neighbors and friends. We were the only neighbors in attendance.

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  3. That wind was a record breaker. I'm glad you got the virus cleared- what a pain! I'll always remember that canicule and so will you both. Isn't it good that you were young enough to camp out while cleaning out your house?

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    1. Yes, I was 54 when we came and camped here in June 2003. We didn't know when our container would arrive and we'd have furniture, but we didn't need to go out and buy any. We did need appliances, though, and it was fun going to buy them all at the same time so we had all new one: stove, fridge, washer, dryer, phone, coffee maker, TV, scanner, and so on. We brought a laptop computer with us. That summer we bought the Peugeot that we are still driving, 17 years later.

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  4. Brrrr, Ken, I know what you're going through with this wind/storm - it's the same here. I'm gettng quite fed up with it, but fortunately, so far, no damage (touch wood). We'll just have to sit it out. As you said, they're predicting less wind and higher temps for Thursday till at least the weekend. Wouldn't now be the ideal time for you to look a bit more into the region you're going to visit for your spring break? Lining up some more trips, nice restaurants, sights? Hang in there, it'll be Friday before you know!

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    1. You're right, that trip is coming up. With the recent holidays, the new computer, and then Walt's race back to New York, we haven't had a lot of time to do research. The gîte is rented and we know what towns we want to go see. We don't plan on going to restaurants much because we'll be traveling with the dog. We'll buy easy to cook foods in markets and supermarkets and have dinners at the gîte.

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  5. Nice pictures of the chateau. Glad you got your virus sorted out. What a pain those can be!

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    1. It's ironic because the software that installed itself when I was installing something useful was an anti-virus app that turns out to be intrusive and troublesome. It would freeze up the new computer when it was doing background scans for viruses — I think that's what was happening. Once I figure out how to remove it, and they don't make it easy, the computer stopped hanging every few hours. It's running great now.

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  6. How did you go about finding a company to ship your furniture and belongings. From North Carolina, right?, because your drove cross-country. Moving is complicated enough when it's just down the street.

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    1. We new some people in California who moved to New Zealand a year or so before we moved to France. When we asked friends if they could recommend moving companies, they told us they had had a good experience with Allied International. We had the Allied crew come and do an inventory of our household belongings and then pack up the furniture etc. and put it into storage in California. That was in March, and on May 1 we told them by phone — we were on the road headed to N.C. — to go ahead and ship it. We had to be here to receive the container and sign for it. Our visas came through in mid-May and we flew off to France on June 1. The container arrived in July.

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