Maisons normandes (3)

This is the third and last set of photos of houses in Normandy that I put together and edited this week. These aren't on the Cotentin peninsula but south and west of there, between Domfront and Alençon. I took some of them in Domfront, and others in the spa town called Bagnoles-de-l'Orne as well as in Carrouges. Some of these houses are châteaux, or manoirs at least.

Here it is June 15 and we are still having mostly chilly, cloudy weather, with heavy downpours from storms featuring lightning and thunder. This weather makes me feel like it's March instead of June, though I admit it's a little bit warmer than March weather. We hardly had any real winter weather between November 2018 and April 2019, and now I'm worried we might not have any real summer weather. I'm trying not to be a pessimist...

Maisons normandes (2)

A few days ago, when I started looking for and processing photos of houses that I took in Normandy in the early years of this century (doesn't that sound funny?), I didn't realize how many I would find. I ended up with 42 images. That made a fairly long slide show, so I divided them into three 14-image shows. I'm always surprised by the good quality of images produced by digital cameras so long ago.

All these are houses in Lower Normandy, which is the western part of the province or region. (You might call some "buildings" because they have shops, restaurants, or cafés on the ground floor, but that's not unusual for houses in France.) If I started looking for photos of houses in Upper Normandy (la Haute Normandie) I'd find so many more, because I've spent so much more time there over the years. I lived and worked for a year in that area's capital city, Rouen, back in the 1970s.

Maisons normandes (1)

Yesterday I spent another few hours going through sets of Normandy photos that I've taken over the years. I'm concentrating on the period from 2004 and 2005, when I made several trips to the Cotentin, which is a peninsula in western Normandy, north of the famous Mont Saint-Michel. Here are a few photos of houses grand and modest in Lower Normandy.

Meanwhile, life here in Saint-Aignan is just a waiting game. We're waiting for some nice weather to return. Enough with the chilly days — the afternoon high temperatures haven't barely hit 70ºF this week — and rain, rain go away. The vegetable garden and other plants need some warmth and sunshine.

The other waiting game has to do with the new bathroom we want to have built out and plumbed in up in our big loft space. The two artisans we have contracted with to do the work haven't shown up yet, even though they said they'd start working here around June 1. Major sigh. No news from them at all. We've cleared the space by moving furniture and emptying closets, and I'm getting tired of the house feeling like a jumble.

Le pois mangetout

We're having snow peas, known in French as pois gourmands or pois mangetout ("eat-all"), for lunch today. They're growing in our 2019 vegetable garden and are the first thing we've harvested this spring (with the exception of the Swiss chard that I planted in 2018 and that over-wintered out there).

Walt was going to go out and harvest our third batch of snow peas yesterday afternoon when suddenly it started... get this... snowing! Well, not exactly snowing, but sleeting. There were two bolts of lightning, then a loud rumble of thunder. The bottom fell out. The rain was so hard that I had to go look, and what I saw was a mix of big raindrops and small ice pellets. The pellets were bouncing off the hood and roof of the Citroën, which I had left parked outdoors. No damage done, thankfully.

Wikipédia says people in France and in the Netherlands have been growing, cooking, and eating pois mangetout since at least the 16th century. They are mentioned in a book published in 1526. We'll be having a stir-fry of onion, garlic, carrot, snow peas, and chicken today. We've already had similar stir-fries of snow peas, one with beef and one with shrimp, this spring.

A few days ago Walt posted a photo of the second batch of snow peas he had harvested. He planted seeds we bought here in Saint-Aignan and that are described on the label as being a pois demi-nain 40 jours — semi-dwarf peas that start producing 40 days after planting. I took the photos in the slideshow above two weeks ago.