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.