Friends visiting

I haven't had time to write blog entries this week. After spending a nice Sunday with our English friends (it was my birthday), Walt and I went into high gear to get ready to receive a visit from some friends from California. There always seem to be a million things to do to get the house ready. This time, we actually slightly rearranged our living room furniture as we were doing our spring cleaning. The new arrangement is proving to be nicer than the old one.

We did our spring cleaning early because not only are friends here this week and weekend, but another couple of San Francisco-area friends will arrive next Wednesday for a week. Then in early April our friend Sue from California will come for an extended visit. Meantime, we plan a short trip to Paris at the very end of March to see California friends there, and a couple of them will, we hope, come and spend a few days with us here. This is turning into our busy season, and it promises to be busy until mid-July this year, with visitors from California, Alabama, Normandy, and Colorado. They are all good friends and we are happy to see them, especially after the long, cold, lonely winter we have had this year!

We got five inches of snow last Saturday, the most we have had since we moved here in 2003. There was still some some on the ground until Wednesday, though it was slowly melting the whole time. Now the weather has turned relatively warm (50s F), with rain and quite a bit of gusty wind. We probably won't do much sightseeing with our friends today unless the weather improves some, and that's not predicted.

What we are going to to do today is go out to a restaurant for lunch. That's not something we do very often, so it's a treat. The restaurant I've picked is over in Noyers-sur-Cher, on the other side of the river. It's the kind of place I've heard described as a "white van" establishment. In other words, it's more or less a truckstop. All the French tradesmen seem to have little Renault, Citroën, or Peugeot vans that you see driving around all over the countryside. Our bread lady has one, for example. When you see a restaurant with a number of the white vans parked out front at noontime, you know it's worth a try. I've only eaten at this particular white van restaurant once before, and that was with my mother when she was visiting last September. We both thought the food was very good. Maybe I'll have time to write about it in a day or two.

Oh, and about the river, it has considerably overflowed its banks over the past few days. I don't think any houses are flooded — at least I haven't heard about any — but on my way to the train station in Vierzon (35 miles east) to pick up Chris and Tony late yesterday afternoon I saw a lot of flooded fields and several Route Barrée signs where little roads are closed because they are under water. It was raining and getting dark, so I hadn't taken my camera with me — no pictures. Maybe today.

Speaking of cameras (Dennis, this is an answer to your recent question), I have three digital cameras. One is a Kodak DC4800, which I've had for 5 years or longer. It's a three-megapixel model. The lens has a good wide angle (28 mm equivalent) and a 3x optical zoom. The 4800, which has been out of production for years now, is the one I use to take food pictures. I keep it in the kitchen. It has no manual focus, but the automatic focus gives great results in macro mode. It performs really well in low light conditions. In the kitchen, I often take a few pictures in macro mode sans flash, and then I take some from farther back by using the zoom and turning on the flash. Usually I get images that I'm happy with.

My other two cameras are an older Canon Powershot Pro90 IS, which is also good for closeup shots but which has the advantage of a 10x optical zoom. It's 2.5 megapixels (which I think is plenty). It's a great camera for telephoto shots, but it's a big heavy model (24 oz.) that I only haul around when my main purpose for going out is to take pictures. I do use it for inside closeup once in a while because I like its manual focus feature.

Finally, I have a new Canon Powershot S70, which I am trying to learn to like. It's a seven-megapixel model, but I have it set to take pictures smaller than that because the full-size ones always seem blurry. So far, I like it for wide-angle landscape shots in good light conditions. And I like that it's small and fits easily into a coat pocket. But it's actually a little too small for my hands, so I'm less comfortable using it that I am with the other two cameras.

Adobe Photoshop is the other key to getting decent pictures. I use it to crop, resize, and sharpen pictures, and to modify their brightness, contrast, and color saturation.

Colorful contrasts to all the white snow

Here are some pictures that will stand in contrast to the nearly monochrome images I posted of yesterday's snow. The day before yesterday, I noticed that our Christmas cactus (schlumbergera) — I might now call in my birthday cactus, and I see that it is also known as an Easter cactus — was in full bloom. It deserved some pictures.



We also have a new orchid — a gift from our friend who is now in the clinic, recuperating from her attack. She bought it for us to thank us for driving her back and forth to the hospital in Blois back in January, when she was having a series of tests done. There's an orchid greenhouse in the town of Contres, just 10 miles north of us.

And here's one more plant, a peace lily that our friends Geri and Phil from SF gave us in 2003. They were the first people to come visit and stay with us after we arrived in France. The peace lily (spathiphyllum wallisii) flowers in late winter and early spring.

Oh, and here's a cyclamen that I bought at a nursery last year. After a summer of dormancy, it came back this winter and has produced a lot of flowers.

To go with today's dinner of venison and Yorkshire pudding, I made a pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. I found a fresh pineapple at the Ed supermarket, and I used a recipe from this blog, which is a great food site. I didn't have brown sugar, so I used French sucre de canne (what I would call raw sugar) instead. The proof of the recipe will be in the eating, which we will put off until after lunch.

I actually ended up with two cakes, because I used a slightly smaller cakepan than the recipe called for. There was plenty of pineapple, plenty of caramel, and plenty of batter to make the two cakes.

The snow is starting to melt. The sun is shining brightly this morning. We're hoping to be able to drive on the little roads out through the vineyards later this morning. There's a good bakery up there that makes bread in wood-fired ovens.

The back yard again, in sunshine

A cushion of snow sitting on top of our bay laurel hedge

A rouge-gorge (European robin) looking for food in the snow

A Saturday surprise

Back yard at La Renaudière on March 4, 2006, 7:30 a.m.

The linden tree in the back yard

It's a surprise because yesterday it was downright warm (okay, only 12ºC, or 54ºF) in comparison to the temperatures we've experienced for the past 6 weeks or so. I just calculated our average high temperature for January and February 2006 and it came to 5.7ºC.

We had a few 10º days in January, and a couple of 11º days in the middle of February, so yesterday's 12 is our high temperature for the year so far. I have to say, though, that we haven't had any days when the temperature stayed below freezing. We've had snow more frequently this winter than we did during the last two, but we haven't had any significant accumulations.

View from the kitchen

The neighbor's house, hidden by frosted trees

On France Inter radio this morning I heard a report about driving conditions in the Alps. They said travel was difficult and the roads were slippery malgré le ballet des chasse-neige. At least that's what I understood: "the ballet of the snow chasers" — that is, the dance of the snowplows. Nice image, if I understand it correctly. The only problem is that there's another French word, balai, that's pronounced the same as ballet and means broom.

That in turn reminds me of a French professor I knew back in Illinois who said that when he was a little boy, he heard that people were going to Paris to see les ballets russes. He understood balais russes and wondered why people would go all the way to Paris to see some Russian brooms.

Kitchen window view

On the radio, they are calling this the winter that just won't quit (l'hiver qui n'en finit pas). It's now mid-morning and it's still snowing. It's starting to melt, I think. We are hoping the heavy wet snow won't take down any tree branches in the yard, or cause a power failure.

Our new British friends called yesterday and invited us to lunch tomorrow. Janet is going to cook a roast leg of venison en croûte. She and David live only about a mile from us, so we should be able to get to their house, even if the snowplows don't give a performance at Saint-Aignan and we have to walk. The special Sunday dinner is a nice birthday dinner for me, coincidentally. Tomorrow I celebrate my 57th. It's hard to believe.

Aiguevives abbey near Montrichard

Prelude: Here's the full-size version of the Blois panorama I tried to post yesterday. Click the thumbnail to display the full-size view and then use the horizontal scrollbar to pan across the whole picture.

Panorama of Blois taken from the south bank of the Loire river

Yesterday afternoon I went to see the ruins of an old abbey church called Aiguevives, near Montrichard. (I was on my way to visit the friend who had that attack last month when we were driving to Blois. She was in the hospital for more than two weeks, and now she is going through a month of rehabilitation in a clinic in Montrichard. She seemed to be doing well yesterday. Her daughter was there when I was. They had just come in from taking a walk around the grounds of the clinic.)

Aiguesvives abbey wasn't a spectacular sight but I took some pictures of it and other things. First, here's the church, built in the 12th century and pillaged during the Revolution at the end of the 18th.

Aiguevives abbey near Montrichard

The old church is in a nice setting, down a dead-end road a couple of miles from the highway and in a forest. There's a big house (it might even qualify as a château or at least a manoir or manor house).

The big house across the road from the Aiguevives church

The people who live there keep horses and other animals. When I stopped the car to take a picture of the church from a distance, two of them came running over to see what I was up to.

The steeple of Aiguevives church is visible in the background

And these two were in an enclosure on the opposite side of the little road.

Horses at Aiguevives

Here's a picture just to give you an idea of what the countryside south and west of Saint-Aignan looks like. It's rolling hills with forested areas and a lot of open fields where crops including canola, sunflowers, and wheat are grown.

A route départementale south of Saint-Aignan in Touraine

Finally, here are a couple of pictures of the old town in Montrichard. The old castle keep dominates the town's main shopping street and the banks of the Cher river.

Montrichard, 10 miles south of Amboise

The Hôtel Bellevue is a much more recent building that sits right on the banks of the Cher and on the edge of the old town. Those are pigeons roosting on the roof, I believe.

The Hôtel Bellevue in Montrichard