Cows Cows Cows Cows

Cows in Beaumont, cows at their Sunday best, all clean and glossy. Yesterday was the day of the fête celebrating the 50th year of the local Comise Agricole. Cows, of course, were part of all this - as were sheep, chickens, ducks, geese (we skipped the opportunity to watch the gavage, the force feeding of geese that forms a basis of the production of foie gras). The cows here, at least the ones on display, were all Holsteins. Milk is their raison d'etre. Here's some of the ladies, one of whom has got herself on the wrong side of the rope enclosure:

Across the path from these, was this lovely little 'Dalmatian' calf. A Dalmatian Reincarnation?

Farther along, there was a grand show - a cow pedicure. We saw this cow being led - or more precisely, being pulled and pushed and tail-twisted - to the pedicure salon, a large steel set of livestock stocks, into which she was deposited with a lot more pushing and pulling. Once in, the apparatus grasps one leg, lifts it and presents it to the pedicurist, first for a trim:

and then for a finishing buff and polish with a disc sander:

Next to the pedicurist's truck were a group of calves - waiting their turn?

Meanwhile in the main square in the town, there was the usual market, with food, clothing, just about everything, even a hurdy gurdy player.

Isn't she something!

But life is more than just having fun at the local fetes, eh? Yesterday afternoon our friend and brilliant handyman (and horse vet, but that's a whole other story) Partick, came to start installing a counter top over our kitchen cabinets. Here's the result of yesterday afternoon's work:

Previously, this cabinet was topped with random bits of wood, wobbling around. Now it has a real counter top! Today, Patrick is tackling the opposite side of the kitchen, a much trickier problem. Here's the state of things there:

It seems that our state of life now is that we bumble around, trying to bring order out of chaos and then all of that precarious order tumbles into chaos once again. It always comes out better in the end, but it does seem an unrelenting process. Entropy is entirely too strong a force in our world!

This endeavor also uncovered some dodgy bits in the floor :

To fix it properly, everything along that wall would have to be removed, including the newly installed sink, but Patrick has come up with a solution involving a slim piece of metal laid onto the existing floor, spanning the dodgy area and preventing the washing machine from plummeting into the cellar one fine day.

I am thrilled with all this progress, in fact, tiring though it may be rearranging everything in the house on a daily basis, or so it seems. Once these kitchen counter tops are completed - Oh, I forgot to mention, the reason this can all now happen is that we finally found a stove top to fit the area this stovetop will sit on top of an Ikea cabinet (of course) with lots of drawers. And yesterday's work also included a lazy susan being installed into the corner cabinet. What this means is that we now have storage room for those things like pots and pans. Wheee! We can unpack the rest of the kitchen boxes, which means we can then unpack the rest of the book boxes behind those boxes. Someday, in the future, in a galaxy far, far away, we may just be able to live our normal lives, without the looming piles of unpacked boxes.

A day in Sarlat with friends from the US

Our friends Pete and Jan are visiting with us for a few days. We'll play tourist here until Saturday and then we'll head to Paris for a long weekend. Yesterday we went to the town of Sarlat, an old medieval town restored in the 60s, the first in a series of restorations initiated by then minister of culture André Malraux back in the 60s. Sarlat is like a storybook town come to life - old winding streets, buildings of honey-colored stone, now with restaurants, fancy shops, everything a tourist could want, but also everything an artist could want. Here's an example of the varied architecture you'll see in this very special town:

Here's Jan and Pete

When we left Sarlat, we went home by way of the town of Tremolat, a very small town with - surprise surprise - lovely houses. Could anything be prettier than this cottage?

I love going to the supermarket

Our trip to the nearest supermarket covers 5.3 kilometers of back roads through farmland. It's a trip that's just a little bit different every day. Yesterday's entry showed the sunflower fields. Today there's a new sculpture that has appeared in a hayfield. I love it - the tractor makes the hay and then the hay makes a tractor. As I stopped to take a photo of this, an old farmer came walking down his driveway, offered his hand and said he saw by our number plate that we weren't from here and wondered if we needed directions. I told him No, we had just moved to here but hadn't yet changed our car registration. We chatted for a while and it turns out he knew the people who used to own our house. It's a very small world here. And a friendly one.

Sunflowers!

July is sunflower season and we're in the midst of both the month and the fields of flowers. Here's a photo taken on our way back from the supermarket today. This scene will soon be in a painting, I think. There's a small area at the side of the road where I can park the car and a few meters farther along is a spot with this view. What could be better? The sunflowers are not as spectacular as they could be this year though; they really need rain. We had a very rainy, cold unpleasant spring but once summer started, exactly to the day, the weather turned sunny and hot. There has been no appreciable rain since June 21, unless we count a 5 minute shower a couple of weeks ago.

OK, back home. I thought I'd give you a tour of our garden. Here, both in English and in French, the word 'garden' means what we call a yard in America. As you'll see most of this garden isn't what we'd think of as a garden, since it's mostly lawn and trees.

Here's the steps going down into the garden. There's an arbor arching over the steps and it's covered with trumpet vine, a very popular ornamental plant here in France. John trimmed this vine this morning, making it easier to walk under the arbor. Before he trimmed it, even I had to duck down to walk under it.

This is the view from the bottom of the steps, the pigeonnier with another huge old trumpet vine arching over its facade. A lovely thing, but in need of much discipline! It's too late to give it a good pruning now, but it will get a severe chopping back in time. Right now, the trumpet vines are taking over the yard, completely covering one of the apple trees, for instance. Once the leaves fall, we'll have to have someone in to hack it back.

To one side of the pigeonnier, we've installed a clothesline, here in use. It's been easy washing clothes these past few weeks with all the sunny weather. The area to the left holds our picnic table and chairs. Beyond the clothesline is our orchard, with apple trees, plum trees and cherry trees. There are also two peach trees, one just to the right of the clothesline, and another in front of the house, both of which we were assured were almond trees. But the fact that the land under them is littered with old peach pits leads me to think they are indeed peach trees.

Beyond the orchard is what was, and will be again next year, a vegetable garden. By the time we had the garden cleared this year it was too late to plant much of anything. Yes, I could plant some things now, but first I'd need to have the space roto tilled, since it was weeds for the past 5 years. In this clay soil, now turned to marble with the drought, breaking ground with a spading fork is just not an option. Anyway, here's the garden, with a line of roses defining one side. At the rear of the garden are large trees and bushes, with the stream beyond. When Cedric was interested in clearing the yard - an interest that faded rather quickly - he was also interested in finding little steps that lead to the small stream, La Bournegue, that forms the rear border of our property. Here's one set of stone steps he dug out. He says there's at least one more set of steps along the stream and possibly more.

the other side of the vegetable garden is a hedge of Rose of Sharon bushes.

Beyond this hedge is what I call the forest. This is a deliciously cool spot on a hot day. In the distance you can see the small greenhouse and the garage. To the right of the trees in this photo, there's a lovely stone-edged raised bed, empty now, that will be fun to play with in the future.

There's two large walnut trees in the forest, this one giving the largest walnuts I've ever seen, to judge from the shells littering the ground under it - and hidden in the cellar by various wild creatures living there for the past few years.

And here's the driveway, with it's border of the high laurel hedge and large and heavy wooden gate opening onto the street.

From the street, you can see the remaining part of out domain, a small field en friche as they say in French, meaning gone wild, not used or tended to. Maybe in time it will be part of a horse paddock.

But next to it is a very much larger field with - sunflowers!

And so ends our tour of our little piece of French countryside. Hope you enjoyed seeing it.

Did we get lost?

Note the town name on that sign! I think we have indeed been on another planet for the past two or three weeks. Perhaps we took a wrong turn somewhere? This is a sign we came across when taking a back road to the art show venue one day when it was my turn to be on duty.

The show itself was held over for an extra week and we had good crowds throughout the whole time, even though the posters all over the place showed the earlier end date. All in all, this is a very good venue for a show!

What's really been taking up our time, though, has been our septic system. Shortly before a quick trip back to the Ste. Colombe house to pick up some more things left behind, we found ourselves with a non-working toilet. Good thing we were leaving for the weekend! We called a septic-tank emptying company and they agreed to show up on the Monday and empty it. Which they did. But this did not solve the problem. The guys then made a hole (this is the most euphemistic way I can describe what they did) in the pipe going from the bathroom to the tank and used a RotoRooter sort of thing, which improved the situation but did not completely cure it, and left a very picturesque pipe, wrapped in plastic bags. The next day, our usual plumber came by and replaced this piece of pipe with another one without holes. All was well for about 3 days, and then everything backed up again. In the night, I thought to myself, Hey, it's just a piece of pipe that is causing the problem, one piece of pipe. Why can't that bit of pipe, only about 10 feet long, just be replaced?

So next morning, I called our plumber. Sure, said he, of course it could be replaced. But not by him. He only did things inside the house. We then called the people who will ultimately be doing the new septic system. Too busy, couldn't get to such a thing for weeks. Meanwhile, John had a look online and found a 24/7 emergency plumber. (There's a lot of benefits to living somewhere with a large English population; they're used to these sorts of services) They came by the next day, had a look at things and after much pondering about how to get a backhoe through the very narrow quarters leading to the septic tank, the digger operator came up with an easy solution: run the pipe above ground, no digging required. Well of course! It's to be temporary anyway, so why not just take this easy fix. We agreed, and the probably illegal job was done the following day. It's been working now for a week! We're back in the civilized world!!!!

Meanwhile, we've been unpacking boxes, moving furniture, moving furniture again, and again and again. We've also made trips to Ikea, built kitchen cabinets, put them in place, gone shopping for one thing after another. But we do take breaks now and then. We had to do some banking in the town of Lalinde and took in the weekly market as well. Here's a paella stand

and another that sells every sort of handbag you could want.

We also recently treated ourselves to lunch in the bastide town of Monpazier. When caught up in the turmoil of trying to get this house in order, it's easy to forget what an incredibly beautiful part of the world we live in. Here's some photos of a couple of the back streets we walked down in Monpazier.

Monpazier has handbag sellers as well.

Art Opening at St. Avit Sénieur

It's been such a busy week! Some time before we moved to here, I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in an art show at the gorgeous little village of St. Avit Sénieur, a town on the St. Jacques de Compostella pilgrimage trail. The setting could not be lovelier. Here's a photo of the courtyard in front of the presbytere, where the show is hung. It was a real challenge to get together the paintings to hang and to find all the little things we need for a show as well. I had ordered new business cards and they showed up in plenty of time. Plenty of time to disappear for a while, since one of the enduring problems with a new house is that you no longer know where you put things. But they were rediscovered in time for the opening, which occured this past Friday. It was a great success, in that crowds of people showed up. Here's some photos of the crowd - well, since I was taking them, they are the parts of the crowd showing other artists. But, trust me, there were people other that artists and their friends there! The organizer of the show, Jacqui Clark, mentioned that people come to this show because over the years that it has been running, it has gained a reputation for having art worth seeing. (I am doubly pleased to have been invited to participate.) The featured artist at the show is a well known New York Abstract Expressionist, John Griefen, who has recently moved to St. Avit.

I seem to have specialised in the backs of artist's heads! From left to right, Gillian (red hair), John Griefen (grey hair), Jane, then (facing you) the mayor of St. Avit, and Jacqui.

As usual at this sort of thing, Jacqui gave a speech about the show, and then the mayor did the same, mentioning that there were plans in the works for continuing the renovation of the space, providing us with more in the way of electrics in the near future. All in all a very good evening. But - even better - Jacqui called me today to say that I had sold two paintings on Sunday. Wheee!

Yesterday, in our travels back and forth, we took a little road that leads to one of the noted 'must-see' items in Nojals, a dolmen several thousand years old. It's much larger than I thought. You could walk around in it. Interesting to ponder how they makers managed to pose that upper rock on the others. No cranes...

We're finally connected to the internet again!!!

At last! We are once more connected to the outside world! It's been a very strange three weeks. We had no internet, no land line phone, and no cell phones that worked, since it seems our house is in a dead spot for the SFR cell phone coverage. The internet service was supposed to be working as of March 24th! After several frustrating and useless phone calls, we gave up. Even when our (French) estate agent called and argued with them nothing happened. So we decided to forget it and go with another provider, Orange, after first having France telecom give us a phone line. That happened last Friday and then we were just to wait until the internet light on the router came on. It did! On Monday! We couldn't do much with it on Monday since we had the house and garden full of workers. But before describing that, let me tell you why we needed a house full of workers.

Ahhhh, where to begin. Let's begin with the actual move. The move from hell. It all started in Espéraza at 7 in the morning. Or at least it did for us. The mover had said to meet him at the house at 7AM, when they would start loading the truck. We had gone to the mairie the previous week to ask for that section of road to be cordoned off so that the truck could park - standard practice in French towns, where streets are narrow. But no such luck. When we got there the parking places were filled with cars, leaving no place for the truck to park. But, hey, the truck and the mover were nowhere to be seen anyway. But in the course of the next hour or so they arrived, one car moved out of the way and there was just enough room to squeeze the truck into a spot where it could be filled. Here's a photo of John officiating.

After loading everything from Esperaza, we continued on to the house in Ste. Colombe. The first problem there was that the truck was too large to fit around the corner of the small street that runs in front of the house, and had to park next to the terrace, making loading a bit more difficult. By noon or so, our car was filled with last minute stuff, but the moving truck was far from full. Jean and Jim, friends from Fougax, had also filled their car with loose odds and ends stuff and had left some time before. We then took off for the trip to Nojals, leaving the movers to fit whatever they could into the truck. We arrived at Nojals around 4 in the afternoon, meeting Jim and Jean, who had to get back home. So we unpacked our car and waited. And waited. And then waited some more. The movers arrived at 11PM. By this time, they were tired and had no interest whatsoever in putting furniture in the proper rooms, or even putting boxes in the proper rooms. By the time they left, at 3AM, we had one room full of boxes and another full of furniture, floor to ceiling, literally. Here's photos of the sea of boxes and the mountain of furniture.

The boxes, as seen from the stairway to the tower room. Note that the pile of boxes almost reaches the ceiling lamp.

The furniture, as seen from the kitchen.

We've slowly moved bits of furniture and unpacked more than a few boxes. But it's not easy! For a start, most of the boxes are full of books, and most of the bookcases are at the rear of that hill of furniture. And the hill of furniture occupies the room where all the bookcases will go! Some things are more urgent than others. Not unusual, unfortunately, to find a box marked 'fragile' to be under a stack of book boxes! And through it all we keep remembering that the reason we hired movers instead of just renting a large truck was so that we would not have to be moving heavy furniture and boxes full of books. Arrgghhhh. Now we get to move many of these things not once but several times, stacks of boxes and furniture being disorganized things by nature. But we reward ourselves from time to time with - lunch!

Here's my salad from one lunch at the brasserie in Beaumont.

And here's the plat , a local specialty called anchaud, which is pork confit, served cold.

PHOTOS

Here's a 'before' photo of the kitchen. That wallpaper will be disappearing. The horrible wallpaper on the door will be going as well. That same wallpaper covers the walls in the hallway, where it's already falling off the walls - as if it agreed with its intended fate. The stuff on the door will be harder to get rid of, it's really stuck on there. That icky light-brown faux-wood trim painted around the door panels will be on my list of things to be got rid of as well. The door itself is a lovely solid wood paneled door. As for the doors on the cabinet to the rear of the door, well, I may just take them off completely. I'm not sure what's under that contact-paper. But the drawers of course will be staying, so I hope it's not too awful.

I'm not sure what color to paint the walls. The woodwork will be white, and perhaps those cabinet doors and drawers as well, or, if the doors get junked, maybe a bright color inside the cabinet. The room faces south, so there's lots of light all day.

IT'S OURS!

SOLD!!!!

It's ours! 10:19 this morning, John's mobil phone rings, as we are driving through Chalabre center, having been to the box factory there and bought 20 cartons. It's Mikaël, our estate agent. 'Are you sitting down', he asks. He continues, telling us we own the house, the money was sent to the notaire yesterday afternoon, the notaire signed everything, and called Mikaël this morning. WOOHOO!!!!! In other news, he also has the plans for the new septic system, dropped off yesterday. We can pick them up when we pick up the house keys.

I ALMOST CAN'T BELIEVE IT!

IT MUST BE TRUE AFTER ALL

Yeah, must be true after all. Wednesday, under the guidance of the banker, we signed many possibly fraudulent statements concerning when we received this loan offer, and he sent them off to the Montpelier office by interoffice courrier. Today, Friday, a huge chunk of money was deducted from our bank account. (Wait, I thought they were giving us money?) This was in the amount of the fees and who knows what for said loan, and the siphoning-off agency was the bank. So any day now, we'll probably own the house. Funny, we have lots of bills that are taken out of our bank account automatically, which is quite the standard thing in France. But all the other takers let you know how much and when way ahead of time. EDF (the electric company) sends us a notice at least two weeks ahead of the scheduled time telling us the exact amount and date. You'd think a bank would do the same.

On second thought, I guess I don't expect anything nearly so rational from them

Anyway, now I can get my life back. Funny how something like this can take over your consciousness, making you forget those other zillion things you should be doing. Like answering email. Now I can get to that! If anyone remember who I am by this time.

COULD IT BE TRUE???

IT'S HERE! IT'S HERE! WE GOT THE OFFER TODAY! Just as I was sitting here at my computer, figuring out how to finagle an IRA withdrawal, and would we get the loan within the 60-day reinvestment period, thus not incurring taxes? And I heard the mail delivery lady at the door, and Le voila! What she was stuffing into the post box was a huge envelope. Not all that exciting at first, since most of our forwarded mail has been ganged into large envelopes. But I opened it and saw the magic name Caisse d'Epargne de Languedoc Roussillon. I immediately called the bank and made an appointment for 3 this afternoon. HOORRAYY!!!!

And here's what's strange - of course there had to be something strange. Remember how yesterday I was informed that these offers are always sent by registered mail? Indeed an online website I saw this morning says that by law these have to be sent by registered mail. This was not. And this bit of strangeness is a sort of companion piece to the piece of incorrect information I got from the woman in Paris yesterday, who said that registered mail is never forwarded. It is, at least according to the La Poste website and according to all the various people in the two post offices we went to this morning. So, people in Paris don't know everything.

Now we just have to find out what date we can sign the offer, because it's not at all clear to me which date on the various papers and envelopes will mark the start of the 10-day 'cooling off' period. And then we'll also want to know exactly when the money will be transferred to the notaire, since that will mark when we actually come to own the house.

I then called our estate agent, the ever patient Mikaël, who himself was getting a bit rattled after he spoke to the banker earlier this morning. He was thrilled! He said I should have told him to sit down first, because he nearly fell over.

No wonder the Parisians think of everyone else as hicks

I have been doing research into the facts of how things work with French loans. A friend suggested I talk to her bank in Paris, which has an international branch - which means I got to speak to someone in English to ask these somewhat complex questions. Anyway, the situation right now with Caisse d'Epargne, our bank in Esperaza, is that the Montpelier office has once more sent the loan offer letter to our old address in Esperaza. Our banker there (a friend has suggested changing the 'b' to a 'w') told us that all we now had to do is to wait for it to be forwarded to us through the post. Well, I asked this woman in Paris if this sort of letter would in fact be forwarded. No, she said, Never. They are sent by registered mail, which is never forwarded. She also said that La Poste holds unclaimed registered mail for 10 days before returning it to the sender. So we are going to go to La Poste in Esperaza first thing tomorrow morning, in hope that they still have this maudit letter!

As an aside, I suspect that this means that yet another bit of information from the wanker is incorrect. By law, when you receive such an offer, you have to wait 10 days to sign it - this is a consumer protection measure. So I had mentioned to him a few sessions back that no matter when we received this offer, we would still have to add 10 days onto the already long delay. Oh No, he said, the 10 days starts with the date the letter is post marked when it leaves the sender. Well, I now doubt it. I strongly suspect that the 10 days starts on the the day you sign the registered post form accepting the letter. We'll see. I hope.

I can't believe it. How can anyone be this stupid?

OK, you've probably guessed that I'm talking about the banker. But first, an interlude with the appliance repairman.

This is a photo of our kitchen. Note that charming addition to the sink - a garden hose. Don't you have one in your kitchen? In ours, the receiving end of the hose is connected to the dishwasher connection under the sink, and the delivering end is in the sink. Why? Because of the dishwasher that is no longer there. The dishwasher that the repairman first showed up to fix on March 5th. Yes, you saw the month right; that's March, 5 weeks ago today, I think. The latest installment on that story was that he was here again on Tuesday, and decided that he had to take the dishwasher back to the shop. He failed to notice that the tap that the dishwasher was connected to wouldn't turn off properly and thus dripped water into the cabinet under the sink. (The fault of some inept plumber? How could that be?) Anyway, the repairman said he would return the dishwasher either late that same day or on Thursday. What appeared late in the day was not the repairman, but the puddle of water in front of the sink. Needless to say, he also didn't show up yesterday, Thursday, either. But we had such fun staying home all day waiting for him. We didn't have to go shopping, we didn't have to go for a walk on a wonderful spring day, we got to sit around looking at moving boxes. So today we just decided to forget about him. We went to Espéraza, to see the banker! What fun!

When we bearded the banker in his den, who said he had not received the dossier and he could do nothing, accompanying this with that wonderful Gallic shrug. Since I was in no mood to just leave, I kept telling him what a horrible situation this was to be in, and he finally decided to call the Montpelier office, to ask why if they had sent him the dossier on Monday he had not yet received it. They of course could not take any time to talk to him and said they would call them back. We sat in his office for about 10 minutes, and then decided we could do other errands while we were in town, and he promised to call us as soon as he heard from them.

So off we went, to find the policeman in Espéraza, the person to whom our renewed Cartes de Sejour (residency permits) will be sent. We are unable to make an appointment with him, since he simply doesn't do that. You just have to wander past his office from time to time and see if he happens to be there, or wander around the streets until you run into him. This used to be easier when we lived a block away. Anyway, these permits are already three months late, but No, he had not yet received them. There is a boring regularity to the inefficiency of absolutely everything that happens in France.

OK, so we left the policeman's office, ready to head home. My phone rings! It's the banker! The Montpelier office called him back and - are you ready for this? - they had once more sent the dossier to our old address in Espéraza! They sent it again to the house we no longer live in! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! HOW STUPID CAN THEY BE!!!!! I could barely keep from standing there on the sidewalk screaming at this guy over the phone. He tells me that the rule is that they have to send it to the address on the loan application. WHY DIDN'T HE ALREADY KNOW THIS! HE'S THE BANK MANAGER FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! THIS MAN IS A MORON!

So, we trundle off home, there to find the dishwasher sitting on the terrace. By this time, I am screaming.

I'm losing the will to live.