The River Walk (2)

Jill and Peter left yesterday at noontime by train, going back to Paris for one night and then to London for a week-long stay there. They're visit was very relaxed. Peter has been here many times over the years, the last time in 2019. Jill was last here in 2017, when we had just brought Tasha home. We almost never got to know them, because we met them at the suggestion of a French friend only a month before we sold our house in San Francisco and then moved to Saint-Aignan. Now they live just steps from where we lived in SF from 1987 until 1991.

    
I enjoyed walks with Jill and Tasha every afternoon while they were here. The river walk was the best.
I wonder if the man fishing on the north bank was catching anything.

The old lock keeper's house on the north bank of the Cher is less than a mile north of our house.

    
The weather was gorgeous while P. and J. were here. It wasn't too hot. Mornings were refreshingly cool. The sun
shone brightly every day, with the exception of last Thursday morning, when we got some much needed rain.

The River Walk (1)

    
Yesterday afternoon, Jill and I took Tasha on a walk along the river (le Cher). We ended up walking 2.5 miles in all, from
a spot near our house to the center of our village and back, along a path on the left bank, with perfect weather.

This was the first time in many months that Tasha had been able to walk off-leash. There were no cars, and we saw
no people or animals, so the dog wasn't tempted to run and jump. She just trotted along close to us.

     Above on the left is an area where fields go right down to river's edge.
On the right is a view of the river looking north toward the right bank.

House Guests and Feasting

The internet connection came back on yesterday morning at about 7:00. There were several brief outages over the course of the morning, but by noon the situation stabilized and we've found everything working again this morning.

Our house guests, Peter and Jill, have been here since Wednesday afternoon. They are the first friends to sleep here since 2019. We haven't really been out touring, unless you include walks with Natasha out in the vineyard. Instead, we've gone shopping a few times and we've spent the days cooking, eating, and catching up, with a lot of reminiscing. On Thursday I made a big batch of couscous with a lot of vegetables, some guinea hen leg-and-thigh sections, and braised chunks of leg of lamb meat, along with merguez sausages (made with lamb, beef, and spices). We ate more of it on Saturday.

On Friday, we bought blood sausages (boudins noirs), rillettes (potted pork), and rillons (braised cubes of pork belly), a pan gratin dauphinois (scalloped potatoes with cream and cheese), some céleri rémoulade (grated celery root in a mayonnaise/mustard/cream dressing), some salade de betteraves (cooked cubes of red beet and chopped shallot dressed in vinaigrette). All that came from a local charcuterie/boucherie (a delicatessen). Today will be P and J's last full day here, and the feast will continue.

     Here are a few remaining Arc de Triomphe photos I wanted to post.

    

We're baaaack... for the moment

I can't tell you why the internet connection has suddenly started working. I've been experimenting with different settings in the router, but it's so complicated I couldn't tell you what I might have changed that re-established the connection. We'll just keep working with it until it fails again. I'm supposed to get a call from a technician on the the ISP's staff Monday morning.

Meanwhile, here are some photos of the last of the four "monumental" hauts-reliefs on the exterior walls of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It's commonly known as La Marseillaise, and is widely considered to be the most spectacular and interesting of all the sculpture on the Arc. The sculptor was François Rude (1784-1855).