Another Out & About

The lockdown continues.

The highlight of each day has been a daily walk and possibly a walk to the grocery store if needed. Here is B just back from a solo, early morning walk to the grocery. With every trip out of the apartment, we carry our signed certificates indicating why we are out in the world and we wear masks. A recent update to the online, fillable certificate remembers your personal information so you just have to change the time and check the reason why you are out box and download the form to your phone. We still carry our paper forms as well.

On recent food runs we picked up a couple of French cheeses: 

Tomme de pyrénées which is a rustic cheese, very mild. We haven't been able to label it as similar to something else, but it is good.

We also picked up a small piece of Brie. Yummm!

B picked up an interesting cake mix on an early run before we managed to pick up some flour, sugar, etc. to allow us to bake anything. I was trying to determine which container I would try to bake it in because of the limited options supplied in our temporary apartment. I opened the box. It contained it's own baking pan. Surprise!

It's a pretty good tasting chocolate cake.

We tried yet another French apple: This is something called a Reinette Grise. It's an old French cultivar of a domesticated Grise apple-- a type of "golden" apple that keeps it's shape especially in an apple strudel.  To me this looks much like an Asian pear. Taste was OK.

We had a service call on the combo washer/dryer and it isn't heating for the dryer because a part is bad-- that means another week without a dryer while the technician gets a new part.

We had a big day this week. We spent a couple of hours doing virtual tours of 3 possible apartments and 1 possible house with a realty agent. One of the apartments is a possibility. The house hasn't been ruled completely out yet but it is further out of town and is being completely redone inside so who knows how that will turn out.  After that exciting virtual house hunt, we walked to the bank to open our French bank accounts. It was sort of a cold, drizzly day but I did take this photo. There is an interesting bronze(?) looking statue in the middle of the shot which looked interesting. We hurried back home and back into lockdown due to impending heavier rain.

Printer Issues

We have placed an order for a printer which will make it easier to accomplish things here. For those who don't know, the chips on ink cartridges for inkjet printers are regional. We do have a US printer in our shipment that will come once we find a place to live. However, we cannot purchase cartridges locally for that printer. We did the same thing in Indonesia-- we bought a printer for which we could locally source printer cartridges. The US purchased printer, however, has a document sheet feeder which can send documents to the computer so we hang onto and sometimes use that as well. It just can't print once we use up the cartridges we brought with us. I then sold our Indonesia regional printer to a friend prior to leaving the country. For a day to day printer, we really need to be able to locally source cartridges. The printer and the ream of paper arrived before I published this post! Yay!

Coffee Maker Issues

We purchased a pod coffee maker in Indonesia. We weren't 100% sure we could purchase pods for it in France. It turns out, yes we can! They carry them in the small neighborhood grocery we can walk to from our temporary apartment. Once our shipment arrives, yay!

I should note, though, that we are making some excellent cups of coffee using ground French coffees from the market. I miss my milk foamer, though!