Overwhelmed...

I don't have a lot more to say about it because I haven't got any real information, but I did go back and check on the incarcerated crow yesterday afternoon (see yesterday's post). I found only one bird in the cage. At least only one live bird. I also saw what appeared to be a bird carcass, an egg, and some dog kibble in a separate compartment of the cage.

I also noticed that the imprisoned crow has food and water in his compartment, so he is being well looked after. There are compartments in the cage structure that are open such that an animal or bird could go in. I don't know if the doors would be triggered to fall shut at that point, but I suppose they would. I really wish I had seen somebody out there that I could ask about the whole business. Maybe I will this morning.

Meanwhile, our fine weather has returned and is predicted to last all week. There are trees in flower and wildflowers on the ground everywhere. The grapevines are starting to put out leaves, as are many of the trees all around us. And I'm suffering miserably with a very sore throat, which might be some kind of allergic and sinus thing, or might be a bug.

I'm taking so many photos that I don't know what to do with them all. I guess I'll just post a few below, and complain about my pollen allergies.

Allergies are all the news in France right now. Pollen levels are extremely high (especially birch pollen, they say) and, according to this morning's news reports, one-third of French adults suffer from pollen allergies, along with one-fifth of all children.

Pollution is said to be a contributing factor, and the number of people with pollen allergies is on the rise — it won't be too many more years, at this rate, before fully half of all adults in France will be allergic to pollen, and the season for pollen allergies just keeps getting longer.

My own pollen allergies started suddenly. It was April 1, 1992, and Walt and I had just moved from San Francisco down to Sunnyvale in the Santa Clara Valley (that's Silicon Valley) in California. For 10 years starting that day, I was miserable from about the end of January to the first of June every year. Sneezing, burning eyes, a runny nose, fatigue — it was debilitating. I had to give up springtime gardening entirely, and I took a lot of sick days off from work.

Moving to France was good for me, and I've had allergy attacks here infrequently. It's been 12 years already. This spring I'm getting nervous about what's happening. Maybe I need to move to the North Pole, where there are no cypress trees or Scotch broom (a.k.a. "common broom"). Broom (or genêt à balais) has aggressively invaded this area over the past 12 years, and I'm sure it's one of the main offenders in my case.

Black and blue

Yesterday morning on my walk I went to check on the cage I had noticed out in the vineyard a couple of days earlier. Callie, too, was also curious to go and have a nose around in that area.

Well, I found a crow — a raven, really — un corbeau — trapped in the cage. There was nothing I could do about it but take a couple of photos. The poor bird went a little wild flapping its wings and jumping from a perch to another and onto the ground when Callie got too close. I won't make any jokes about "Nevermore!"

But Callie didn't bark or seem too excited about the whole situation. She sniffed around for a minute or two, and then we continued on our way. When I called her, she followed me immediately. Anyway, why would anyone want to trap a raven? A pheasant, maybe. But a raven? Could he be bait?

Very close by, I saw the first wild orchid of the season. I have the impression they are late blooming this year

P.S. I just did some reading and learned that ravens and crows are considered pests, along with pigeons and magpies. They are trapped and killed. The bodies spread in fields deter other ravens and crows that might want to come and feed on crops planted by farmers. It's pretty awful.

Fog, and a web

A few days ago we had a nice foggy morning. It was nice because the fog didn't last too long. It lifted by about 10 a.m. and the day turned out to be warm and sunny.

The photos just above and just below show our back yard, where Callie will enjoy spending a lot of her time over the next four or five months (if the weather stays dry).

Below, a line of poplars cuts into the sky behind a vineyard plot just outside our back gate.

When it's foggy and the moisture condenses on spiders' webs, we can see just how many there are in and around the vineyard, and how elaborate some of them are.

It rained overnight, but I'm not sure how much. Now it's supposed to be dry for about another week. There's plenty of work left to be done out in the yard and garden. I often write about the vegetable garden this time of year because gardening is a major part of the Loire Valley lifestyle. Everybody seems to have one. This is, after all, le jardin de la France.

The Citroën car, springtime allergies, and the Canon camera

Today we'll be driving the Citroën C4, which I bought in February, over to Tours to do some shopping on the north side of the city, where there are lot of big-box stores. We want to go to an Auchan store (think Wal-Mart) to see if we can find some bagels and to pick up some other, less-exotic supplies.

In addition, we'll stop at a Picard frozen-foods shop to have a look around (there are no Picard stores close to Saint-Aignan), and then we'll do some serious shopping at the Paris Store Asian supermarket near Auchan. We want to get some frozen shrimp, a few jars of peanut butter, and some bottles of soy and fish sauces. We also have Japanese panko breadcrumbs on our list, for ourselves and for a friend.

Yesterday the weather forecast said that today would be rainy, but that forecast seems to have changed overnight. Now they say we shouldn't get any rain until evening, so ours will be a dry drive. One point of going to Tours — a round-trip of nearly 100 miles — is to drive the Citroën on the autoroute for the first time, just to see what that's like.

The speed limit on a French autoroute, the equivalent of an American interstate highway, is 81 mph (130 kph). On other highways, the limit is 55 mph (90 kph) most places, with just a few places, at least around here, where you might see a speed limit of 66 mph (110 kph) on a stretch of four-lane road. My goal is drive the C4 at 80 mph for an hour or so as a test of its performance and our comfort at that high speed.

I'm having a lot of sinus trouble right now. I had low-grade allergy symptoms in March when I was in North Carolina for two weeks, and that didn't surprise me. I'm especially allergic to cypress-tree pollen, and there are extensive stands of of cypress trees along the Carolina coast, as there are in California, where we used to live. It was normal for me to have springtime allergy symptoms in the U.S.

Here in the Saint-Aignan area and the Loire Valley, there aren't so many cypress trees, but when the wind blows from the south it brings a lot of pollen with it. Right now a low-pressure area bringing clouds, gusty winds, and some rain is moving up from Spain and the Pyrenees. I'm really feeling the effects of it. I can't wait for our weather to change again.

I think doing the tilling I did in what will be our 2015 vegetable garden aggravated the allergies. I must have stirred up and breathed in a lot of pollen by running the rototiller. The three or four tilling sessions I managed to finish out there really did me in. Yesterday I took a day off from garden work, but I'm not sure it helped. I feel just as miserable this morning as I did yesterday morning.

Meanwhile, I'm still experimenting with my new Canon SX700 digital camera. While the weather was sunny and warm, I took a lot of photos of springtime scenes when I went out for walks with the dog. Some of those photos are posted here. As always, you can click or tap on the images to see them at a larger size.

Callie's morning chore

I took the day off yesterday — I've got some kind of sinus infection — but Callie didn't. She got her daily chore done. We didn't teach the dog to do this. She came up with the idea on her own. I don't know why she started, except that maybe a border collie feels the need to work for its keep.

Over the winter, the vineyard workers (there are 5 or 6 of them) go through all the rows of vines and pull out any grape stumps that have died over the course of the previous growing season. A certain percentage of the plants do die every year. Some of them are decades old.

When we get out to the end of the road and turn to come back home, in this season Callie will carefully examine the piles of grapevine stumps she finds at the ends of the vine rows. She picks out a stump, gets a hold on it so that it is basically balanced, and trots on home with the bout de bois clamped between her jaws.

Meanwhile, there's a cage out on a plot of grass among the rows of grapevines. It appears to be a trap. I can't imagine what animal anybody is trying to catch. A fox? A badger? I'll just have to keep an eye on the cage and see if there's anything in it over the next days and weeks. I'm sure Callie will help. Maybe I'll find somebody out there to ask about it soon.

The first barbecue of 2015

We're trying to take full advantage of this mini-summer we're living through right now. Temperatures are supposed to fall back to the normal range — high 'teens C, mid-60s F — for the weekend. And beyond.

One way we took advantage of the fine weather yesterday was to fire up the gas grill and sizzle some sausages. We had spicy lamb-and-beef merguez sausages in the freezer, and I bought a pork sausage called a saucisse bretonne at the supermarket. It came from a company located in the village of Tinténiac in Brittany.

Fresh tender Swiss chard leaves — feuilles de blettes — from plants that spent the winter in the back yard garden

With the sausages we had some Swiss chard leaves that I picked out in the back corner garden plot earlier in the morning. We planted chard out there last summer, and it has overwintered just fine. Most of the plants are the regular green-leaf white-rib variety, but one is a yellow-ribbed chard.

The leaves were spring-tender new growth. I cooked them in olive oil with sliced onions and garlic, along with some hot crushed red pepper and a little splash of white wine. Sausages and chard from the garden were a nice way to start off the summer grilling season.

Getting our hands dirty

Walt decided it was time to change the configuration of our vegetable garden, and I'm doing the tilling. My impression is that consolidating the four square garden plots into one large square plot means we are going to have a much bigger garden this summer. I have one more patch of deeply rooted grass to till up today and then the first pass will be done. I'm tilling around a couple of rhubarb plants that came up unexpectedly.

The newly configured garden will cover 100 square meters (1100 sq. ft.) or more of ground.

If this weather continues through the summer — realistically, I doubt it will — we could have quite a harvest. One thing we are going to do is try to spread out our plants so that they are not so close together, giving them more breathing room than we have before. If the weather goes damp, better air flow might dry the leaves on our tomato and other plants faster and prevent mildew. We'll see.

The two unexpected rhubarb plants will get moved next year— no need to dig them up right now.

The other dirt we have to deal with requires use not of a tiller but of a shovel and wheelbarrow. Since our long drought ended a few years back, our yard has been overrun — well, underrun, really — by moles. Before he can mow the grass, Walt has to go knock down dozens or scores of molehills and scoop what we call the mole dirt into a wheelbarrow. We use it to fill holes and ruts, or to pot plants in.

“Mole dirt”

The temperature today is supposed to be in the mid-20s C (mid-70s F) in the shade. It's much hotter in the sun. These days would be what we might expect in June, or even in July and August. In past years, when April has turned this warm, May and June have given us cold snaps and a lot of moisture. We'll see if that pattern repeats itself in 2015.

Cooking quail — « Cailles aux petits pois »

A few days ago I cooked something I had never cooked before: quail, or cailles. I'd often seen them on the markets or advertised in the supermarket flyers, but for some reason had never bought any. This time, SuperU had a package of four farm-raised, supposedly ready-to-cook quails for about ten euros, and I was game.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the package and found the little birds with their heads still on. To my mind, that's not really what should be called prêt-à-cuire. Oh well. Off with them... an old French tradition. My guillotine being in storage these days, I just used a big kitchen knife.

Each quail weighed in at about 250 grams, or a little over half a pound. Quail, by the way, are migratory birds that greatly resemble partridges but are much smaller. American quails are slightly larger than the Old World varieyy, but they are said to be excellent eating. As I mentioned, these quail were farm-raised — no buckshot in them. Besides having their heads still attached, they also needed further plucking to remove a lot of stray pinfeathers.

The recipe I had picked out of the Larousse Gastronomique was for quail served with garden peas. After pondering the question, I decided the best way to finish preparing the quails for roasting was to butterfly them. It's easy to cut out each bird's backbone with a good pair of kitchen shears, and then spread the birds out so that they'll lie fairly flat on a baking rack.

It's good to season the volaille at this point, with herbs, spices (paprika, hot or smoked, or both) and salt and pepper. Then turn them over to roast in a hot oven for 20 minutes or so. They're very small, so they don't take long to cook.

It was a lot of work to get them ready for the oven, and I told Walt I didn't know if I would be eager to cook quail again any time soon. While I kept working on the quail, I also cooked some diced carrots and little pearl onions (oignons grelots or "sleigh-bell onions" in French) to serve with frozen peas, along with a few smoked pork lardoons.

To finish cooking the quails and give good flavor to the peas and carrots, I arranged the roasted birds on top of a batch of vegetables, covered the pan, and let everything steam on top of the stove for 10 minutes before serving time.

There of course isn't a lot to eat on a quail. Eating the tiny bit of meat on the wings reminded me of eating frogs' legs. The drumsticks and thighs were a little more generous and succulent. However, the breast meat was a real treat. You couldn't call it white meat, exactly. In French, the breast filet is called a suprême, and these really were supreme, actually.

Rediscovering Canon cameras

I've had two Canon cameras before. One was a honking giant of a thing that I used for years and then kept packed up in a dark corner for many more years. It was the Pro90 IS, with a long zoom, a flip-out screen, and manual focus capabilities. I bought it in the year 2000 and it cost nearly 4 times as much as the Canon camera I purchased last week. I finally donated it and all the accompanying paraphernalia (batteries, chargers, etc.) to the French charity organization Emmaüs (think Good Will) a month or so ago.

I loved that camera but it was too big to haul around every day. In fact, it once almost got me pick-pocketed in the Paris metro. I think carrying it signaled to a gang of would-be malfaiteurs that I might be a rich American. They started pushing me around and patting me down. I was able to fend them off and start shouting at them in French to alert the other passengers in the metro car to what was happening. They made a clean getaway, but empty-handed.

The second Canon camera I bought was much smaller. It was the Powershot S70. I bought it in 2005. I liked the camera, but it didn't have image stabilization, which is a feature included on the earlier Canon and the several Panasonic Lumix cameras I've owned and enjoyed using over the years. Here's a blog post about all that.

Image stabilization made it possible for me to take this fully zoomed hand-held photo of the moon a couple of mornings ago.

Without optical image stabilization (a built-in gyroscope) it's difficult to take hand-held photos using a long zoom. And I don't see myself hauling a tripod around on my walks in the vineyard with Callie. My first Lumix camera, the TZ3, soon replaced the Canon S70.

Back to the future... and the present, I guess. Here's the camera model I just acquired and started using: the Canon Powershot SX700 HS. I paid just 218 euros for it on Amazon.fr — an amazingly low price considering all the camera's features. It takes full-HD movies and has built-in wi-fi. And it fits in my pocket.

The old heavy Canon Pro90 IS had a 10x zoom. The SX700 has a 30x zoom. Both have or had both automatic and manual focus, and the newer camera has full manual capabilities (which I don't use). The Pro90IS produced much smaller images, even though I don't ever take photos at the largest size — at 16 megapixels they'd be far too large to post on the blog, which is what I take photos for. I stopped printing photos years ago.

Anyway, there you go. I'm happy and I like the images the SX700 produces, which are the ones you see in this post. Here's a page that lists some of the camera's features and specs.

Oh, and by the way, yesterday I got the refund from the Amazon partner vendor from whom I had bought the Panasonic TZ40. Thanks to them, and I'm sorry I had to return it. Fact is, it cost more than the new Canon camera.

Leaving Panasonic behind... for now

It was really too bad about the second Panasonic camera I tried out in March. I ended up sending back for a refund (I'm still waiting but hopeful). It was a model called the Lumix DMC-ZS30 in the U.S. (and the Lumix DMC-TZ40 in Europe). It produced beautiful images, but for me the touch screen feature made it hard for me to imagine keeping it.

I guess the idea of a touch screen could sound attractive. I never saw the advantage of that feature, but I quickly realized the disadvantages. Touching it accidentally caused it to take a photo. Okay, I thought, I'll just turn the touch screen feature off. That turned out to be impossible using the camera's menus. I was stuck with it. A web search confirmed that. Bad design, I'd say.

The only way to de-activate the SZ30's touch feature was to touch an icon on the screen itself. And if you touched it again, even unintentionally, it was re-activated and it started firing off photos in every direction, whether you wanted it to or not. I couldn't see getting used to that.

 One day when I took it out on a walk and carried it hanging from a wrist strap, every time the back of the camera brushed against my pants leg, it took a picture. You never saw so many blurry photos of gravel, weeds, and gray skies. I understood why my memory card filled up much faster than I thought it should. The camera took more photos on its own than I took by pressing the shutter release, without my realizing what was happening.

So I sent that camera back with some regrets. By the way, I see that the next model up in the ZS line from Panasonic, the ZS40 (the TZ60 in Europe) doesn't have a touch screen. I think somebody in the Panasonic organization finally realized the touch screen (écran tactile) wasn't such a good idea after all. It's a camera, not a tablet.

The first Panasonic camera I tried out, however, was obviously not up to the task I bought it for. It was the Lumix DMC-SZ35. Remember that the second Lumix camera was the ZS30. Two other Panansonic cameras I've owned and enjoyed using over the past five years were the ZS1, purchased in 2010, and the ZS8, purchased in 2012.

Did you notice that the letters got switched? I didn't. ZS or SZ? Did Panasonic do that on purpose? When I bought the SZ35, I wasn't paying close attention and just assumed I was ordering another camera in the ZS series — those cameras have Leica lenses, which is a major selling point.

After spending a few frustrating days with the SZ35, I started doing some internet research. The first thing I learned was that the SZ cameras don't have Leica lenses. Then I understood why I thought the photos coming out of the camera were so different in quality from what I was used to. Not to say inferior... They were fuzzy. The colors weren't right. I returned that camera with no regrets. Thanks to Amazon.com for reimbursing me promptly.

The photos in this post are ones I've taken over the past couple of days using my new Canon camera. You can click or tap on the images to see them at a larger size. More tomorrow...