Frosty branches and needles, etc.

Here are a few more photos that I took last weekend, before all our frost melted. I say that, but the temperature is again below freezing this morning, so the trees and vines might be frosty white again this morning. At 6:30 a.m., it's too dark outside for me to be able to tell yet.

Yesterday I got my monthly check from my retirement pension provider. With the current exchange rate, for each $1000 U.S. dollars I received about 963 euros. Compare that to the situation just a five years ago, when $1000 was coming in at something less than 665 euros. It's not hard to understand how much easier it is to live here now. Let's hope the dollar doesn't take another dive. About 95% of my income is in U.S. dollars.

Another subject: I've been digitizing my movie collection. Well, it was already digital, I guess, but the movies were in DVD format and saved on recordable DVDs. I'm converting them to MP4 format so that I can copy them to SD cards or USB flash drives and play them directly on my television set, computer, or touch-screen tablet. The MP4s take up between 400MB and 1.5 GB each, and each DVD movie uses more than 4.25GB of space, so it's quite a saving in disk space.

In the conversion process, I've come to realize that I have a collection of more than 150 French movies. I've bought some of them on DVDs, and others I have recorded on our satellite TV decoder and then transferred to my computer in DVD format. I'm preparing for the day when DVD players will go obsolete, and when desktop and laptop computer will no longer have optical drives. There are French films that I watch on a fairly regular basis — say once or twice a year — just because I enjoy the atmosphere they project and I love listening to the language. They remind me of the life I lived in Paris and Normandy back in the 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, I started recording a lot of French movies back when the dollar was so low, and I thought we might one day have to move back to the U.S. I'd always have Paris, I thought to myself, at least on DVDs...

Le passé et le présent

December 28, 2005

December 30, 2016

January 1, 2017

I'm still finding it hard to type 2017. My fingers will get used to it.

Snow? No — fog.

When you look at the photo below, which I took from an upstairs window yesterday morning, you might think it had snowed. It had not. You can see that when you look at the ground in our back yard and, especially, the green trimmed top of our laurel hedge. The little white truck parked next to the maison de vigneron belongs to a man named Roland who lives in the village and was out hunting yesterday afternoon.

January 1, 2017 — just before noon in the Renaudière vineyard outside Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

The frosty vineyard and woods are all white because it's been foggy for three or four days, with temperatures below freezing for much of that time. Until yesterday afternoon, that is. Around 3 p.m. a little westerly breeze came up and all the frost started melting. By the time I went out with the dog at 4:30, the white was nearly all gone and water was dripping out of all the trees around the edge of the vineyard. The weather report on Télématin says there's snow, changing over to freezing rain, north of the Loire Valley, including in Normandy and the Paris area, this morning.

Cuisses de canard confites, slow-cooked and packed by the Jean Larnaudie company in Figeac (southwestern France)

Meanwhile, yesterday I mentioned the confit de canard we would be having for lunch with our New Year's Day black-eyed peas. It came out of a large tin (6 inches in diameter and 3½ inches tall). I thought the four duck leg-and-thigh pieces were beautiful, and then they were delicious at lunchtime. Earlier, I had opened the can and warmed it up in the oven for a few minutes so that I could get the duck pieces out unbroken.

Meilleurs vœux pour 2017...

...and Happy New Year. It's another frosty morning here. Yesterday the temperature might have hit freezing, but I think it stayed slightly below. The landscape got whiter and whiter.

I was going to post some more photos of the frost, but I left the SD card the photos are on upstairs, plugged into the TV. Rather than stumble around in the dark and make noise to wake Callie and Walt up, I just went in the kitchen and snapped these photos of our New Year's Day good-luck meal.

It's black-eyed peas cooked with carrots, a leek, an onion, some chicken broth, and a big spoonful of duck fat. Where I come from (North Carolina in the U.S.), eating black-eyed peas on January 1 is considered to be a smart thing to do. As with most superstitions, there probably isn't much to it, but it can't hurt to eat black-eyes anyway — especially if you like them. And I do. They cooked overnight in the slow-cooker, and I think they look beautiful.

But to add a French touch to the feast, I'll be opening a can of confit de canard — duck legs slow-cooked in duck fat — to eat with the beans. Duck and beans are a classic, and what I'm making is a sort of Franco-American cassoulet. I hope you eat your black-eyed peas today, or whatever food you enjoy and believe will bring you good fortune. I wish you peace and prosperity, health and happiness in 2017, wherever you are, and I thank you for participating in my blog for another year (number 12).