We are back

Many of you may just be getting up to start the day. For us, it is nearly 4:00 p.m. Our Internet/DSL service just came back on. It feels like a wasted day.

Last night we had a wild thunderstorm at about 2:00 a.m. The thunder and the wind woke me up, and I got out of bed to see if any windows needed closing. The bathroom window was slightly open and I decided to close it because the rain was beating against that side of the house.

Nice flower

As I slid the window shut, a long, slender bolt of lightning dropped down from high up in the western sky and hit the ground a few hundred yards out behind our house, in the vineyard. When it hit the ground, the lightning bolt exploded into a big yellow fireball on the ground.

Maybe I was still half asleep. Maybe I was dreaming. But the cordless phone beeped two or three times. I don't know if that meant the power had been cut for a second, or if the lightning had affected the phone service. The clocks on the microwave and regular ovens were still displaying the correct time this morning, so I don't think the electricity went off during the storm.

La Renaudière, near Saint-Aignan, 21 July 2009. Nice clouds.

This morning, we had no Internet connection. I had disconnected the modem and the router last night before going to bed, because the thunderstorms were predicted. Twice over the past few months, lightning strikes have reset our router, erasing all the settings stored in it, including our Internet connection identifier and password. It's a pain to have to set the thing up again; I never remember how many settings need to be changed, or what the proper settings are. I thought that by unplugging the router and turning off the modem, I was protecting our setup.

Yesterday afternoon, waiting for the storms to come

But nothing happened when I turned the Internet devices back on this morning. Our local network was normal — all our computers could "see" each other — but the Internet was absent and unaccounted for. I spent more than an hour on the phone with technical support between 9:30 and 11:00. The France Télécom support agent, after many tests and trials, couldn't figure it out. Everything seemed to be working normally, but still I couldn't get connected to the Internet. No Google, no blog.

While I was on the phone, we had company. Our American friends from the village south of us stopped by to use our Internet connection. They were disappointed. The French woman who sold us our house six years ago stopped by to get some tomatoes from our garden. I couldn't talk to any of them. Walt kept them busy and entertained while I waited on hold, the phone scotché to my ear.

Now, suddenly, the Internet connection works again. An "expert"— same word in French, pronounced [ek-spehr] — from France Telecom is supposed to call me at 6:00 p.m. to resolve the problem. Well, it's too late. It's now working again. I say it was their problem, not ours, all along. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Prunes

The other day our neighbor came over and rang the bell. I was out walking the dog. Walt went to the kitchen window and leaned out. Mme M., the one who lives in Blois but spends weekends and summers across the street, said her husband had picked 15 kg — more than 30 lbs. — of plums (those are prunes in French) off one tree in their yard.

Petites prunes rouges

"Come over and take all you want," she said. "There are a lot of them on the ground and a lot left on the tree." She didn't know that I had already picked quite a few of them. M. and Mme M. were still in Blois. They had told me earlier that I could help myself.

They look like cherries but they're plums.

So yesterday morning we went and picked up a lot of plums off the ground. The weather is so dry that they hadn't started to spoil. I washed and sorted through them all and weighed them. Three kilograms. More than 6½ lbs. Now what are we going to do with them?

Greens and beans

We are still harvesting chard (a.k.a. silverbeet), and now we're starting to get beans too. Thanks to Carolyn, who comments here and has visited, we have some very nice pole beans growing tall in the garden and now producing profusely. We also have wax beans, which are a bush variety, and they are producing too. We have some lima bean plants, too, and we are hoping for at least a small crop. We don't get lima beans in France otherwise.

Pole beans and wax beans

I gave our American friend H. some Swiss chard last week. She and her husband have a house about 10 miles south of Saint-Aignan, and they are here for the summer. Actually, H. and I went out to the garden together and cut the leaves. A., her husband, is like me — he loves greens.

A day or two ago H. said she had cooked the greens with onions and lardons — those are the little chunks of smoked or salted pork you buy here in France and use to season vegetables, stews, or egg dishes. Think bacon cut into chunks rather than thin slices. Anyway, she said she cooked the chard with lardons and onions and then combined it with cooked pasta into a kind of stir-fry.

Swiss chard stir-fry with pasta, smoked pork, and sausages

We decided to do the same thing, and it was excellent. I think that's obvious from the pictures. We cooked the chard first in water with salt. Then we cooked the pasta, re-using the chard water to give it flavor. Finally, we cooked the lardons and onions together, along with some garlic.

We also added a couple of little sausages, cooked and then cut into short sections. And we put in some hot red pepper flakes and black pepper to spice it up. Then we combined it all in a wok and stirred it around for the flavors to blend, adding in a little more of the chard cooking liquid (known as "pot liquor" in the U.S. south).

A mix of pole beans and wax beans will be our lunch today. The pole beans are pretty, all spotted and striped with a reddish-purple color. I'll be interested to see if they cook up all green. Carolyn, as I said, send us the seeds for the pole beans, along with seeds for several varieties of heirloom tomatoes. The tomatoes are also doing great. What a pleasure it is to have the pole beans and the unusual tomatoes.

Other news from the garden: Walt pointed out to me this morning that one of our eggplants is producing white fruit rather than the more common purple variety. I'm sure eggplant is called by that name because the white varieties do look like eggs. I'll be glad to see them again.

When I was growing up, we had white eggplants but not purple ones, if I remember correctly. I think the white ones lost out because they bruise easily and don't look as pretty on display. Only once in a while do you see white aubergines (the British and French term) in markets in France or in the U.S.

The garden, and a sudden trip plan

I took Callie out for her regular afternoon walk yesterday. On the way out, I browsed through our vegetable garden see what was happening. There are quite a few more ripe tomatoes now. The small ones are turning red, but the bigger varieties are still green. The weather is mild — not to say chilly.

Today we'll pick some Swiss chard and make a pasta/chard stir-fry dish — onions, garlic, red pepper flakes, and maybe a couple of little sausages I have in the freezer. Yesterday and the day before we ate a zucchini casserole — a gratin — with zukes from the garden. It's the season.

Sweet corn growing in the garden

After checking out the garden, Callie and I slipped through the wires of the electrified fence — it doesn't appear to be electrified right now — that protects the vines and grapes from marauding deer. We wanted to walk down the hill toward the north, through some woods. Callie gets very excited when you take her on a seldom-used path.

Wild blackberries are already starting to ripen.

At the bottom of the hill, I took a few pictures. I noticed a big tree that had blown over in the other evening's wind storm, and this morning I saw another one that had a big limb broken out of it. We were lucky not to have any wind damage the other night.

A view from the bottom of our hill, looking across the
Cher River Valley to the other side. There are sheep
in the pen behind the white house.

In late August, some friends of ours from America and from Normandy are going to be spending three days together in Paris. On the spur of the moment, I decided yesterday afternoon to buy myself a train ticket and go to Paris for part of their time there. It'll be fun. I'll spend two nights in a hotel in the Latin Quarter.

That's the nice thing about living here: I buy a 10€ train ticket, jump on a train, and be in Paris in two hours' time. Walt will stay home with Callie this time.