Progress and changes

Jacques the building contractor sent one of his men over on Thursday to seal all the cracks and seams in our upstairs closets where cold air was coming in. It took the man all day, and he seems to have done an excellent job. It's been very windy this morning and we aren't feeling it up here in the loft at all.

The weather is still very mild and very wet most of the time. Walt got up this morning, looked out the window, and said: "There are all these very strange points of light in the sky." Ha ha. That's right, it's clear this morning, but that's not supposed to last. A rain front is moving in from the northwest and will give us steady rain all afternoon and into the night, according to the forecast I just saw.

This morning's sunrise, with a rare clear sky

Oh, and I got the currency exchange done. It's easy once I've made up my mind. I set up the transaction, then I send a request form to the bank in the U.S. by e-mail, and I wait for a call. The phone rings, I answer a few security questions to prove I am who I say I am, and the money is sent.

Living on U.S. dollars in a country where they are not the legal tender is not the ideal situation to be in. But there we are. We are at the mercy of the dollar/euro exchange rate. It certainly makes budgeting more complicated.

I ended up getting a rate of $1 U.S. = 0.76 € this time. That's not too bad. Expressed in dollars per euro, that's 1 € = $1.31. I realized a gain of a couple of hundred euros by waiting a few days as the euro fell against the U.S. dollar. Every euro counts, that's my attitude. When I changed money last spring, I got 80 eurocents per dollar, but in March it was only 72 eurocents. So my average for the year is $1 = 0.76 €. We did several currency transactions in 2010 because we were having the attic converted into new living space.

In other news, we think one of the houses in our hamlet might be going on the market. There are only 9 houses here at La Renaudière, and about half of them are occupied only seasonally. None has been sold since we bought ours in 2002/2003. The house we think might be advertised for sale soon belonged to a woman who died last year. She was 95 years old. Her two children — people my age — inherited the house, but one lives in the Paris area and the other lives down south near the Mediterranean.

Yesterday's sunset

Both of the late owner's heirs have come and spent a few days here over the past year, but not often, and they never stay long. One of them told me the place needs a lot a work. I've never seen the inside, and, unfortunately, they don't seem to do open houses here the way they do in the U.S. to sell houses. I'd love to see the interior, what facilities it has, and how it is decorated. All I know is that there are at least two small outbuildings and there's a small orchard of half a dozen apple trees out back. The house has great views of the vineyard right outside.

We haven't seen any « A Vendre » signs go up yet, but there's been a flurry of activity over there this week. Obviously, contractors are being called in, either to repair things or to spiff the place up. And Walt found a real estate agent's calling card on the ground on the road out there. I don't even know if the heirs are here right now, or are having all this done from afar. I haven't seen them or their car.

Watching the rates

It's time for me to transfer some U.S. dollars over to France so that we'll have money to live on for the next six months. Doing the transfer is not complicated, but it is a lot of trouble. I have to set up a transfer with a company that specializes in currency conversions and agree on the exchange rate. Then I have to have my bank in the U.S. wire the dollars to the currency exchange company, which is in London. The London office wires the money as euros on to my bank here in Saint-Aignan (Montrichard, actually) at the agreed-upon rate.

It's important to me to get the best rate I can get for the conversion from U.S. dollars to euros. As a retired person, I'm in a position where every dollar — or euro — counts. And the dollar is weaker than we'd like it to be. For the past few days, I've been watching the exchange rate evolve in favor of the American currency. In other words, just this week the U.S. dollar has gone from being worth 0.74 to 0.77 centimes d'euro (eurocents). In other words, the euro has dropped from $1.34 U.S. to $1.30.

As a hypothetical example, let's say you are having $25,000 U.S. dollars transferred to Europe. If you change the money at $1 = 0.74 €, you end up getting 18,500 euros. If you change the money at a rate of $1 = 0.77 €, you get 19,250 euros. Those 750 extra euros represent a good portion of our everyday expenses for a whole month (groceries, fuel for the car, bread, wine, satellite TV, Internet, etc.). Or a six-month supply of heating oil. Or several years' worth of firewood. A round-trip plane ticket to the U.S. Or, for example, I could buy a nice computer with the extra money. We could go spend a week in a rental apartment in a nice neighborhood in Paris. Or... well, I can dream, can't I?

Remember, the above example is purely hypothetical. Nonetheless, when we bought our house in 2003, that sum, $25,000 U.S., was worth more than 23,000 euros — nearly 4,000 € more than it is worth today. In 2002, it was worth more that 28,000 euros! And a couple of years ago, at the U.S. dollar's low point, it was worth less than 16,000 €. All the while, prices in France, as nearly everywhere, just keep going up. Wild and unpredictable currency fluctuations have been a hard reality of the American (and British) expatriate's life for the past eight years.

When I applied for my future U.S. Social Security benefits the other day, the man I talked to at the American embassy in Paris told me that I can have the monthly payment sent directly to my bank here in France in euros. There is no fee involved for the conversion of the dollars into euros. The only unknown factor is the exchange rate. We won't know from one month to the next how much money will come through when it gets to the bank in euros.

I think I'm going to try it. Having the money paid into a U.S. bank account and then processing the conversion into euros once or twice a year is a big hassle. Something in my head says I'd have more control over the process if I continued doing it that way, however. I'm sure that's just an illusion. There's no need to be a control freak. Exchange rates are like the weather. You can worry about them, and you can talk about them, but really, you can't predict or change them. All you can do is watch... and adapt.

Weather, cold and especially wet

We are finally having a real thaw in Saint-Aignan, after about 6 weeks of freezing temperatures and off-and-on snow. December 2010 was the coldest month we've had in the last 8 years, and it was also the wettest month we've had since we starting keeping rain and temperature records at our house in 2004.

The low temperature this morning was in the mid-40s F (8ºC) and the highs over the next few days are supposed to go as high as 12ºC (mid-50s). It's a big change, and we're glad for it. The price for this "tropical heat wave" is rain, which started last night. There's quite a bit of wind too.

The stretch of bad weather started during the last week of November. We had snow then, and it continued for about three weeks, off and on. In December we recorded 13 mornings with temperatures below freezing (as low as –5ºC, which is in the low 20s F), and we had only 9 days when the temperature got up higher than 5ºC (41ºF).

About the only dry place Bertie can find to sit outdoors
these days is on top of a car parked out back.

We have a very temperate climate here in the Loire Valley, but you wouldn't know it if you lived through our December 2010. It was the rainiest month we've ever experienced here in Saint-Aignan. We recorded a total of 133 mm (more than 5 inches) of water in our rain gauge. A lot of days, we had to bring in a rain gauge full of snow and wait for it to melt to see how much precipitation we really got.

Our average monthly precipitation is about 60 mm. In 2010, we more than doubled that in December, and we nearly doubled it in July 2010 too, with 110 mm. (An inch of rain is about 25 mm.) Our drought is over, for sure. The only other months that have ever come close in amount of precipitation were June 2007 and November 2009, both with just 100 mm. In no other month since we started keeping track have we exceeded 100 mm of precipitation.

The ground out in the garden is very squishy, and even the gravel road out through the vineyard feels spongy when you walk on it — unless it's frozen solid, of course, which it was earlier this week. The pond out back has been overflowing for weeks now. The water runs down what is normally a tractor path just out behind our back hedge. It's cutting quite a gully, so that track will need some maintenance next spring.

Or maybe that tractor path will just revert to being a natural watercourse. It depends on the weather.

Feeling lucky

Did you eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day? I did. It's a tradition, and a superstition. Eating black-eyed peas on January 1 brings you good luck for the whole year.

Luckily, black-eyed peas are available in the supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan. I got a one-kilogram bag of dried black-eyes at Intermarché. They put them in the imported food section. They are imported from Portugal. I think they might actually be grown in the U.S.A. Oh, and in French they are called cornilles [kor-NEE-yuh]. Here's a link to a brief Wikipedia article in French.

Black-eyed peas with turkey confit and Montbéliard sausages

There are quite a few Portuguese people living in the Saint-Aignan area. SuperU has an annual semaine portugaise — a week when Portuguese products are on special sale. Evidently, black-eyed peas are appreciated in Portugal and in Brazil, as they are in the U.S. South. Portugal had colonies in Africa, and that's where black-eyed peas came from originally.

Confit de dinde — turkey leg and thigh sections, with
the turkey heart and gizzard, cooked slowly in
duck fat for two or three hours and then drained

We cook our black-eyed peas with smoked Montbéliard sausages from eastern France, and we season them with duck fat and vegetables including celery, onion, and carrots. This year, I made confit de dinde — turkey leg-thigh sections slow-cooked in duck fat until the meat is very tender and cooked to the point of falling off the bone. That turkey meat went well with the black-eyed peas too.

Black-eyed peas have a distinctive, pleasant taste compared to all the other dried beans — cocos blancs (navy or great northern beans), cocos roses (pinto beans), lingots blancs (canellini beans), and haricots rouges (kidney beans). You can use all of them in soups and salads, though, or eat them as beans the way we did, with or without accompanying meats.