The snail called a petit-gris

It's also called a luma. I was looking back at some topics that I'd left in draft mode many moons ago and found these pictures of petits-gris, aka escargots. Not long ago I posted a topic about our village's annual snail festival, which is dedicated to these creatures.

This is a snail I found in our garden in August 2007, which was a very rainy summer here in Saint-Aignan and the whole northern half of France. It was great weather for snails. This summer of 2008 has turned out to be much warmer and drier. We and our garden thank the weather gods for that.

As I said in an earlier posting, it is pretty easy to take pictures of snails. They don't fly away, and they don't even run that fast. The photographer has plenty of time to adjust the camera and get the focus right.

You might notice that I'm having a lazy blogging day. That's because I'm in the middle of organizing and "de-duping" a bunch of recipes that I have collected from web sites, newspapers, and other miscellaneous sources. Some of them are on my computer in several different file formats, and others existed in identical form on two different computers. It's time to put some order into all that.

We've been doing a lot of cooking on the new stove, which has not been a disappointment. But I haven't been taking many pictures. We've been doing a lot of Thai-style stir-fry and curry dishes, using a lot of lime juice and coconut milk, with chicken and even beef. It's great to have hot gas burners for quick sauteing. Back to the recipes...

Vineyard sunrise, collards, and walks

Of course, I'm looking west at sunrise, out over
the Renaudie vineyards — not toward the sun.

On my walk this morning, I picked a good bouquet of wild chicory, which I put in water. I'm waiting for the flowers to fade and then I'll get the seeds for my planting out back.

Cornflowers (wild chicory) for seeds

This morning I'm going to plant a row or two of collard greens so we will have a crop in November and December, before the first hard freeze. If we get a hard freeze... because sometimes we don't. I tilled up a new plot yesterday.

The new garden plot, for collard greens

The weather continues hot and dry. Too hot, almost. And too dry. After all my complaining about having too much rain in 2007 and the first four months of 2008, now I want rain and I'm complaining about it being too dry. Jamais content, décidément.

Seeds for two varieties of collards
that I brought back from North Carolina

Meanwhile, on my morning walk I actually counted the steps I take going out to the end of the gravel road that runs through the vineyard. It turns out to be 1,600 steps, one way. So 3,200 for a round trip. That's not much, since some people I know are now walking 11,000 steps a day for health purposes. I'd better start taking two walks a day instead of just one.

An unusual church in Chârost

Chârost is a very old village located about 15 miles west of Bourges in the Berry. It's more than an hour's drive from Saint-Aignan. CHM and I went there on our way back from Bourges in mid-June.

The church in Chârost near Bourges

The guide books say there is a château, or at least the ruins of one, in Chârost, but it is almost completely hidden behind walls and trees. We got just a glimpse of it. We stopped and looked around the church grounds. We even went inside the church — which meant going to get the key at the Mairie, the village hall, next door — but about half of it was closed off because it's being restored.

Chârost — no, it is not brick.

The town itself didn't look very prosperous, and it was nearly deserted at 5:00 p.m. on a weekday. It's not far from Bourges, but much closer to Issoudun. The Reuilly and Quincy (AOC Sauvignon Blanc) wine areas are to the north.

The side portal of the church and a close-up

This part of the old Berry province used to be a mining center. There's a lot of iron ore in the local rock. The church in Chârost is built of limestone that contains a good amount of that ore, and the church walls look as if they are rusting. I guess they are.

L'Eglise St-Michel in Chârost

The Eglise St-Michel is an abbey church in Romanesque style dating back to the 12th century. I want to go back one day to see the part of the church that was closed off to visitors.

Just some clouds and a breeze

It was anticlimactic. Météo France predicted big storms for last night. About 6:00 p.m. the wind started blowing the trees around, and we had a few drops of rain. The high temperature in the afternoon had been 31ºC or 88ºF. But it wasn't too muggy.

We closed all the shutters all around the house, because predictions were for hard rain, strong winds, and maybe some hail. We put the car in the garage for the first time in months. Then we waited. Walt watched the rain on weather radar sites on the web. It was all west of us, along the coast from Bordeaux up to Cherbourg.

And, well, it all passed us right by. We never did get any rain. We didn't hear any thunder, we felt no stronger winds than the first gusts early in the evening, and there isn't a drop of water in the rain gauge this morning. It's a good thing I watered the plants that needed watering yesterday morning.

Our friends who own a house about 10 miles south of Saint-Aignan were supposed to leave this morning to return to California. I'm glad I didn't have to go, but I'm also glad they didn't have to make the drive to Paris through stormy weather.

Skies over the vineyard at sunrise yesterday

What they do is get up in the middle of the night and leave their house at about 4:00 a.m. to drive to Charles de Gaulle airport, which is on the north side of Paris. The drive takes at least three hours — unless there is traffic, and then it takes longer. That's the unpredictable part. Then they have to wait several hours at the airport before spending an hour or two going through all the security checks.

The flight from Paris to San Francisco takes 11 hours. It's a very long haul.

Callie waiting for the stormy weather to arrive
and maybe doing some California dreaming

I think I'll just stay here. I'm not much of a traveler any more. The only reason I wanted to travel when I lived all those years in California was to come to France. Or to go see my family in North Carolina. Now I just have one destination when I get on a plane, and that's N.C. Otherwise, I'll just stay in France.

The news on France 2 TV just reported that there was heavy weather down south of us yesterday and last night. In the Lot and the Tarn-et-Garonne departments, trees were down and there was some flooding. We were spared.