All the leaves are brown. And yellow.

Not a great photo, but it shows the dramatic leaf drop we had with recent storms. This forsythia in the back yard has already set its buds for next spring.

Almost all the leaves are gone having fallen pretty much in one day.

After it blooms, it will get trimmed seriously back. I've let it go a bit too long.

I took my camera with me to the blood lab this morning thinking I could snap a few shots of the river in the morning fog. When I got down there I realized there was no memory card in the camera. D'oh! This tells me that I should keep an extra memory card in the car for such occasions.

Arc-en-ciel

That's French for rainbow. There was a pretty cool rainbow out back on Sunday morning. The sun was rising in the east and a rain system was moving in from the west.

A tree of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I wish the photo did the sight justice, but I was hurrying to get a shot before the rainbow disappeared.

There and back again

This image sums up the weather and the mood around here right now. Leaves mostly gone. Skies leaden. Colors muted. Ground damp. And now it's getting colder. It's all to be expected, of course. It's that time of year. But there are normally a few sunny and dry days mixed in. Enough to lift the spirits and get us out into the yard a little.

Looking up at the overcast sky.

But so far we've had more of the gloomy and wet and less of the sunny and dry. I hope the whole winter doesn't go like this. It probably won't.

I've picked up The Lord of the Rings again. I read it every few years. This will make the tenth time in thirty-four years that I've read it. I always enjoy it; I find that I've not concentrated on some section or chapter the last time through and it's almost like reading it for the first time. And the story becomes richer and more complete. At least for me.

And another thing that I find curious: now that I've lived nearly eight years in France and have come to know many British people, I realize that the book, written by an Englishman, is filled with cultural references, words, and expressions the meanings of which I just couldn't grasp as a young, somewhat insulated American. A simple example of this is "elevenses," a tea time between breakfast and lunch. A custom we Americans don't have; for us, tea is a drink, not a meal. I can't imagine what I thought when those voracious hobbits were upset about missing "elevenses." I didn't understand then that it was one of the many meals of their day (after first breakfast and second breakfast, but before luncheon, of course).

It's interesting to re-read some of the books I've read as a young person. My understanding of things as a fifty year old is so very different from when I was high school age, or even in my twenties. I've recently re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. So much more meaningful now than when I was fifteen or sixteen. And a year or so ago, just for fun, I read The Last of the Mohicans by Cooper. Wow. I missed so much stuff the first time through. I should re-read more of that stuff from high school and finally figure out what I was supposed to have learned back then.

I wonder how many of my teenage classmates were lost in all that literature like I was. I was completely at sea with Shakespeare and poetry in general. I trudged through those plays and books and short stories by the likes of Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe, and all the others. It's not that I didn't enjoy some of them, but I just couldn't get what all the fuss was about. I supposed I absorbed enough to regurgitate what my teachers expected. At least enough to get by. I dreaded having to write essays about the motivations of protagonists and antagonists and over-arching and parallel themes and how did I interpret the subtle references to, what was it again? Ugh.

I was better at math and science. Hard cold reality. Something I could grasp and hold on to. Right answers. Wrong answers. Proofs. Reason. The only nebulous things in those subjects were clouds and gasses. What a nerd.

And I liked French, too. I took French from the sixth grade through twelfth. French was fun; it was kind of like math. One giant set of formulas. All I had to do was to plug in the right variables and it worked. And it fulfilled my foreign language requirement. Do American high schools still have foreign language requirements, I wonder?

Oh, and I liked musical theater, although I had no talent for it. Still, it was fun to watch. My high school actually had an elective class called "American Musical Theater," which of course I enrolled in. Most of the students in that class were girls, the rest of us were nerds. It got one-half of one of my English credits out of the way. We took a field trip in that class to New York City to see Yul Brenner in The King and I. That experience remains one of my coolest memories (by coincidence, Brenner is buried not far from where I currently live in France). For my final paper in that class I wrote a biography of Barbra Streisand. Stop snickering.

I got another half-credit in English for a class called "Fantasy in Literature." In addition to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we read Tolkien in that class. And that was my first exposure to The Lord of the Rings. As usual, I was completely lost. It was a hard read for me, complex, very long, and filled with words I didn't understand. I couldn't keep up the pace. Especially during class discussions of the chapters I had yet to slog through. Still, there was something interesting there. It just took me a little more time and a few re-readings, on my own terms, to come to appreciate it. And, after thirty-four years, I'm happily reading it again. For the tenth time.

See how nicely I wrapped that up?

Mini kiwi fruit

A funny thing happened earlier this week. We noticed that our neighbors across the street were down from Blois on Sunday doing errands at their summer house. During the time they were here, we saw them picking some fruit off a large bush that we can see from our kitchen window. A few hours later, after they had returned to Blois, some other people were in our neighbors' yard picking fruit from the same tree.

A close up of mini kiwis picked from our neighbors' yard.

After the other people left, I walked over to see what they were picking. I realized right away that it was the mini kiwi that our neighbors had pointed out to us once. It's loaded with fruit right now and, if you didn't know better, you'd think they were olives. But we don't live in a climate that's good for olives and the bush doesn't look anything like an olive tree.

The neighbors' tree, laden with fruit. Our house in the background.

So I got curious as to what mini kiwis actually are. Are they really kiwis? Apparently, yes. They've been around for a long time, probably just a wild variety of the larger kiwi that's been successfully commercialized. Did you know that France is the fifth largest producer of kiwi fruit in the world? Neither did I.

A cluster of mini kiwis next to a fork for scale. See how they look like olives?

Then, on Monday, I noticed Chez Loulou post a link on Facebook to one of the articles I had found about the mini kiwi and how some producers in France are trying to commercialize it as well. Here's the article. Such a strange coincidence!

So Ken suggested that the mini kiwi would be a good subject for a blog post. I got the camera out immediately and took these photos. I also ate a few mini kiwis. Very good! They taste just like their larger cousins, only the skin is thin and smooth and edible. I'm not quite sure what to do with them except to eat them as a snack. Any ideas?

Saturday night sunset

Since summer, the point on the horizon where the sun sets has been moving steadily to the left (south) as we look westerly through the windows on the back side of the house. In another month or so, at the solstice, it will begin its swing back toward the north again. We have beautiful sunsets all during the year, but somehow November sunsets stand out. I don't know why.

Not the most spectacular sunset, but still pretty. Click to embiggen.

This was the view this past Saturday night, er, evening (getting close to afternoon, actually) as the sun set. The sun is setting these days at about a quarter past five. It will be even earlier as we approach the solstice.

Interesting fact: if you could look straight west of here right through the center of this photo, beyond the horizon, beyond the western coast of France, and across the Atlantic, the first land you would see would be the easternmost coast of Newfoundland, just south of the city of Saint John's.

Periodic Puppy Pics

Here's Mademoiselle Chose (Miss Thing) slinking among the vines out back. Actually, she's not slinking, she's just waiting for me to catch up.

The vines have lost all of their leaves now. The pruners have started their work, but not yet in this parcel.

Callie loves running across the rows of vines. She seldom runs the length of a row, preferring to cut through between the trunks, under the tendrils and leaves and wires. The first time she did this, as a puppy, she didn't know about the wires and nearly decapitated herself. She only did that once. Now she's quite an expert at maneuvering among the vines.

I made a leek upside down pie

I've done this before. It's a tarte tatin de poireaux. It's kind of a sweet and spicy dish, made with caramel and curry. Very tasty. But this time it didn't look nice. So there are no photos of the finished dish. Just the ingredients.

Sliced leeks, ready to be made into a sweet and spicy pie.

The pie tasted fine, but it looked rather messy. The first time I made it, a little more than a year ago, it turned out great. You can see that here. But not this time. I think the problem is in the measurements. The recipe has the wrong measurements, and for some reason I knew that the first time. The second time I forgot, so I used too much cream and it came out strange.

Oh well. You win some. You lose some.