Making do

Last night I had the guest bedroom and Walt tried to sleep on the sofa in the living room. It was hot when I went to bed, but sometime before midnight I threw the windows open and there was some movement of air, so I was able to sleep. Walt says the sofa is too soft for good sleeping, and he ended up going back upstairs for a while. We have a big fan up there. He turned that on and opened some windows, but he said he was still uncomfortably warm.

Downstairs in the guest room, I got about four hours of sleep. Then I got up at 4:30 to let Tasha to do her business and then to feed her. Walt heard me and the dog, so he came downstairs to see what we were doing. She's fed, I told him. And I said he should go lie down on the guestroom bed, close to a big window that was wide open. There was some movement of air from the back yard, but you could hardly call it a breeze. Anyway, he got two or three hours of shut-eye. I finished opening windows all around the house and took a little snooze on the living room sofa.

This morning Walt went down to the garage and succeeded in locating an air mattress we used to use on camping trips in California. We pumped it up and it seems to holds air. I hope Walt will be able to sleep on it tonight. The bad news is that today and tonight are supposed to be even hotter than yesterday and last night. It's already getting warm and muggy this morning.

Our temperatures this week...

...in degrees Fahrenheit. These are Accuweather predictions

for Saint-Aignan from June 22 to June 28, 2010.

Sunday - 104º

Monday - 110º

Tuesday - 109º

Wednesday - 110º 

Thursday - 108º

Friday - 99º

Saturday - 93º

Yikes!

Yesterday afternoon at about five o'clock I went out to take a short walk with Tasha. We walked out through the greenhouse, which felt like we we were walking through an oven. I looked at the thermometer in there, and it showed the temperature as 50ºC. That's 122ºF. The two skylight windows in the greenhouse were wide open, as was the doorway that leads out into the back yard.

Beautiful weather, but far too hot

Views of the vineyard under such clear skies are nice, but you can see how the grass along the dirt road is dry and turning brown. Weather forecasts for the next 10 days in the Loire Valley say that we'll have two days with a high temperature of 94ºF, and eight days with temperatures ranging from  95 and — gasp! —
106ºF (on Sunday June 21).

Weird weather

We are having the weirdest weather here in France, or at least in the Loire Valley. In the afternoon it's hot — around 90 degrees F. In the morning — I get up at 4:30 or so to take the dog out to do her morning pee — it is so cold outside that it seems like wintertime. Then I open the windows and doors in the house to get some fresh, chilly morning air and chase away the stuffiness. After an hour or two, I have to close everything up again because because by then it gets too cold inside the house. Did I hear somebody say "whiplash" a few days ago? Oh yeah, that was me.

Mystery plant

What plant is this?

Heat wave #2 for this year

Here's what we have to look forward to, weatherwise, stating tomorrow. This is a 10 day forecast that I grabbed off the Accuweather web site. I modified the settings so that the text would display in English and the temperatures in Fahrenheit. Rignt now I'm airing out the house and letting cool morning air in before it gets hot outwide (high today 88ºF). We'll close the windows and shutters later this morning to keep the sun and heat out. We'll be spending a lot of time indoors over the week to come.

Hydrangea

The hydrangeas in our yard are really nice this year.They survived the May canicule and are in full flower right now.

Neighborhood prunes

If nobody else picks them, I will. Just a few.
However, they don't usually ripen until September.
Maybe this year's May heat wave will advance that date.

Le Pont du Gard (1989)

It was October in 1989 and Walt and I were starting a road trip from Grenoble to Toulouse and then north to Paris via Saint-Aignan and Chartres. (Little did we know that one day we'd end up living in Saint-Aignan, a place we had never even heard of back then. But that's another story.)

One of our first stops was the pont du Gard, an enormous Roman aqueduct about 30 minutes by west of Avignon by car. Not only did we see it from afar, but we climbed stairs up to the bridge's top level and walked the length of it. It was impressive and it felt more than slightly dangerous because there was nothing to prevent you from tripping and falling from up there into the river or onto the rocks 50 meters (164 ft.) below.

Walt took these pictures of the Pont du Gard. I'm not even sure that I traveled with, or even owned, a camera in those days. I found Walt's 1989 photos on my hard disk yesterday morning. Neither of us is in any of the pictures.

Notre maison en France

This a photo of the north (left) and the west-facing sides (right) of our house, which overlook the back yard. I took it yesterday morning.
We bought the house in the spring of 2003 and have been living here since June of that year.

Clouds over the vineyard

Just a picture today.

Entering our hamlet from the west

We've been on a weather roller coaster for the past two or three weeks. High temperatures were at or even above 95 degrees Fahrenheit during the month of May. We experienced an unprecedented heat wave, considering it's not even summer yet. Now it's June and it's chilly outside and in the house too — almost cold is how it feels, because it's also very windy. Much of of France is getting rained on. I'm getting weather whiplash. We're under a thunderstorm watch today as well.

Montpoupon, a hunting lodge.

This is the Château de Montpoupon. It was built in the 15th and 16th centuries

 on the site of a 13th century fortress of which only the tall round towers remain. 
It's only a short drive south of Montrichard, and a slightly longer one from Saint-Aignan.

I don't think I took this photo of Montpoupon; I think our friend Sue from California did when

she was here for a few months in 2006. I found it on my laptop this morning.