April showers

We went out to dinner last night with Bob and Ann, a couple from Maine. We used to have a mutual friend in Bill from New Hampshire. He passed away five years ago already. You might remember him and his comments on this blog.

Bob is a wine writer, and Ann is a writer and editor working in educational publishing. I've followed Bob's blog for years. It was great to finally meet them. The restaurant was crowded, warm, and noisy in a good way. The food was excellent — smoked salmon, foie gras, guinea fowl, sea bass, pork cheeks, rib steaks, and ripe cheeses. No, each of us didn't all have all of that, but all of it appeared on the table at one point or another.

When we left for the restaurant, it was raining and felt cold outside. When is it not raining? Or at least threatening to rain? Ah, France! Ooh, April! Ne te découvre pas d'un fil... The fine food and drink were a good antidote.

The photos here are shots I took out of an upstairs window just a couple of days ago. We didn't end up having storms — those stayed off to the south. We could hear thunder in the distance. It was pretty, but a bright sky would have been just as nice.

Le balcon du Panthéon

Two weeks ago, les parties hautes (the upper levels) of the Panthéon in Paris were re-opened to the public. The 18th-century monument, located in the center of the Latin Quarter, has been undergoing major renovations for several years.

I was surprised when I heard about le balcon du Panthéon, because I don't think I was ever aware that visitors were allowed to go up there. The "balcony" offers a 360º view of the Latin Quarter, the historic center of Paris, and much of the city. I want to go up there this year. Walt might go on May 2, when he'll be in Paris on his way to Montréal and New York.

You might know that I really enjoy seeing Paris from on high. In my life, I've been up to the top level of the Eiffel Tower three or four times (1970, 1997, 2007...) that I can remember. Walt and I climbed the stairs up to the Eiffel Tower's first level, and maybe the second, some 25 years ago. I've been to the top of the Tour Montparnasse as many times, with Walt, CHM, and my friends Evelyn and Lewis (last year), among others. The links here will take you to some of my photos.

A few years ago, when it was first opened to visitors, I climbed up 300 steps to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques, which stands square in the middle of the city. I took dozens... nay, hundreds... of photos from up there. You can see many of them in these blog posts.

I have good memories of going up into the towers of Notre-Dame and out onto the rooftop with Walt in maybe 1988. « Monte là-dessus — tu verras Montmartre », we joked. We also went up to the top level of the Arc de Triomphe one year — at least 20 years ago — and, around that time, up into the Grande Arche de la Défense, west of Paris proper, for the views from there.

The Panthéon as I saw it from the Jardin du Luxembourg in August 2009. You can see several other photos of the Panthéon by clicking on this link or this one.

So how have a remained ignorant of the balcony of the Panthéon all these years? I worked in the shadow of the monument back in 1974-75, when I was on staff at the University of Illinois Year Abroad Program. We had our office on the rue Soufflot, just down the street. As early as 1970, on my first trip to France, I spent two weeks in a hotel just down the hill from the Panthéon, near the Place Maubert. I was a teacher at the nearby Sorbonne in 1975-76.

Despite all the time I spent in the neighborhood, I never knew I was missing out on a chance to go up to the balcony that surrounds the base of the dome of the Panthéon. Now I have all these digital cameras to take up there with me. I can't wait to go this summer. You have to pay the 8.50€ entry fee to get into the Panthéon, plus a 2.00€ surcharge for the guided tour up into the parties hautes du monument. Not bad.

By the way, yesterday I was wondering how high the Panthéon balcony is compared to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. Walt looked it up. He found a site that gives not only the height of the buildings but also the altitude above sea level of the ground that various Paris monuments stand on.

It turns out that the Tour Saint-Jacques is built on ground that is at 35 meters above sea level, and the top of the tower is 54 meters above ground. That means that when you're up there, you're at about 89 meters (or some 290 feet) above sea level.

The Panthéon, built on top of the big hill called La Montagne Sainte-Geniviève, stands on ground that is 58 meters above sea level, and the staircase (200 steps) that leads up to the balcony is 35 meters tall. So when you're on the balcony, you are at 93 meters, or about 305 feet, of altitude. I think I got all that right.

Here are links to several web pages in French, with photos, about the Panthéon and its balcony: easyvoyage.com, the newspaper Le Parisien, franceinfo.fr, and paris-pittoresque.com.

« Les Bouleaux »

Les Bouleaux — The Birches — is the name of our house and land on official maps. It's a house we found in December 2002, with the help of a real estate agent who had offices in Amboise and Montrichard. We had come to France to look at houses for sale in the area around Vouvray and Amboise, but we had no idea we'd put a down payment on one right then. I had quit my job in October, and I'd been spending time on the web looking at houses that were for sale in the Loire Valley.

In four days, the realtor showed us about 15 houses around Montrichard, Amboise, and, at his suggestion, Saint-Aignan — a town we had never heard of, much less set foot in, before. All were in our stated price range. At the time,we were living in San Francisco, where we had bought a house seven years earlier. I was tired of the rat race of a life that I was living there — driving 100 miles a day to Silicon Valley and back, spending 3 to 5 hours daily in the car, in freeway traffic, five days a week.

When we saw Les Bouleaux, we looked at each other and said, "We could live here one day." It was the only one of the houses we saw in those four hectic days where we could clearly starting picture a new life. Part of it was the setting — the house is at the end of a dead-end road, at least as far as pavement is concerned. There are vineyards on two sides, and a dirt road running through the vines. But it's only two miles from the center of Saint-Aignan and all the conveniences we need.

There's a tall hedge around the sides of the property (half an acre) where you'd be glad to have some privacy. And all the rooms have big windows that let in a maximum of daylight and provide views. The yard was already landscaped, and there was room for a vegetable garden. There was attic space that could be converted into one, two, or three rooms at some point. The place was modern (built in the late 1960s) and didn't need major renovations. We could move right in if we decided to.

A few days later, back in San Francisco, we sent the real estate agent some money to put a hold on Les Bouleaux. The closing date was set for April 15 — 13 years ago today — which gave us time to arrange financing for the actual purchase. We thought we might refinance our house in San Francisco to raise some more cash, and I would look for a new job. We'd have a place in France where we could come spend as much time as possible each year, and we'd slowly fix the place up, with retirement as our timeframe (I was 53 years old). We had met in Paris in the early '80s, and we'd spent most of our vacations in France for nearly 15 years.

Well, it didn't happen that way. We decided pretty quickly to see what kind of price we could get for our house in San Francisco if we were to sell it. We got the agent who had earlier helped us buy it to put it on the market. We did some improvements — painting, mostly, and some cleaning out to make the place feel more spacious. Whether you are planning to sell and move or not, those are always efforts that pay off.

We ended up selling the SF house in February 2003 for nearly three times what we had paid for it in 1995, and for quite a bit over the asking price. We could pay off the mortgage and still have a tidy sum left over. We could afford Les Bouleaux and still have money to cover living costs for a few years. By June 2003, we had moved into our house near Saint-Aignan.

Macro and zoom

Most of the photos I took that first day (last Monday), after I received the new old camera, were macro shots. That means close-ups, with the camera set in what is called macro mode. One definition of macrophotography is "extreme close-up photography, usually of very small subjects, in which the size of the subject in the photograph is greater than life size."

That applies to at least some of my photos, including the one above. Click on it to see it at a larger size. The insects in it are harmless little creatures called firebugs, or gendarmes in French. They're about the size of a ladybug, they don't fly, and they feed on plant debris, cleaning up your yard for you as they enrich the soil.

The one above of some some purple flowers in the neighbors' flower garden is zoomed in. The TZ18 handles both kind of photos well. The photo below is also a zoomed shot. The cameras has a 16x optical zoom, and an optical zoom range of 24 (wide angle) to 384 (telephoto) millimeters, if that means anything to you.

The houses above are on the other side of the Cher River from our house, and maybe 3 km (nearly 2 miles) from where I was standing when I took the picture. I didn't have any kind of support for the camera, which I was just holding in my hands. And no, there's no viewfinder, just the LCD screen on the back of the camera.

As you can see in the two photos above, irises are starting to bloom in our yard. It's early yet, but a bed of iris bulbs I planted two or three years ago and which was nearly overtaken by weeds for a while has now crowded those weeds out. There are only two or three flowers right now but there will soon be many more. I took the first photo on Monday, and the second on Tuesday after it had rained.

Finally, here's a branch of one of the plum trees out on the edge of the vineyard, taken against a clear blue sky. Unless the weather turns really cold, it looks like we'll have a good year for both red and yellow plums.

Tout passe...

I have a theory about cameras and photographers. The bigger and more complex your photography equipment, the fewer photos you actually take. You end up spending most of your time fiddling with settings and trying to get that perfect shot. It's a little like the writer who wants to produce the Great American Novel but works on one book for years and years. The writer who just churns out the text sometimes ends up writing a masterpiece.

That theory is self-serving, of course. I don't have the imagination or organizational skills to write a novel or become a serious photographer. I write snippets, and I snap hundreds of picture every week. Some of the photos turn out okay, and some are better than okay. Most are not. But that's fine with me. I enjoy taking them, and it gets me and Callie out of the house. But I need a good, easy-to-use camera in order to find enjoyment in the process. I also enjoy processing the images on my computers. Or even tablets, as I processed most of the ones in this post.

I recently acquired a 10.1" tablet (Android) and I'm really happy with it. The screen is big enough that my not-so-nimble fingers can actually "type" on the on-screen keyboard, because the "keys" are larger on a larger screen. And photos show up larger on it too, so that I can see what I'm doing when I crop, sharpen, or otherwise edit them. I've found a photo editor I like. It's called Fotor. I also use PixLR some. Neither one has all the features of Photoshop Elements, which doesn't have all the features of the full Photoshop application or Lightroom, but the lighter-weight apps work for what I want to do.

The photos in this post emphasize blues, while the ones yesterday focused on reds. I take a lot of flower pictures over in our across-the-street neighbors' yard, where there are many, many flowering plants. The neighbors are the couple who live most of the year in Blois, a 45-minute drive north of here Their son works in a gardening center up there called Jardiland. The neighbors are both in their 80s now, and they both have health issues that prevent them from coming down here to their "summer place" as often as they used to. We became friends with them immediately when we moved here in 2003. They have had other American friends over the years, even thought they speak no English at all and have never themselves been to America or even flown on an airplane.

When we first moved here 13 years ago, we ended up having a much more active social life than we had ever had before, either in Washington DC or the San Francisco area. It was mostly because of the neighbors. They would have big parties in the summertime, with as many as 150 people in attendance for special occasions like Bastille Day or their own 50th wedding anniversary. We met so many people it sometimes made our heads spin. That and the wine and good food! Nowadays, things a quieted down again, significantly.

The fact is, we felt welcomed when we arrived here, and we both spoke enough French that we could socialize with all those people easily. Most of them — none, really, besides the stray American or Brit — ever spoke English. We were a part of the local social scene and we learned a lot. But it couldn't last forever — what does? The flowers don't, but this is the season. The rug in the last close-up has lasted, however. We've had it for 20 or 25 years. Who remembers?

The new old camera

New to me, old to the camera market overall. It arrived yesterday — a few days late. I bought it off eBay, and it was shipped to me from a seller in Berlin. For about a year, I had given up hope of finding another camera like this one. You see, I had one before, and I gave it away in early 2015 because I wanted to "upgrade." The so-called upgrades have just not worked out.

The camera I had before was the Panasonic Lumix ZS8. I loved it. Over the past year, I had a hard time finding one of those available among the used camera offerings on line. That was especially true because I thought I needed to have the camera shipped from the U.S. to France, and many vendors don't ship such merchandise internationally.

I noticed yesterday that my plum tree already has a lot of plums on it.

I also didn't want to invest a lot of money in a used camera. Many of the used models were too expensive, and the ones advertised as new were listed at US$400 to $500. But the fact is, I spend a lot of time taking and processing pictures, indoors and outdoors, for this blog. It's an important part of what I do every day. So I continued longing for a better camera.

For some reason, I started reading about small digital cameras and I came across the CCD vs. MOS (or CMOS) sensor issue. Camera manufacturers worldwide turned to MOS technology 4 or 5 years ago. The new sensors had both advantages (cheaper, less power-hungry, enabling longer zoom lenses) and disadvantages ("noisier" images, meaning not as sharp or clear, and with some linear distortion).

Then I discovered that the ZS8 camera I had before, purchased in 2012, also had gone by another name. ZS8 was the name used in the North American market. In Europe it was always called the TZ18 (TZ stands for "travel zoom"). For a long time, back when the dollar was so weak compared to the euro, I bought my cameras from Amazon in the U.S. because they were so much less expensive there than in Europe.

The Panasonic Lumix TZ18 that I used for these photos — the one that arrived Monday, a few days later than expected — looks and behaves like a brand-new camera. I was lucky that the sun came out for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon, so I could take the camera out and do the test shots you see here.

My new old TZ18 came with a battery, a charger (including a car charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter), and a wrist strap. It set me back 113€, which is about $130 right now. That included shipping. The camera is probably four or five years old, but given how people buy cameras but don't use them much, it probably hasn't suffered much wear and tear.

There it is on the right, zoom lens fully extended and with a teaspoon for scale. I recommend the Lumix TZ18 / ZS8 if you are in the market for a new old camera and can find one at a good price.

Different styles

It's funny that the photos of two distinctively modern windows in the church at Montrichard came out so blurry, while photos of more traditional windows came out sharp and clear. I don't have much to say about the church itself because there doesn't seem to be much information about it on line.

Notre-Dame de Nanteuil was built in the 12th century, heavily damaged by the Revolutionaries in the late 18th, and much modified by restorers in the 19th. That was the fate of many churches in France.

Most of these stained glass windows must have been made and installed in the 19th or even 20th century.

I am going to go back over there and take new photos of the stained glass this week or next. I'm hoping that the "new old" camera I ordered last week will come today, so I'll be able to use that one to take pictures in the church.

Le flou artistique

Here are some more photos I took inside the Eglise Notre-Dame de Nanteuil. This is how my camera saw things. I'm not sure my own vision was any clearer. It was so dark and cold in there at 10:30 a.m. on that gray day, and I was having an allergy attack.

The first photo shows a representation of the crucifixion of Christ, I believe. The colors are nice. The photos are examples of what someone might call le flou artsitique — the artsy blur.

As I remember them, the windows were striking and modern-looking. I'll have to go take a second look at them and try to shoot some clearer photos. The one below seems to depict something like "Christ is risen" — I think I can see a halo.

I'm not sure what the last photo shows but, again, the colors and shapes are nice. I couldn't have taken these on purpose if I had tried, and I'm not even sure that Photoshop could give this effect.

I took other photos of stained glass over at the Eglise Notre-Dame de Nanteuil, and those came out crisp and clear. And kind of boring, in an academic way. Maybe the windows I'm showing here really looked like the photos. I don't think so, but then it could be that my memory is affected by some kind of flou artistique.

Notre-Dame de Nanteuil

I only rarely take flash photos, but I took a couple inside a church in Montrichard a few days ago. I was using my old Panasonic ZS1 camera. I stopped to see the church on the spur of the moment, just because I've driven past it hundreds of times over the past 15 years but had never seen the interior.

It was very dark and cold inside the church. The weather outside was cloudy and gray. Using the flash was about my only option, and I couldn't really see what I was taking pictures of.

I did take some pictures of stained glass windows, and then I went outside and photographed some of the stone carvings along the roofline of the church. I don't know why it's called Notre-Dame de Nanteuil, but it's been here since the 12th century.

Here's the exterior of the church. It sits near the Montrichard train station, a little way outside of the center of the town. This exterior photo didn't require using a flash, of course. I'm posting these photos in large sizes. If you click or tap on them a couple of times you can see enlargements.

Pimento cheese

Last week a friend who lives in northern Virginia wrote to me and asked me what I knew about the Southern U.S. specialty called "pimento cheese." She said she had ordered grilled pimento cheese sandwiches in two different restaurants in the Charlotte N.C. area and had found the pimento cheese mixture to be pretty hot and spicy.

I told her I wasn't surprised to hear that pimento cheese has been spiced up by the addition of cayenne pepper or maybe some roasted chili peppers by younger chefs these days. It's the style now. When I was growing up, pimento cheese was a staple in our house and it wasn't spicy at all, but slightly sweet because of the roasted sweet bell peppers (or pimientos) in it and because the mayonnaise used in the mixture was slightly sweet too. I saw a quote from a well-known North Carolina novelist saying that pimento cheese was "the peanut butter of his household" when he was growing up decades ago.

After all that, I set out to make some pimento cheese myself. It had been years since I had made or even eaten it, because even in regions outside the South in the U.S. it's rarely seen, and I haven't lived in North Carolina since the early 1970s. My mother used to make pimento cheese, of course, but now she doesn't because she has an allergy to bell peppers. Here in France, what cheese would I use? In the U.S., it's made with orange-colored cheddar, which I've never seen here.

There is at least one orange-colored cheese here, though. It's called mimolette [mee-moh-LET] and it's made in France and in the Netherlands. Mimolette is a cow's milk cheese that comes in several styles, from young, fresh, and soft to aged, dry, and hard. When I went to the cheese counter at the supermarket, I found a fresh mimolette and then I noticed a mimolette demi-vieille. In other words, it's aged mais pas trop, so it's medium style. I decided that a combination of fresh and the entre-deux mimolette would be right for pimento cheese. (I also think it would be good made with a mixture of cantal and mimolette cheeses.)

So what is pimento cheese anyway? It's a cheese spread made with grated cheese, roasted and diced red bell peppers (poivrons rouges), and a little bit of mayonnaise to serve as a binder and make it all into a spreadable mass. Americans in different regions have been making and eating it in sandwiches at least since the 1870s, from what I've read. Here's a history of pimento cheese that I think is interesting because it explains how the product, after being invented in New York, became a specialty in the American South.

What I did was grate the two wedges of cheese in the food processor using the fine blade. There was about 500 grams of cheese in all — just over a pound. I diced up about 200 grams (7 oz.) of roasted sweet red peppers. Then I put all that in the bowl of a stand mixer and added about a third of a cup of mayonnaise and another third of a cup of cream cheese (fromage à tartiner, "spreading cheese," is a so-called "Philadelphia-style" cream cheese that I can get here nowadays in any supermarket). I used a combination of mayonnaise and cream cheese because it just sounded more appetizing to me than mayonnaise only

I could have made fresh mayonnaise, but since I needed so little for the recipe I decided not to. A third of a cup is just 5 or 6 tablespoons. Pimento cheese is not cooked, so you can make it up and adjust the quantity of mayo or cream cheese that you want in it to get the desired consistency. Add black pepper, some salt, some cayenne pepper to taste, and even some finely diced onion or garlic, as you will.

Spread the pimento cheese on slices of bread or on crackers to make either sandwiches or a finger food for snacks or apéritifs. You can make a grilled cheese sandwich with it, as we did. And I've read that people put it on ground beef patties to make a pimento-cheese cheeseburger. I haven't tried that yet but plan to soon.

As always, you can click or tap on the pictures to open them at a larger size in a new window.

The iPhone storm wanes, but not the stormy weather

It's been a very hectic and stressful week, so today I'm relaxing. Well, I do have to go out and send that iPhone back. I got a response from the customer service people at the company saying that the company's software is not the problem — I believe that's what he says — and that it's just a case of fraudulent activity on the part of some unknown third party (not me or them). [Continues below, after the photos...]

Meanwhile, a couple of photos from last week, on prettier days.

And then a photo of today's weather forecast, which just went by on Télématin. Ugh. I hope our new greenhouse tent doesn't blow away. Winds at 50 to 70 kph (30 to 45 mph) are predicted for this afternoon, with rain and a possibility of sleet. Down south, winds will hit 60 mph.

[Back to the iPhone incident] I had asked the customer service representative whether the customer who placed the order had filed a complaint when the package didn't show up as promised. He said the phone was never meant to go to any customer besides me, apparently. He says the company has made it very difficult for new customers to set up accounts on the company site, and therefore "pirates" have figured out ways to get into existing accounts and place orders from those, as happened in my case. Here's the text of his message, if you are interested. I won't translate it but Google can do so:

Il n'y a pas eu d'inversion et cet iPhone, commandé depuis votre compte, n'était destiné à aucun autre client. L'historique de ce type d'achat est toujours complexe à reconstituer mais il s'agit vraisemblablement d'une fraude. La fraude, notamment sur les produits high-tech, est malheureusement devenue extrêmement répandue sur internet et impose aujourd'hui aux e-commerçants des méthodes de plus en plus nombreuses (collaboration avec des prestataires de type FIANET, demandes de justificatifs, paiements par la méthode 3D Secure ...) pour faire face à des commandes réglées avec des cartes bancaires volées.

Nous sommes devenus très attentifs à la création de nouveaux comptes et demandons, lorsque notre algorithme détecte un risque, un justificatif de domicile et une pièce d'identité avant tout envoi de matériel. Les fraudeurs sont donc amenés à se tourner vers d'autres méthodes pour réaliser une commande, comme l'utilisation illicite du compte d'un tiers qui ne présentait aucun risque à nos yeux jusqu'alors.

Si vous avez la certitude qu'aucune personne de votre famille ou votre entourage n'a pu passer cette commande pour vous c'est l'hypothèse la plus probable, et aussi c'est la raison pour laquelle nous vous avons conseillé de modifier à la fois le mot de passe de votre compte client, mais aussi et surtout celui de votre adresse de messagerie.

Nous pouvons simplement vous préciser que la carte utilisée pour le règlement commence par les chiffres  4978 et se termine par 06.

Restant à votre disposition pour toute demande, je vous souhaite une très agréable fin de journée.

The other shoe

I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. According to the dictionary, that means I've been "awaiting a seemingly inevitable event, especially one that is not desirable." The other shoe dropped last night. Fairly late in the evening, I got an e-mail from the security department at my bank — credit union, really — in the U.S. I called the bank. The man on the phone told me there had been a suspicious attempted transaction on my Visa card and wanted to know if I was aware of it.

I told him that, yes, I knew it might happen and told him about the mysterious iPhone I received last Friday. He asked me some questions — birth date, address, telephone number, last four digit of my Social Security number, the security code on the Visa card, and so on. He wanted to verify another couple of recent transactions on the credit card. I confirmed that those were legitimate.

And then he said he was going to close the account immediately and send me a new card, with a new number. He said the suspicious transaction had to do with an attempted payment to a PayPal account. That's all the information I got last night. I might call and ask a few more questions today.

Earlier in the day, I had written to the company that sent me that expensive iPhone out of the blue last week (see my posts here over the past few days). I'll still be curious to read the answers to the questions I asked in my e-mail. However, I'll probably never know exactly what happened. I have to send the iPhone back, of course, and I guess I should change the password on some other accounts I have on on-line shopping sites.

So that's that. The shoe fell with a thud. It was anticlimactic. Included here are a few recent photos of Callie the collie, taken on our morning walks and with a couple of different cameras.