Summertime

And the livin' is dry. When the heat wave broke last weekend, we got some rain. About six millimeters worth. That's not much. I'm still watering the vegetable garden every morning to keep it alive. I wonder if I'm watering enough, but I don't want to overdo it, either. The peppers have a lot of blossoms and the zukes are producing.

Tuesday morning's sunrise.

Some of the tomato plants seem smaller than they should be, and a few of them have burned leaves from the heat. So do some of the yellow flat beans. Oh well. Like I said once before, I'm not going to take extraordinary measures.

The neighbor's cat

A couple of weeks ago, while walking by a neighbor's house, I noticed this cat in her back yard and snapped a photo. The neighbor had just arrived from her home in the Paris area to spend a few summer weeks here. The cat, it turns out, belongs to her daughter's family. They came down about a week ago. Then we found out that the cat had gone missing.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty...

Other than the day I took the photo, neither Ken nor I have seen the cat. We noticed the family driving slowly up and down the road the other day hoping to find it, but to no avail. They went back to Paris yesterday morning, without the cat. Our neighbor told Ken that they were going to check in at the local vet's office to see if anyone had reported a found cat.

These days, Bert (our cat) gets along with most of the neighborhood cats, even the temporary visitors from Paris. We've seen some of them in our yard hanging out with Bert. But this particular cat is nowhere to be seen. Another neighbor speculated that a badger might have taken it. I suppose that's possible, but this is not a small cat, and I haven't heard of any other neighborhood cat falling prey to a badger since we've been here.

I find it curious that people would bring a cat to a vacation home and let it roam free. Seems like a strange thing to do, but this particular neighbor has been doing just that for years with her own, her son's, and her daughter's cats.

Summer daze

We got the paint brushes out yesterday and made some progress. Ken stained/varnished a couple of wooden boxes we got for kleenex and a wooden coat rack for the wall, and I put a coat of paint on the column that was built to hide the drain pipe that comes down from the loft. I think it might need a second coat. We still have to varnish the oak shelf in the new half-bath upstairs.

Neatly trimmed grape vines bask in the heat during our recent hot spell. You can see how dry the ground is.

The weather stayed pleasantly cool on Sunday and I grilled hamburgers for lunch. Our neighbors across the road had a small gathering and they invited us, but we didn't get their phone message until it was too late. That's ok. I wasn't really in the mood to get presentable and socialize.

The house is cooling off to the point where it almost feels cold in the morning. Things are getting back to normal. At least for the time being.

Contrast

Contrasts abound. We just had one of the hottest days ever, and now it's chilly outside. I had to add a blanket to the bed early this morning. Brrr. Out in the vineyards, the fields of tall grasses are parched brown while the deep-rooted grapes and trees stay green.

Make hay while the sun shines.

The Tour de France concludes today after a tumultuous weekend of hail and landslides shook things up along the route. This afternoon the cyclists will have a calm and relatively easy ride into Paris, the traditional, mostly ceremonial, finish. I'll be watching, if only for the nice aerial shots of the city.

Relief

The heat wave is over. In our region, anyway. The temperatures are more normal and it finally rained on Friday. This morning, it's cool with light rain falling. Such a change. We could actually watch tv up in the loft last night, and sleeping was much more comfortable.

Last Wednesday's sunrise.

Because the weather has been so oppressive over the past week, we haven't felt like doing much around the house. There is some painting and varnishing left to finish, and a few more things to hang up on the walls. But we'll get there, eventually.

Toasted

The grass in our yard is grillée, as they say. Grilled. Toasted. It's not unique to this year's heat wave. Most every summer has its dry spell and the grass goes brown. The green parts you see are patches of weeds that tolerate the drought better than the actual grass. Our lawn is really a prairie of wild weeds with some grass mixed in.

The last time I cut the "grass" was three weeks ago, on July 4. You can see it hasn't grown at all. The clary sage is thirsty.

Until it starts to rain again regularly, the ground out back will stay brown. Watering it is out of the question. Even if we weren't under water restrictions, it makes no sense to try to keep the lawn green. Our water is better used in the vegetable garden and for potted plants.

The heat wave is breaking. It's still warm this morning (the house will take a while to cool down), but there is a cool-ish breeze blowing and rain is coming in from the west. We're not expected to break 30ºC (86ºF) today, and it should be even cooler over the weekend. The high on our deck on Thursday was 40.5ºC, just about 105ºF. The humidity was very low, down around 20% or so. It was a dry heat. Thank goodness.

Stifling

Today is supposed to be the hottest day of our current heat wave, but the weather site I look at most often has dialed back the predicted high. It will be hot, but not as hot as they were saying yesterday. The northeast will get it worse than us. The problem we have is that the house has now heated up. It's not cool enough in the morning for the house to shed the accumulated heat, so it just stays hot inside, and gets hotter as the day goes on.

The daisies are starting to dry out. Maybe some rain will help them last a little longer.

So, we will suffer through another stifling afternoon and evening before the weather breaks overnight. They say it will cool down significantly on Friday and we'll have some rain. The weekend will be almost chilly. I'm ready for some of that.