el Loco & el Lobo

Knitting : day 2

2012-01-22T22:00:00.000+01:00

My progress has been at the same rate as yesterday and I’ve finished the back panel. Four balls of yarn took me to within a half dozen rows of the top.

You can see how the self-striping yarn has revealed itself in five different colour bands that alternate with the base colour. Again because I’m knitting double, I’m holding a strand of base yarn and a strand of self-striping yarn together.

Tote that tree! Lift that trunk!

2012-01-22T14:18:00.000+01:00

Lest anyone think I’m just sitting around throwing stitches over knitting needles, there’s also heavy labouring to be done outdoors.

Sometime in December a couple of trees fell into the pond, taking some saplings with them which have bent into the water under the weight of the heavier trunks.

Inspection of the bases showed that both had been well chewed by insects and were now only supported by ivy stems and the interlocking of higher branches with neighbouring trees. Whether it was wind, water or coypu that ultimately dislodged them I don’t know, but it was only a matter of time before they rotated like a ball joint and toppled to the water.

Whatever roots are remaining are still in the ground to bind the soil, but the weight of the trunk bases is providing some downward pressure on the banks.

I’ve had a couple of goes at pulling the topmost tree out of the water from the opposing bank –both alone and with Gustav - but didn’t get very far till the third attempt. At this point I’d been aided by rainfall filling the pond and giving some more flotation. I could have tied a rope to it and pulled it out with my car weeks ago, but part of the point of the exercise is the exercise itself.

Last week I pulled it about 80% clear of the water (as shown above), but was defeated by a combination of the heavier weight of the tree base and some branch stubs digging into the ground.

With the top tree out of the water, the next one proved to be much easier and it joined the other on dry land. The only tentative plan I have for them is to strip away the branches and drag them down to the other end of the pond to use as reinforcement for the banks that the coypu have hollowed out.

With these two trees out of the way, the western end of the pond is now clear of most of the debris that has fallen or been thrown into it. There are a few more zombie trees that will fall in sooner or later which can be dealt with as that happens. I’ve also cleaned out most of the dead branches interwoven with long thorny bramble branches that were forming a canopy across the centre of the pond, some of which was blocking my view southwards to the Pyrenees.

Munson went into the water a few times today, and for the first time ever came out cleaner than when he went in!

In the front of the last picture here you can see part of an old metal door that I’ve left in the water. It was lying further up on the pond and I dragged it back here to give me something to stand on when I was cleaning other muck out. I’m going to leave it there for now to improve access to the water, if only for the dogs who would otherwise get quite muddy.

There’s a few more smaller clearing and reinforcement tasks to be done over the next few weeks before Spring growth begins.

Knitting: day 1

2012-01-21T22:32:00.000+01:00

I picked up the knitting needles today to begin my first project of the millennium. I’ll provide details of the pattern I’m working to when I’m finished; for now you can see it evolve over the coming weeks.

I got much more done than expected. This is the back panel at the end of the first two balls of yarn. The yarn is held doubled which means I’m knitting two strands as if they were one. I’ve reached the end of one ball slightly ahead of the other because I cast on with a single thread. I’ve just switched to a self-striping yarn, which will become more apparent in my next report.

I realised belatedly that I forgot to incorporate some knit-in elastic in the waist band to compensate against it sagging in later life.

Munson in the edit suite

2012-01-20T18:11:00.000+01:00

I captured some video of Munson & Legend. Munson is quite fascinated by the whole thing. He talks his own commentary over the top of it. I’m intrigued by how much he can follow on screen. Bondi paid no attention to televisual images but Munson will have his attention caught by sights or sounds on the screen, and will watch what’s going on for minutes at a time.

Legend and the overfriend

2012-01-20T17:24:00.000+01:00

I haven’t given a size update on young Legend since September, when he was about chin-height to Munson. At nine months he’s grown just a wee bit more – he’s slightly taller than Munson, and gangly as all get out. Being much your out-in-the-fields hanging-out-with-the-livestock or watching the driveway for visitors sort of dog he’s not the relentless seeker of human company that Munson is. One of the pictures below shows the typical contrast – Munson looks you in the eye, inviting interaction, whereas Legend tends to look away, dropping his head to avoid a direct gaze.

But they do play so well together.

Munson still his little-stick schtick for luring playmates; it works for tiny dogs and big dogs all.

After the play session was done, I was walking back inside when I stopped to check how some of my pots of lavender were doing. I spotted a small green resident deep in the foliage of one of them.

A slightly rocambolesque expedition

2012-01-18T23:29:00.000+01:00

We’re off to Toulouse again today. Gustav’s returning from Sweden on an evening flight so I’m going to take Munson for a leisurely drive across the Gers to check out a few places and then fill in time at the shopping precinct close to Blagnac airport.

First stop was in Auch to check out a wool shop, but it looked like they’d not come back from lunch for the afternoon so we kept going. Incidentally Brent has suggested that I buy a sheep to have a personal wool supply, and run it with the cow herd on the farm (comme ça). My preference is to run angora rabbits with them, which will give Munson something to chase during knitting off-season.

Forsaking Auch, I called ahead to Laine et Co in Monblanc where Yvonne & Mike run holiday rooms, a needlecraft centre and an internet supply centre. I checked off my immediate needs for correctly-sized needles and looked at some of the wool stock so I could get an idea of texture when choosing my next yarn. I have a standing invitation to return with any knitting project in progress for a cup of tea and another long chat. Yvonne mentioned an Anny Blatt store near the Capitole in Toulouse, so that gave me a little mission while filling up the remaining hours.

I found the Anny Blatt store very quickly on a side street away from the Place du Capitole. The centre of the store was mostly taken up by a group of ladies knitting around a table. As I entered I got the usual raised eyebrow assessment of a man appearing in an unfamiliar zone: “he’s been sent by someone and I hope he knows what he’s doing”.

I quickly got the manager on side with my precise list of requests for various circular and double-pointed needles. She told me that some of the quarter-sizes like 3.75mm were Anglaise or Americain and I’d have to make do with 3.5mm or 4.0mm. I guess I’ll actually get those over the internet and having an extra or two in those sizes will just be extras for the knitting toolbox.

She asked if there were anything more and I said I just wanted to browse through the wool, but first I needed to check my dog outside. As we reached the door, another lady was pushing her head around it asking “is that your snow dog? He’s magnifique!”. Madame manager took one look and with swooping arms and an “Entrez!” told me to bring him in. I rescued Munson from a group of ladies on the street and delivered him into the cosy set inside. He found the whole thing quite diverting, aside from charming all the humans he wanted to sniff all the interesting animal hair piled up around the walls.

After this I popped back to Album store to look over some more bandes-desinées graphic novels, as I think they’re a good way to bolster my French. I spent a productive hour browsing through titles, marvelling at the artistry in so many of these slim volumes. At the moment I’m reading a very witty comic homage to the universe of the Valerian series by Manu Larcenet titled L’Armure du Jakolass. Not being familiar with his earlier work I had a poke around on the net, and bookmarked a few titles for later. I also came across his blog where he’d posted some rather wonderful images this month:

A labrador on the roof of the world Van Gogh comes to say hello to Monet

I don’t know if these are stand-alone images or come from other novels: he does have a book about Vincent van Gogh and in the same spirit, one that’s grabbed my fancy: Le temps du chien – recounting a story of Sigmund Freud crossing the American West in the style of Don Quixote albeit with more overt psycho-analyses, during which adventure rocambolesque he encounters a stray dog searching for its soul. Something for everyone!

Finally we wound up at Blagnac airport, just in time to meet Gustav as he stepped out onto the concourse. Munson was very excited by this as I think he got a bit confused by Gustav’s disappearance there two weeks ago.

Cold weather supplies

2012-01-16T23:48:00.000+01:00

So much for yesterday in the sun. Today the house is a refrigerator and I’m wearing gloves indoors! Munson’s been sticking close to me, snuggled up on my blanket on the chaise longue while the electric oil heater strains to take the edge off the cold.

The good news is that the wool I ordered for my knitting project has just arrived from the US. Fittingly for this household, the yarn Freia is named for a Chesapeake Bay Retriever – which makes me wonder if Munson can detect any of that during his inspection. It does smell good though.

As soon as I get the correct sized needles, and my hands defrosted, the project will begin. I’m going to warm myself with a greencho hot chocolate now.

Everybody loves sun buddies

2012-01-15T15:36:00.000+01:00

Seeing Munson and Griff sunning themselves on the terrace drew me out to sit on the bench by the kitchen door, coffee in one hand, book in the other.

My presence distracts the reclining animals from their companionable slumbers. Griff decides he wants some of my coffee, and I find I can’t put it down without him scooting over to my mug. Meanwhile Munson wants to play with Griff, and is pawing and nibbling at him like some big old polar bear playing with a husky. The interaction of polar bear : dog : kitten is amazingly similar down the scale of size.

I notice that even with this mild daytime weather, Munson’s snow-nose is becoming more visible after dimming somewhat through the warmer months.

The only way I can get some reading done is to finish my coffee; Griff discovers that the charms of my now empty mug have all gone, so he slinks off. I’m left to finish off Les Mauvais Rêves, a reissue of the first story of spatio-temporal agent Valerian serialised back in the 60s. Despite being a comic book, a bande-dessinée or BD, the concentration of idiomatic dialogue is such that I can’t just skim through each frame as I might the subtitles of a film.

At first I could only manage about three pages in one go – stopping and starting to check the dictionary or a phrase translator. While the pictorial context can give me the gist of most of the conversation, I’m really trying to bed down some more French and to not miss any of the verbal humour. The first few pages were heavy with expository detail; as the tale proceeded there was less an less new vocabulary to absorb and I picked up some pace.

Les Mauvais Rêves is the first BD I’ve completed in French – no chance of “cheating” with this one as it’s never been translated into English. Less than half of the Valerian books have been translated over the 45 years they’ve appeared and I wouldn’t count on many of those being easy to find. Still that’s pretty good going, anyone conversant with English comic books would find little recognisable in the world of French BDs.

Fresh from my reading triumph, Brent invited us out to walk some of the fences to see where the electrification is shorting out. Even when the post mortem was done, Munson wasn’t too perturbed by it and was nonchalantly wriggling under the lower wire to check out rabbit tracks.

Oven U is easy

2012-01-12T12:42:00.000+01:00

On cold days hovering around an active stove seems to be the best way to keep warm. The farm has been wreathed in fog for a few days and that has pulled the ambient temperature down by at least 4-5 degrees. The world ends about 100 metres away, and at its chilliest seems to end around my ankles.

I’ve been having on-again off-again problems with the espresso machine (insufficient pressure in the brew cycle) and ordered some special decalcifying solution to see if that would do more than the citric acid I’ve employed on earlier occasions. For a high-end home machine like this, you can’t use vinegar or one of the small appliance detartrants; at the very least you don’t want unwelcome tastes lingering in the boiler or one of the many steam or hot water outlets.

This is at least a half-day effort, following several pages of typed instructions, connecting and reconnecting power, filling and flushing different subsystems. If that fails to achieve a restoration of caffeine supply, then the nearest qualified service centre is in Avignon i.e. not on my doorstep.

During the rest periods I knocked out a couple of loaves of biscotti and made a fry-up of cabbage, carrot and onion flavoured with caraway seeds to bed down the shredded leftovers of my pork shoulder roast.

I have no animal reports today – all were locked out so I could deal with the machine’s innards safely. Some took that better than others.

Mairzy doats, dozy doats and kitty d’oats

2012-01-07T16:18:00.000+01:00

Peter was back in the area for a short time between spells in London and invited us for lunch in Condom. “Fragrant chicken” – a delicately spiced casserole was on the menu, which we warmed up to with a glass of very well aged Oban whiskey.

His lounge is turning into a small orchard as his three potted citrus plants are all bearing fruit. The warm middays in the Gers are driving my outdoor plants to bud as well. Friends’ descriptions of Sydney’s cold wet summer ( some are using electric blankets!) probably put us slightly ahead in enjoyable outdoor weather at this time.

At home, Munson’s bromance with Griff continues with Griff somehow managing to take the upper paw in the relationship. Griff is a bolder Goldilocks, taking food and bedding right from under the nose of the bears.

I’ve discovered that he’s been hiding out on top of the clothes-dryer in my kitchen. It’s a bit like the last bit of the movie Alien where Ripley and Jones the cat are safely in their escape pod, only to find that the malevolent black creature has sequestered itself on the top of the pod console and slowly unfurls itself when all is quiet.

This evening I peered out the kitchen door to see the two queued up outside the door, Munson deferring to Griff who was standing on his rear paws and tapping on the glass!

While I was in Condom looking for some unshelled pistachios to make biscotti, I managed to discover where the supermarket had been hiding its breakfast oats: in the “Bio” section. Bio is a kind of catch-all for organic/health – branded items, plus stuff that’s a bit too outré for conventional rural French tastes.

The regular cereal aisle has the same scary chocolate-and-sugar infested boxes that you see around the world, and not so much of your mueslis and oats. It should have occurred to me to look in one of the “Bio” aisles – there’s often one for fresher items and another for packaged in different parts of the supermarket.

For some items I’ve gotten used to looking in one of the four food “quarters” of the supermarket: regular, bio, Anglais, artisan. Something that’s neither regular nor biologique may be shelved with the peculiar foods that the English eat ( including pickles, Cadbury chocolate, various Indian condiments, …) or artisan, which is something that comes from regional boutique suppliers. In the English-speaking world, if something from a factory that is supposed to suggest home made qualities will often have a red-gingham pattern printed on the lid, or something quaint like that. In France, it’s faux handwritten labels and/or brown-paper wrapped cans which make one think of austerity rations. Each supermarket has an idiosyncratic way of populating each quarter according to local needs. Over the last year I’ve noticed more items migrating off the shelves d’Angleterre into regular usage so it’s an ongoing quest for hunter-gatherers stalking the aisles to locate alien delicacies from month to month. It goes without saying that there is a price premium for buying from the bio or English shelves.

[cartoon by Sam Gross from The Rejection Collection]

Sometimes I turn to the internet to locate foodstuffs. If I order through Amazon France a 25€ order gets me a free delivery, so it can be worthwhile to pad out a book order with some coffee beans or something similar. I thought I’d see if porridge oats were available thus, but wasn’t prepared for what a search on “oats” threw up*. They’re prettier than baby peas and carrots don’t you think?

That’s why Munson likes Griff. He thinks he’s a walking bowl of porridge.

* Amazon have since “corrected” this by taking down the image and leaving the product description as is. I can’t wait to see what baby oats really look like. [Update: there’s another one!]

Day-trip to Toulouse

2012-01-04T06:02:00.000+01:00

Gustav is having R&R in Sweden for a couple of weeks. I’ve dropped him off at Blagnac airport and continued into Toulouse on some shopping errands. I get the inevitable IKEA journey out of the way quickly but just as inevitably I was stuck at the cashier behind someone who has bought a zillion items (my guess was for a wedding reception) and only after they’ve all been scanned, discovered that she can’t find her card or cheque book.

Errand #2 was a bust as the shop I wanted to visit was closed for lunch and when I returned an hour later, they'd closed up early for the day and drawn the shutters. My final errand was to look for some knitting wool as I’ve decided to take up my needles again. I tried a couple of specialist stores but found – as I’d suspected from my online investigations – that the range of yarns in France was not a patch on what one could get in the UK, or better still in Australia. At least I got a tangible confirmation of what was available and that it was cost effective to order some from England or the States. There was a confusing moment when I thought the store manager was asking me if I was a model (for knitwear), and it wasn’t till a few minutes later that I realised he was asking if I had a model i.e. a pattern.

Munson had a lovely time out, sniffing every kerb and proffered hand as we circled the inner city. While queuing to order some take-away lunch, he got his own queue of courters. As happens so many times in city squares, ladies with long red-lacquered nails scratched the bridge of his nose and behind his ears. When we withdrew to a bench for me to have my lunch, I was often urged to give Munson a bite, and when I did give him some scraps at the end a smiling woman publicly congratulated his delicate handling of the morsels and deconstructed the scene for the benefit of her husband.

Munson Abbey Christmas Special

2012-01-01T22:53:00.000+01:00

I certainly didn’t intend to take a week off from the blog but I’ve been nudged enough by a few readers to get back behind the wheel. That’s not to say that I haven’t done anything over the last couple of weeks: if you are on the RSS feed or get my Twitter updates then you may have seen that I’ve been spring-cleaning the darker recesses of the blog from days gone by when time and bandwidth were a greater constraint.

While I work fitfully on thebookoftheblog I’m dusting and polishing specific chapters of my travel years with Bondi as I review them. Graham Robb’s rather wonderful book Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris inspired me to attack the blog posts for our two month stay; so far I’ve done all of February 2006 and while they may not be as shiny as a Downton Abbey teaspoon, there are more photos on display and they’re much easier to view.

Cognoscenti will of course know that Munson’s Cafe is less than five minutes walk from Ealing Studios, so we all know where the Dowager Countess of Grantham is getting her lattés delivered from.

Our last jaunt anywhere before Xmas was to a wine-tasting open day at Domaine de Sédoupret located just south of Eauze. Like some of the smaller markets we’d been to through December it was mainly an expat affair, but I saw familiar faces from all over the Gers making me feel a little less like an outsider.

Munson’s presence was an opener for a lot of new people to talk to us and Gustav even managed to connect over a barrel of fire with a neighbour from Sweden whose children go to school with the Munsoneers.

We took in a boarder over the holidays: César an old poodle-cross stayed for 5 days while his owner Dorothy was away. César appears to have Cushing’s Syndrome as Bondi did, but much more advanced and has lost most of the coat from his abdomen. He was a little grumpy and confused at first, but after a couple of nights of unsettled sleep (for everyone!) he got into the rhythm of life at Munson Abbey. The only awkwardness was when any of the kittens came to visit and quickly decided they should make a spitting exit.

The night before Xmas we had the annual show given by the Munsoneers, everything carefully prepared and rehearsed for days before, from the tickets and seating to the bilingual repertoire, and everything carefully falling apart during the show as performers, costumes, dogs and bits of set drifted backwards and forwards in front of our seats. Every time someone changed outfits, Tosca the dog looked through the old outfit for any food that might be found in the pockets. The fourth wall was penetrated every ten seconds – usually by Minty doing a comedy warm-up routine – even when the show was in progress, or looking for somewhere more comfortable to sit, such as a parental lap. It was an incredible leap forward from last year’s play when 2/3 of the cast decided at curtain-up that they all preferred to be kittens rather than whatever roles had been assigned.

After the theatricals we retired to the green room with the performers to supervise their (alcohol-free) fizz.

Christmas Day was another communal affair at the “big house”. Between the seafood platter and Otto’s new Star Wars chess set, one never whether to reach for a prawn or a pawn.

A big surprise for me was unwrapping this quilt that Jean had made. I was just beginning to take in the details when it struck me that some of the fabric looked familiar. “Isn’t this some of ~~my missing sheets from the clothes–line~~ the excess curtain fabric I gave you?” After a few bouts of putting up curtains to give extra insulation, I’d donated all the trimmed sections to Jean to make Xmas toys. Further analysis showed that the “bits of really ugly wool that you least want from your knitting bag” had also surfaced as knotty details. It was a very special gift. The idea was that I’d have something special to rug up in when a-bloggin’ late at night, so it’s actually transformed my office chair into a throne that I can wrap myself in.

The ensuing days were pretty warm, which was a shock to Gustav who’s been programmed to hibernate for days while snow piles up outside the door. There was even a morning or two where I was out in tank-top to do some gardening, and to try to drag some tree trunks out of the pond. The pond has nearly refilled due to all the recent rain, but the temperature hasn’t dropped very far, so I was able to stand in it for a little while to break off smaller branches that were impeding progress.

Cute young things

2011-12-24T08:48:00.001+01:00

When I saw this picture of Siku the polar bear cub in Scandinavian Wildlife Park

I was instantly reminded of this picture of Munson at about the same age:

That was the “I’ll have that one” picture.

Kindle–closure

2011-12-20T18:06:00.000+01:00

So, after a couple of days of bizarre email exchanges with Amazon support and a twenty minute Skype call to Amazon US support (who couldn’t look at orders from the French site), and confirmation that I had in fact found a bug in their Return Centre pages, I was not holding out on any resolution before the new year.

I discussed a couple of the issues I had with it with Jean and she said “oh you need to get the man-hands version”. I agreed – I don’t need any more technology which requires tiny fingers to manipulate the buttons.

Count me surprised when last night I got a call from Matthias at Amazon France to clear everything up. He very kindly emailed me some prepaid return mailing labels to work around the site bug and I got everything dispatched today. Thank you Matthias!

I’ll revisit the issue of getting a different device in 2012. My reasons for wanting one haven’t changed, but the standard Kindle doesn’t address my needs. Maybe the Touch model will suffice (my reservations about the poor search facilities notwithstanding), or maybe I need to wait another generation.

Munson makes merry at the markets in Marciac and Mirande

2011-12-18T19:16:00.000+01:00

It’s been oh so cold this week. Icy rain driven by a wide-ranging tempest dropped us from our mild daytime weather into the subzero range on Thursday. I had closed most of our window shutters the night before to keep in the heat, which wasn’t helpful when we had rolling blackouts through the day. Time to light the fire and hover around it.

Friday was quite a bit better but the rain and wind continued, with the runoff from the barn rooves helping to replenish the water level in our little lake. For the most part we’ve stayed inside, wrapped in blankets and books, filled with fresh cream of cauliflower soup. Yesterday I started reading Graham Robb’s Parisians where the second chapter deals with the “sequence of catastrophic events that began on 17 December 1774” also happening to be a Saturday afternoon. ( Meanwhile in London, Chris was celebrating the “sequence of hilarious consequences that began on 17 December 1974”. Happy birthday!)

I’d heard mention that were several more Xmas markets in the area today: Marciac, Mirande, Fleurance and Lavardans to name a few. I’ve not visited Marciac before so that was good enough reason to make that our choice. Just on 45 minutes’ drive from here, it’s the home of a world-famous annual jazz festival in mid-August. I would have looked in this year if I weren’t on my Offa’s Dyke ramble.

Approaching the town square from the north, I swore that if I’d been released from blindfolds here I would have said that we were in Mirande, the country-music town twenty minutes east of here. The place was pretty quiet, most of the stalls were in the open arcades around the perimeter with a good proportion of them just being stands from the adjacent store pushed out onto the street. Whether it was the hour (just after lunch) or the cold, people seemed to be staying away in droves. I think stall-holders outnumbered visitors. We bought some pastries and spoke to a couple of stall-holders encountered at earlier markets but stayed no longer than a single circuit of the square. Even then some of the food vendors were packing up their vans and cutting their losses.

In Mirande, Mother Noël told me that Munson was mignon, merveilleux and magnifique… and then “would it help if I spoke to you in English?” She turned out to be Rachael from Trois Lions vendors of British products, who had set up tables today in the square’s central bandstand. Rachael decided that the only thing that went with her colourful jacket was Munson.

After today I’m proposing that the two towns bury their musical rivalry and unite under an all-purpose Munson Festival.

Kindle–back in the box experience

2011-12-18T17:18:00.000+01:00

Since I wrote my first post on getting a Kindle, I’ve been finding the device less and less satisfactory.

Apart from the cumbersome mechanical controls, there are other issues with the Kindle experience. I’ve been trying to put some of my other e-Books onto the device and while some work it’s really önly just”. I downloaded the Calibre program for converting other formats to one that Kindle understands but found that PDFs are still nearly unreadable. Re-editing page sizes in PDFs is hugely time-consuming, even when you’ve got a nice program like PDF Annotator which can slice away at page margins as a bulk action.

Just this morning I tried getting some new titles from the Kindle Store via the device. As I’ve been reading some of Mark Rowlands’ blog posts on his book The Philosopher and the Wolf, I thought I’d look for more of his works. As I slowly keyed in his name (by arrowing around the on-screen keyboard), the keyboard flashes a lot showing prospective search targets and in one instance actually seems to take the focus away from the keyboard.

By the time I’ve got to Rowla there are only three targets on the screen (rather diminished once it figured I wasn’t looking for a book by J.K. Rowling!):

rowland white
rowland
rowland rivron

By sheer coincidence I’ve just read Rowland Rivron’s memoir What the F*** Did I Do Last Night? … but I digress. I exit the keyboard to select “rowland” but see that with 28pp of titles I’ll be there all day.

Returning to the search box, I have to rekey the search entirely, rather surprised that it hasn’t kept the last search text, and it tells me “No suggestions found for rowlands. Press [enter] to execute your query now.”

When I do that, after some huffing and puffing I get the same 28pp of “rowland” no-‘s’ that it showed me before. So I page down and at #11 on the second screen, I find “The Philosopher and the Wolf” just above “What the F****”. I click onto that and then onto Mark’s name, and then I find there are 8 Kindle titles listed, including the French and Italian translations of TPATW. Clock up another fail for Amazon search.

I decide that I’m going to return the device, so I go to Amazon France’s returns page (on my desktop computer now), and find that to return a Kindle for a refund, you have to speak to an agent on the phone first. You cannot proceed to print a return authorisation. I would have preferred to buy it from Amazon UK to simplify these issues but that isn’t permitted – in general you can’t buy Kindles for delivery in another country. The returns pages took me around in circles for a while before I could get to this stage.

So I plug in my details and moments later get an automated phone call with a breathlessly fast message and then it clicks off. A message on my computer screen tells me the call was interrupted, so I try again. This time I catch something about pressing 9, so I do that and then get a woman whispering on the other end. I ask (in French) for someone who speaks English as I can’t manage a long conversation on the telephone with someone whispering in another language. She tries to find someone and then after a long wait tells me that I will get a call from an agent “soon”. That was before I started writing this post.

**** FIVE HOURS LATER ****

While I was out for the day, I got an email from Amazon customer service to say they had tried to call me and to say that yes I could return the item and to go to their return centre and follow the instructions. So that simply takes me back to where I started and the impediment to getting a return authorisation is still there. So apart from Amazon Customer Service not knowing how their Kindles work, they don’t know how their return procedure works. This is the first time I’ve had a problem with their customer support in 15 years.

Return to the scene of the cuteness

2011-12-15T13:30:00.000+01:00

Some icy-cold rain has dropped us just south of zero on the thermometer, so it wasn’t surprising when Griff returned mid morning to snuggle next to the warmest thing outside of our fireplace.

Tails of the Unexpected

2011-12-15T08:58:00.001+01:00

When I arose this morning and half sleepwalked into the kitchen to turn on the espresso machine, I didn’t expect to find Munson on the sofa, curled up next to Griff the kitten. They weren’t even just napping: Munson was intermittently grooming Griff, chattering his nearly clenched teeth up and down his spine and legs the same way he does to his own limbs, and licking the back of Griff’s head. Very convenient for Griff that would be, having a giant groomer there to handle all the bits you can’t reach.

I wish I had better photos and video of this, but unless there is a strong ambient light, trying to photograph Munson’s white mask with Griff’s inky melt-into-the-darkness black at the same time in the pre-dawn hours is not easy. Me being in a state of pre-coffee consciousness doesn’t help.

Griff warns Munson off if he tries to sniff or lick his underside too intrusively, yet otherwise he’s completely comfortable being beside a creature outweighing him fifty times over. There was even one point when Munson’s head was lying over half of Griff’s body. I thought the kitten would get suffocated, but he seemed happy under there for a few minutes.

It’s only 7 months since Munson was enrolled in Kittens 101, but I’m prepared to give him advanced credit after this morning. Can’t wait to see where this goes next.

Kindle–out of the box experience

2011-12-14T18:34:00.001+01:00

After holding out for some time, I finally relented and bought a Kindle e-reader from Amazon. I already have a library of a few thousand books – many of which have lived on three continents with me now – but while I am happy to rebox and carry them around for as many more moves as I have in me, not all of the titles are keepers.

I now have enough collectibles and volumes of personal value to me that growing the library at the same rate as I have over my adult life is just not practical. Working out how to shelve and categorise everything practically and aesthetically is something that exercises the minds of many readers, as can be seen from the currently active #bookshelves topic on Twitter initiated by writer Alexander McCall Smith. That in itself reminds me of a debate I had with a Newtown bookseller about where his books should be shelved, I maintained that it should be under “M” for McCall Smith, just as one would file Cats under L = Lloyd Webber, or Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter under V=Vargas Llosa. I doubt that it would actually create extra work for bookstore workers since I’m familiar with being asked where Tolstoy might be found on a shelf of alphabetised fiction when I worked at Elizabeth’s.

The books I have and will have create a lot of the atmosphere in my house. (Munson creates a different atmosphere, but that’s usually only when he’s been given too much cheese.) There’s always a place for both physical books and e-books. The issues around balancing both, particularly when active reading i.e. making annotations on and taking notes from different sources, was something that occupied me professionally as a software designer in my erstwhile career.

I remember the pleasure of a lunch with Victor Nell (author of Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure) and Cathy Marshall, annotations guru, whose own research papers I had completely covered in pen and highlighter ink, discussing the future of reading technologies. We were all lovers of traditional books but could see the advantages conferred by the inevitably ubiquitous tablets in a number of situations. That must have been 8-9 years ago and I’m still impatient that the technology has not caught up with designs and dreams of that time.

Returning to the purchase at hand, I decided to buy a Kindle Touch now for several reasons:

while I’d love to have a colour e-reader, most of what I read is plain text, and those are the titles which are less likely to be “keepers”.
there’s a bunch of big-fat books out this year and I nearly sprained my wrist reading both A Walk on the Wild Side and A Dance with Dragons this year.
I can download sample introductory chapters from Amazon immediately and see if I want to purchase the entire text
iPads are still ridiculously expensive and are horribly horribly horribly horribly limited by the iTunes gateway which takes longer to penetrate than Shelob’s lair en route to Mordor, after which time you just want to caste the precious thing into a river of lava and be done with it.

So anyway the package from Amazon arrives and I spend some time setting it up, which is the point at which I discover that I don’t have a Kindle Touch, but a regular 2nd-generation Kindle (non-Touch). It turns out that this is the only one of the the four new Kindle options that may be purchased outside of North America. This is not something that is made obvious when you’re ordering from my local UK or France stores. Indeed if you search on Kindle Touch on Amazon UK as I did you don’t get told that it’s not available, but simply shown the almost identical-looking Kindle Non-Touch which happens to be the same price as the Touch is in the US i.e. more expensive than the US Non-Touch. Also when I ordered it I was switched to the Amazon France store by force, which has the same problem whereby asking for a Touch model gives you the Non-Touch. The €99 Non-Touch translates to $132USD, rather a lot more than $99USD for a Touch, or 80% more than Americans pay for a $79 Non-Touch.

Furthermore I had no problem specifying and ordering a case for a Kindle Touch from Amazon France, adding to the illusion that all was going well.

I’m discovering the non-touchiness of the device as I’m setting it up which is a bit more difficult than it could be –especially when it comes to entering the 26 character alphanumeric password for my wifi network. Make one mistake and you have to re-enter it from scratch using the on-screen keyboard which requires a LOT of arrowing around to select each letter and number.

At least when I’m logged into the device with my Amazon account, it recognises that my purchases are in English from the Amazon UK store. It doesn’t tie me to the Amazon France store based on my location or on where I purchased the device – unlike Apple’s iTunes store which welds software, hardware and language together as if they were inextricably linked. It downloaded the complete titles that I had purchased as trials earlier in the year to read on the Kindle software on my PC and phone. However it doesn’t download any of the sample chapters of books that Amazon had sent to those devices.

So I go back to my phone and bring up one of the book samples. On the last page of each book there are two links: one to buy the entire book immediately, and the other to look it up in the Kindle Store. Pressing either of these links gives the error “We’re Sorry. This operation is not currently supported”.

It’s kinda dumb that there’s no way for me to make a purchase just when Amazon has me firmly at the virtual cashier’s desk. I could click, pay for the title and have the rest of it downloaded in seconds so I could continue my reading on the next page. Nope. So I use the Provide Feedback option and express my disappointment. We’re not talking grief but it seems to me that Amazon has stood on the brink of success and lurched backwards.

I got a response from Amazon’s helpdesk asking me for which exact book samples the purchase process failed. I don’t think they understood that the iPhone Kindle program just doesn’t support that feature, but I manually went through the Amazon site, looked up all of the titles so I could give them the unambiguous stock details, and pasted that into my response. Their response was to send me back a list of all the links I’d just looked up and tell me to go to each and download them again. Not exactly a triumph of ecommerce from the land of 1-Click purchases. Nothing from the exchange proved that anyone supporting these had ever seen let alone used the software I was giving feedback on.

Other observations from my brief experience:

I’m disappointed that the Home screen is all text and I can’t view by cover image, sort by titles, authors etc as I can do even on my tiny phone interface [Edit: Can do that all except have a Cover Image view]
The button interface is not good for much beyond page forward/back and home (ie list of books). Obviously the idea is that is what you spend most of your time doing, but the existing buttons are so awkward to use that it deters me from using the device’s other features. And when I accidentally invoke one of those other features or modes by pressing the wrong button, getting rid of it is equally frustrating.
I tried loading on some other ebooks I had on my PC, some in PDF format and a bunch of other random ePub files. That’s easy enough to do by simple drag and drop - much easier than getting any of them onto an iPhone, which requires standing in a pentacle, and doing Rubik’s Cube while reciting a thousand digits of pi base 9 in Urdu. The PDFs all showed up and the other files didn’t. Navigating the PDFs proved to be a ghastly experience, especially since all the panning and zooming required one to simultaneously manipulate two buttons separated by about 5mm, or about one quarter the width of my index finger. That’s assuming the Kindle is sitting on a table: if I’m holding it in my hands, I have to try with two fat thumbs, and that’s just an exercise in futility.

I suppose I should send the thing back except I have a bunch of Kindle titles that I don’t want to read on my phone – turning pages that are a paragraph long is OK when I’m at a bus stop, but for a book-sized endeavour, it’s just going to turn my fingertips into teflon. Furthermore, there’s no indication when the Touch devices will be available outside North America. I suppose I could pay someone to receive and repost the device from a US address but meh. At the end of the exercise I’ve paid so much in postage returning one device and getting the other transferred, with risk of import duties that I’m down about as much money again. Also, given the cross-store confusions I’m not confident given some of the bundling options within the US store that I would get access to the same UK titles as I can today.

After all that, the device that would honestly please me much more is an iPad-like tablet with a true A4-sized display that I could use for my sheetmusic. That would allow me to get rid of half a wall of musical scores.

There are iPad apps for music but the display is too tiny for practical use at a piano as you’re only getting 6-8 bars of visibility. My old Motion Computing M1300 Tablet PC from 2003 was approximately the right size for this and I used it at the piano for a while as above. It can’t be too many years before we have flexible, folding devices where I’ll actually have a double page layout, but I can dream.

TOULOUSE Marché de Noël

2011-12-13T21:53:00.000+01:00

Another big Xmas fair today, not as cosy as the one at Fourcès, but definitely streets ahead of Bordeaux’s. Munson stayed home today so that we’d have a bit more flexibility getting around town. Normally I’d drive into Toulouse early to make a day of it, but to avoid the lunch-time doldrums and to see the evening illuminations (sunset is 5.30ish) we hit the main square around 1pm.

Not much to report. We browsed around the central area, supped on tartiflette and glögg, raspberry-pistachio tart and chocolates-chauds. I still didn’t hear any carols sung in French although no shortage of Bing Crosby. The closest I came was a West Indian busker playing the guitar, a helium-filled Santa balloon attached to it, singing a weirdly accented Franglais version of “The Twelve Days of Noël”.

After I got home I discovered that one of my favourite pop performers, Keren Ann had played a concert in Toulouse this evening, an event which had not been listed in my weekly mail0ut of Toulouse events. :-(

Occupy the bed

2011-12-12T12:58:00.001+01:00

FOURCÈS A moat-town Xmas

2011-12-11T16:17:00.000+01:00

Lying almost under our noses some twenty-odd minutes from home, Fourcès is a medieval village wrapped around a large green, and in turn encased by the river Auzoue and a short diversion canal.

We were drawn there today by its Marché de Noël and a program of activities through the afternoon. As soon as we broke through the ring of houses into the green I had a good feeling about the prospects for this fair.

You enter the town via the 15th-century Gothic stone arched bridge seen above. The equally old Château Fourcès replaces a more ancient castle in the centre of the village, and is now a luxury hotel.

The small array of market stalls around the green were much more interesting than those we saw in Bordeaux last week, even subtracting the couple we'd already seen at the Château de Lisse.

Villagers in the tented pavilion in the centre of the green served plates of daube stew and bowls of pumpkin soup. I know daube is generally beef or lamb, but this one tasted like pork. There seemed to be shreds of what I jokingly called “pig face” which were dispatched to a malamute that happened to be sitting handily by our bench.

As we chewed our lunch I heard the familiar introduction to The Doors’ Light My Fire being played over the village audio system. I told Gustav that it was at least slightly appropriate since Jim Morrison was buried in Paris - 40 years ago this year as it happens. Then it morphed into a horrible muzak medley of Doors tunes and all I could think of was Morrison spinning madly somewhere under a stone in Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Between our circuits of the green, we looked down a few of the short alleyways radiating out towards the moat created by the river and canal. It really is a picture postcard place, and to underline this I’ve included one postcard (above right) from the town’s website at http://www.fources.fr/vieux%20fources.htm.

Around 3, the Munsoneers arrived, helping to amplify the noise and thrill level of the fair even before they found the merry-go-round and bon-bon stall.

Postcript: I’m not sure whether the town is Fourcès or Fourcés. The town’s official site opts for the latter accent acute, and other sites opt for the accent grave. Numbers aren’t necessarily the best guide as many of the touristic sites ruthlessly plagiarize each other and then this gets dumped into Wikipedia.

Afternoon light

2011-12-09T15:50:00.000+01:00

*Christmas wreath by Lucy. Tongue by Munson.

BORDEAUX Christmas market

2011-12-06T20:13:00.000+01:00

Amongst my first memories of being in France in December 2002 are the Christmas markets in central Paris: clusters of wooden chalets brilliantly illuminated at night, permeated by the scents of spiced bread and roasting nuts.

Last year I was so busy getting moved into the farm that I didn’t get to see any of this seasonal fun, a terrible oversight. So I want to make up for it this year by visiting a few Marchés des Noël in the region. Today we picked out the one in Bordeaux so we could also get a bit of Christmas shopping done. This is Munson’s first visit too, since the last one was carried out in a rental car while my vehicle was ingaragated.

The Bordeaux market consisted of about 150 huts along the allées de Tourney but were a bit of a bust as far as content and atmosphere went. True we weren’t there at night ( Bordeaux is too far away for a comfortable return drive at night ) but there was just too much unimpressive craftwork, cheap electronics and two-a-centime crepe makers. We found an “Australian” food vendor, liberally emblazoned with flags and kangaroos, but selling only French and American dishes. Around the market, Christmas carols played continuously – all in English! I kept waiting for a French song to be played, but not a one to be heard.

Meanwhile, a big antiques fair was going on in a tent city not far away in the Plaza des Quinconces. So much interesting stuff, but it was off-mission for our trip today. Quite a lot of the vendors there had a dog-in-residence, each of which would stroll out to sniff Munson as he walked past.

As we returned to the central Old Bordeaux quarter and were inspecting a window full of chocolate figures, I could hear a couple of guys murmuring in Australian-accented English that they wanted a picture of Munson. I spoke up : “We can understand what you’re saying, you know!”. They laughed and introduced themselves, and their girlfriends joined us a moment later. One wanted to know what the reaction to Munson was in France and I said “I hear a bit less he’s fucking huuuuge!!!! around here but otherwise it’s much the same as home.”

The middle of the day was awkward for shopping as so many stores close up for a two-hour lunch, so it seemed we missed a lot of potentially interesting opportunities. While Gustav was browsing in one store, a young woman approached to caress Munson. On learning we were from Australia: “Oh I’m from New Caledonia. We’re practically neighbours!”

Eating at an outdoor table, a slightly inebriated guy came to ask about Munson’s age, weight and feeding habits - all the usual – before lurching off down the street. A few minutes later another guy staggered over “Il est de trois ans! incroyable!”. Word was out on the street! This guy wanted to get a picture of Munson with his mobile phone camera, and tried to stand still while his hand wavered side to side. “This is going to be a 3D picture I think” I whispered to Gustav. Eventually it transpired that he couldn’t find the camera control on it so I located it and snapped a photo on his half. “Magique!” and trundled off.

Munson and Gustav were a bit exhausted after hours of walking the hard stone streets so we returned to the car in order to drive out to a suburban shopping centre where the local IKEA was based. My wretched TomTom decided there was another IKEA and took us to a completely wrong location and then we had a very long drive through quite bad traffic to the real place.

We had a quick look in a pet store, which is where I spotted the Eyenimal wearable video camera for pets. I’ve been looking out for something like this for a couple of years as I’d love a Munson’s eye view of his street encounters. I didn’t buy one today, but definitely thinking about it….

By the time we were finished around 6pm, the entire area was becoming completely gridlocked. I managed to squeeze us through a gap between turning cars so we could sit it out in a local Maccas for half an hour or so with coffee and free wifi.

Cheesecake citrouille céleste

2011-12-04T15:40:00.000+01:00

Some weeks ago a recipe for a pumpkin cheesecake floated past me in my newsreader. I haven’t attempted a cheesecake since my first attempt, a chocolate one I produced for my twenty-fifth birthday, and that’s so many months ago now I’m starting from scratch.

I scanned the ingredients list to see if there was anything I’d need to search out: Biscuit crumbs for the base and cream cheese for the filling. Packets of digestive biscuits are easy enough to find on the wee slice of the supermarket shelf designed for les Anglaises et les étrangers, but cream cheese in the land of seventy million cheeses?

There is a lot of intense debate on ex-pat, cooking and linguistic forums about the appropriate terminology and examplars of cream cheese. The French Neufchâtel was the inspiration for the Americans who produced cream cheeses of which Philadelphia is the Hoover, Kleenex or Xerox of this world. There are a few small 150g tubs of Philly cheese at the supermarket, but rather on the pricy side. I’m also a little suspicious that even with the common labelling it’s any more like the US product than American Neufchâtel is like its forebear. Looking over the shelves I deduced that St. Moret was a suitable local equivalent. A quick finger sample at home indicated it was a bit saltier than Philly, but the consistency was fine. In all, a decent substitute for my first attempt.

By the time I got to putting it all together yesterday, another recipe had supplanted the original. With a name like Heavenly Pumpkin cheesecake from the Australian Not Quite Nigella cooking blog, how could I resist? Plus Nigella herself frequents these parts on occasion when visiting her father.

The pumpkin part of the recipe was simply a half kilo of butternut pumpkin boiled till soft as though I was going to make a mash. I drained it and threw it in the blender with the St. Moret, eggs, sugar and lemon zest. I used my small meat tenderizing hammer to break up the biscuits for the base.

The recipe calls for a springform cake tin, and the one I used to have has disappeared to the great moving company in the sky, so I decided to buy a silicone pan. From having a surfeit of unused bakeware I now find I don’t have quite enough to support the volume of oven traffic that Gustav and I are generating between us. Using the silicone bakeware in place of a springform meant that I didn’t have to wrap the whole contraption in cling film and foil to make an impermeable barrier against the water bath it would sit in while in the oven.

Quite handily the inner pan’s grips overlapped my baking tray’s edges, so it was every so slightly suspended and then eventually supported by the boiling water I poured in around it. 90 minutes in the oven at 160C and all done!

The bottom of the silicone tray is a bit saggy so I popped the whole thing in a round ceramic dish while it cooled down and then left it in the fridge overnight.

When I withdrew it, the silicone folded back from the cake so easily, and then carefully supporting the base with outstretched hand I transferred it to a flat surface. In the adjacent photo I’ve left the silicone pan inside out.

The taste? Célestial, mes chers!

It’s very light and fluffy, slightly more lemon-y than pumpkin-y with the zest that was added, and no trace of saltiness from the St. Moret cheese.

I really like the way that the biscuit base has produced a marbled effect around the sides. As the recipe suggested my 23cm (9”) pan was probably a bit too large for the ingredient quantities to create a crust around the edge.

All in all, spectacular result from very little effort.

Now to check out the choc-almond biscuits that Gustav is preparing….