An afternoon walk in summertime

Yesterday afternoon it was my turn to walk Callie. It was a breezy summer afternoon, warmer than I expected. I put on a long-sleeved shirt over my tee-shirt but I was too hot almost immediately as we started down the hill on the north side of the house.

This butterfly seemed to wait for me to take its picture.

We walked along between vineyard plots, with the rows running away from us on either side of the so-called road. As we got down to the edge of the woods, I noticed the butterfly. It kept landing on the ground just a few feet ahead of me. I changed my camera to 7-megapixel mode and used the zoom lens to get a good picture. It waited patiently, ignoring the dog. Then it flew away.

Off the left of the road, a barking deer...

As we (the dog and I) entered the woods on a fairly steep tractor path headed downhill, I heard a strange barking on my left. It was a high-pitched cough, not really similar to a dog's bark, but a bark nonetheless. I know friends of mine will laugh when they read this: I think it was a roe deer — a chevreuil in French. They are said to bark, and I believe I heard one barking this time. It's not the first time.

Poppies, known as coquelicots [kuck-lee-coe] in French

Callie went running off into the woods, chasing whatever it was that had barked. I continued down the path, calling her. In a minute, she showed up, panting, with her tongue hanging way out of her mouth. As I said, it was hot. Then I saw the poppies, one of which is pictured above.

The grass "road"along the edge of fallow fields, leading down
to where new houses are being built

We emerged from the woods at the bottom of the hill and followed the grass "road" past some houses. One has a pool. The house is only a year or two old. There was a woman in bathing suit. She glanced at me and Callie and then quickly disappeared indoors. I noticed her car license indicated she was from the Paris area.

New houses near our hamlet

Since we arrived here in 2003, about a dozen new houses have been built within half a mile or so of ours. None is within sight of our place, but when people actually move in the local population will increase significantly. It will be interesting to see how different our neighborhood becomes.

Lourde comme une bouteille de butane...

That title is a line from an old Francis Cabrel song, and it means "as heavy as a bottle of butane" — which is really heavy. Butane gas is what we are using to fuel the gas burners on our new stove (see yesterday's post).

In the song Cabrel talks about getting up in the morning and having his paupières en panne... his eyelids won't work right and they feel as heavy as a bottle of butane. The song is called Sarbacane (1989) and the lyrics are here.

The red thing under the sink is the tank of butane.

I know how heavy a bottle (or tank, in better English) of butane can be. In 1972-73, when I lived in the rainy Normandy city of Rouen, I had a butane space heater in my little apartment. To get a new bottle of butane when one ran out, I had to walk across the old downtown — usually in a fine, cold rain, Rouen being famous as "the chamber pot of Normandy" (Le Pot de chambre de la Normandie) — carrying the empty tank on my shoulder. That wasn't too bad if you liked having wet feet.

But then when I got to the store called a droguerie (don't ask me why), where things like household supplies and cleaning products are sold, I traded in the empty and got a new full tank. Then I had to trudge back across the city, a 30-minute walk, if I remember, with the full, heavy bouteille de butane on my shoulder. I was, what, 24 years old, and I didn't have a car or know anybody who did.

Nowadays, of course, I do have a car, so getting a tank of butane at SuperU or Intermarché or even the little grocery store in our village is easy. We bought two of them, so when the first one is empty we will be able to connect the second one and then go get a refill.

I know you can get propane or butane in the U.S. People use it to fire their gas grills. That's what we did in San Francisco. There we would take in your tank and it would be refilled. Here, you just trade in the empty and get a new one. When you decide turn in your empty for good, you get your ten-euro deposit back.

Steak and French fries, the classic steak-frites,
for lunch yesterday. The steaks, called pavés de rumsteak,
cooked nicely in a heavy metal pan on a hot hot gas burner.

Estimates we've seen say a tank of the size we have should give us between 60 and 100 hours of cooking time. That should last two or three months, I think. We have an electric oven and one electric burner on the stovetop, so we won't use as much gas as we would if it were an all-gas range.

A tank containing 10 kg (22 lbs.) of butane costs €14.95. If that lasts three months, or even two, it won't be expensive, that's for sure.

Our neighborhood doesn't have piped-in gas (called gaz de ville here). We have no choice but to use butane or propane if we want a gas cookstove, and an outdoor propane tank would not be practical. Walt says we have really "gone native" (a British expression, I think) with our little butane tanks. Tant mieux.

Now we're cookin' with gas

The new stove was delivered this afternoon. No dents in the sides this time. Thank you, Darty.

The Brandt KMP 715 W cooker, with both gas and
electric burners and a multi-function electric oven

The head delivery guy — the one who was obviously in charge — did a good-enough job. When I told him that the electrical cord on the old stove was the one that should be attached to the new stove, he stopped what he was doing. Yes, he said yes, that was a better cord, and he used it instead of the patched-together cord he was fabricating and had planned to use. The only reason I knew to tell him which cord to use was that the installation guy last week had told me he was going to use the cord we already had.

Did the "old" ceramic-cooktop stove look more modern?
Bottled gas? Maybe modern isn't all it's cracked up to be.

That first installation specialist was obviously a pro. He knew his job. Today's delivery guy, when he was stumped, had a moment of insecurity and told me: "I'm a student and just doing this job for the summer." Then he had a second thought and added: "But I plan to make a career of delivering and installing kitchen appliances, of course." Ha ha ha.

Anyway, he and his assistant got the old stove out and the new one hooked up. But it took Walt to figure out how the bottle of butane needed to be activated. The installer was trying to figure it out. It turned out there was a button on the gas bottle that needed to be pushed several times to get the gas flowing. When it finally worked, no problem. Whoosh! Let there be fire.

The tea kettle is hiding the electric burner...

The new stove has electronic oven controls, including a time-delayed cooking and stopping, and a timer. The documentation I had read before we bought the stove seemed to say it had no oven timer. We figured we could live without one — there's on on the microwave, after all — but I for one didn't believe a 21st-century cookstove with electronic oven controls would come without a timer. And for once I was right.

Today's lunch: steak-frites. We have to cook a steak on the new, hot gas burner. We'll use our electric deep-fryer, as usual, for the French fries. Report at 11:00.

Then we plan stir-fried dishes and others requiring hot, hot burners for the next few days. Stir-fry of eggplant and chicken, for example. Or pork and cauliflower. And so on. I went to the supermarket today and found prices for fresh produce to be very low. 'Tis the season.

Please don't eat the daisies

There is a big clump of white daisies growing out in the garden, right next to the table and chairs we have out there. Yesterday I sat out there, under an umbrella so I wouldn't get sunburned, and listened to the radio for a couple of hours.

While I listened, I watched several butterflies and a lot of bees feeding in and on the daisies. And I took pictures. Here are some of the ones that came out the best. I took literally 200 pictures in two hours. As usual, you can click the pictures in this post with your mouse to see larger versions.

I especially tried to get good photos of the two or three orange-colored butterflies that I saw. One is just above. But they were the hardest to photograph, because they wouldn't sit still. And when they did, they seemed to sense my presence and turn themselves so that I couldn't see them very well.

They would turn themselves around so that they were either facing me or looking in exactly the opposite direction. They'd keep their wings folded up. All I could see most of the time was a vertical line with six little stick-legs holding it up. But I finally did get a few good pictures.

As I said, there were also a lot of bees out there but I didn't try to take pictures of them specifically. I did get a few though. It's nice to see bees, with all the talk about how their populations are declining.

There was also one brown butterfly. It looked like it could be the same kind as the more colorful one, but it didn't act so shy and uncooperative. Could it be the female of the species? I think I remember that some butterflies have males and females that are differentiated this way.