What have we been up to?

What have we been up to? Not much actually.  This lack of general activity hasn't given me very many interesting things to write about but I will try to fill you in on some things. Spring was filled with awful allergies for me and required significant meds to function. France issued warnings that allergies this year were indeed really bad for everyone. I had the same trouble on first moving to Indonesia. My allergies were bad for the first 3 years. After that, things were much better. Hopefully, next Spring will be easier for me! 

Covid is still around and we're in another surge. There are no longer any restrictions regarding Covid, so we are living life as best we can with the pandemic still lingering. Recently there's been a gigantic leap upward in terms of cases due to the Ba.5 variant. This is not at all surprising.

Of significant note is the birth of our great niece born in late April. She is a cutey and we can't wait to meet her in person.  Our niece calls for video chats and she recently showed me the texture/playbook I made for her (our niece) when she was a baby. I was amazed that she and her mom had kept it all these years. And it looked brand new! It was full of crinkly things, lacy things, velcro, etc., and was fun to make around 30 years ago. We will be taking a trip to the US soon so I am sewing a few things for the baby. It's been a long time since I constructed baby clothing. Everything is so small and adorable! 

This area, and possibly all of France, had been inconvenienced for weeks by a lack of flour, sunflower oil and meat of all sorts in the grocery stores. Even things liked canned bean shelves were empty. Things seem to be better now. Whew!   Now there is no mustard at all, anywhere, apparently. We don't live on it, but once in a while you need mustard. I guess we will be living without it for a bit once our Dijon jar is empty. B comment - the bigger crisis? Our grocery store hasn't had Coke Zero 1.75L bottles for several weeks. Where is FEMA when we need them?

We've had a couple of heat waves stick around for what seemed like too many days and we are in another one now. We will likely see several days of 105, 106F.  At least we have really good French Badoit; natural fizzy mineral water to drink to stay hydrated. The tap water is safe but Badoit tastes better! They also make an extra fizzy version in a dark red bottle. I like that once in a while, but the staple is the green bottle. 

Since electricity is so expensive, we are trying to cope without using the AC. We air out between 4 and 6 AM if it's cooler outside than inside, then shut the metal shutters during the day to keep it cool. We also noticed that our downstairs neighbor must be running their AC 24/7 because the floor in one spot in our apartment (likely the main manifold for their heating/cooling system) is really cold. I decided to place our 2 fans in this area and blow the cold air near the floor into our apartment and it works pretty well if the temps are in the low to mid 90s. Once the temp is over 100, the system doesn't cool as well. But, hey, it's free!

We've also had a few bouts of rain and storms including some that produced tennis ball sized hail that damaged cars, windows, skylights, crops and vineyards. The vineyards got hit hard by a very late frost last spring and now this year hail damage! Lightening struck a herd of cows killing 15 of them.  The predictions are that this summer will be an extremely hot one and so far it seems the predictions are correct. Yikes!

One of the storms produced this beautiful rainbow.

We had some fun recently hunting for a bottle of beer, a bottle of wine and a cheese to use in recipes. We have no knowledge of beer or wine whatsoever. The beer was for a pork chop recipe. It worked out really well but is this a good beer? Who knows! Yum re the pork chops!

Same for a cheese for a recipe, though we do have some cheese knowledge. The recipe called for Muenster. There are French Muenster cheeses and it seems to me we have seen it but we weren't able to find it anywhere. We chose a port Salut cheese made from pasteurized milk. It seems I can't eat much dairy any longer. Living in the land of cheese, I would prefer to be free to try all sorts of cheeses, but, alas, I have to be very careful and definitely stick to pasteurized cheeses. Pasteurized cheeses are a small minority of French cheeses. Most are not pasteurized.  I also made a beef stew at one point and we had to select a red wine for that. Thank goodness for the Internet. We were able to narrow it down to wine type for the stew then took quite a while in the store itself to choose one. The wine rows ( yes, plural) are divided by type and by region. Because of this we had to check multiple spots in the store. The stew was really tasty so the one we selected worked.

We found some ice cream mixes one day at the grocery so we tried one. This brand offers cake mixes, too. You just mix up the ice cream mix and put it in the freezer. Worth trying once, but I doubt we'd buy it again.

Because we live in the city center there are always things going on in the vicinity of our apartment building. I've shared photos of the re-construction and construction going on across the street in previous posts. (They are turning an old hospital and polyclinique into a library and a nursing home and there will be some retail and they are adding a new apartment building.) 

I've mentioned that there is a lot of noise in the streets during many overnight time periods. We keep our outside metal shutters on the windows and balcony doors fully down at night to muffle the noise and also installed sound dampening curtains at the balcony door in our bedroom. Fortunately these two things help a lot but on some nights the noise is still really loud. 

The day after one noisy night we saw that huge graffiti initials had been added to the polyclinique building right across the street. A large skylight was left open also, so we assume that was the access onto the roof. I can't imagine climbing around on the steeply angled roof of ceramic tileson a 4/5 story building to accomplish this. I can see how they got access to the site itself as that doesn't look too difficult, but I don't know how they got into the building itself. It may not possible to read the labels by the three black arrows, but the left and right arrows point to the graffiti locations and the center arrow points to the open skylight.

Closeups of the two sections of graffiti.

That skylight remained wide open for about a month- during several heavy rainstorms. As the weeks passed, I wondered why no one working over there closed the skylight. Finally, after weeks of a large crew working inside the polyclinique, someone finally shut the skylight. Maybe they finally noticed water after some heavy rains? We've also noticed, though, that the work crew began leaving windows and balcony doors wide open- even during the storms. We still wonder why they did this.

We continue to watch the  polyclinique building across the street since have such a great view. The crew is a bunch of early birds in terms of working. They start arriving at 6 AM! We see them every morning as we are airing out the apartment.

Someone asked me how many people we encounter when we take our city walks. We take our weekend walks very early in the morning and encounter very few people.

If we walk later, we encounter lots and lots of people walking and sitting in the outdoor cafes which are situated on the sidewalks. I don't feel comfortable taking photos of people just in front of us so I wait until there are fewer people and they are further away. Still, these photos show how crowded the streets are pretty much all the time.

Especially this street near the cathedral!

You are always in a crowd!

B comment on the above photos - it is why we wear masks when we walk! 

There are a several restaurant home delivery companies here. The majority of the deliverers use motorcycles. Where the motorcycles parked in clusters waiting to be summoned to deliver an order  became an issue. They would park anywhere they liked within Place du Jaude (the area in the above photo). The town decided the drivers could only park in one tiny spot at one end of Place du Jaude. They marked out the spot with white lines and put up a sign "park here". 

This is a very small area. I have no idea how it is working out. Some delivery guys ride bicycles and a few use the electric scooter devices. 

In French, the electric scooters are called  trottinettes. They are becoming more and more prevalent even here and in Paris, where there are now rules about where they can be used and at what speeds. I saw a "discussion" in the street here between a vehicle driver and an electric scooter "driver." I don't know who was at fault but there was as lot of yelling about whatever had happened. We were traveling in Auckland and the city had created special lanes for the scooters because they are so dangerous. Here, they fly past you and zigzag even on the sidewalks. I don't believe anyone's been killed, but it wouldn't surprise me if there have been injuries caused by the scooters.

Parking for vehicles remains a huge issue here. There simply isn't enough parking. For this reason, we had to find an apartment with parking space included.  The idea of driving 'round and 'round hunting for a parking space and paying for parking all of the time just wouldn't work for us. You may remember that we pull into an elevator and go down one level to park. There are 3 subterranean parking levels for our building. But, often, folks who cannot locate a parking space park in front of our garage elevator door. We've been prevented to enter by an illegally parked car and the other day, someone was prevented from exiting our garage by an illegally parked car. I wondered what all the car honking was about. Then I saw the reason. Finally, the driver of the illegally parked car returned. They always seem to claim ignorance, despite the sign that says no parking.

One day recently there was an accident on this corner and a police car was parked for quite a while in front of our garage elevator door while dealing with the accident. I'm sure he would have moved if necessary. He was right with the car.

We mentioned when we moved into this apartment building an exterior elevator truck lifted our stuff up to our 6th floor apartment balcony and brought our things in through the balcony doors. One day recently a resident of the apartment building across the street moved out and the same system was used. I was able to get good photos of how this works. It still fascinates me. This truck states on the side that it can be used to access a 16th floor apartment. Wow!

The stuff rides up and down on a simple platform. They didn't tie anything down for the ride down, however. You could see it bouncing as the platform moved.

Oddly, they do not put up pylons or caution signage indicating a possible danger to pedestrians below. People walked right under this rig.

So, the stuff is lowered on the platform. Then workers had to climb down off the elevator truck with the stuff in hand, then climb over a fence in order to move the items into the holding truck. It didn't look that difficult with items such as lamps, but the large sofa was a different story. Once they got to the heavy appliances, they carried things around in front of the truck rather than climbing over the fence. Smart!

The new apartment building being constructed across the street continues to move along. 

From April

From May

From June

To us, though, it seems like it has slowed down somewhat. Maybe the rain? Maybe the heat?  Is it more difficult to build the higher you get off the ground?

Last summer, the city installed a nice raised bed garden in Place du Jaude. They did it again this year. We took these photos shortly after installation.

In just a few short weeks, it has grown into a lush area of greenery. It's really nice to stroll through here on our weekend morning walks. They must do everything right for most of the area is growing quite quickly.

Here is a shot of the church at Place du Jaude which, until recently, was covered heavily in scaffolding. They are nearly finished with the renovations so the scaffolding is coming down bit by bit. A lot of scaffolding remains on the left portion but the very top now glistens in a silver finish. Soon even the crane will be gone.

There is an indoor "farmer's market" of sorts here. We posted photos of it long ago. It used to be called Marché Saint-Pierre. They have updated their exterior and have changed the name to Halle Gourmande-Saint-Pierre. Not much as changed indoors except maybe more room for seating. Also, an onsite bakery has renovated and is no longer baking their breads, etc. on site. Their bakery is just around the corner and they walk the goodies over. 

And, lastly, here's an apple that was only available for 1 week in the grocery then it was gone. Nice apple- pomme chanteclerc. It's a cross between the American golden delicious and the traditional French Reinette Clochard. I suspect it was the last of the winter storage of this apple finally getting to market. I read that this  apple is perfect for creating an apple tart.