Country living

A few mornings ago, while munching our morning bread, we noticed one of our extra "fat balls" (seeds in fat, for the birds) was on the floor and the mesh had been nibbled through -- we've had a mouse visitor. (We had a mouse several years ago, one that got closed in the kitchen, ate everything it could find, and finally died under the sink.) We set out our live trap and the next morning we had ourselves a cute long-tailed field mouse. We took her along when we walked up to recycle glass and opened the trap at the edge of a field. The little mouse reluctantly left the cage, then bounded, Pepe le Phew-style, not into the field in front of us, but across the road and up the drive towards the house behind us. (Sorry, we didn't think of taking a picture until we were walking up the road. A video of the sproing-sproing-sproing escape would have been even better.) Since we've not had a mouse all winter, we suspect that she came in when we had the door open on a warm day. Perhaps we should leave the trap set all the time?

And another missed photo op. Saturday morning we went to the foire, a souped-up market, in nearby Chasseneuil. The usual market stalls with food are augmented by clothes, household goods, and an assortment of other things. The foire in our nearest tiny town, Montemboeuf, has just a few extra stalls. Chasseneuil has many more, our favorite being the poultry, ducks, geese, guinea hens, chickens. And, since it's the time of year to start up your potager (vegetable patch), there were lots of stalls with plants and seeds.

Yesterday's paper said that this past winter was 2 degrees Celsius colder than the average of the last thirty years, causing a large increase in the use of power for heating. And now we're 15% behind on rain for the year.

At the lower right, we added a widget that allows you to sign up for an email within an hour or so whenever we update the site. (You'll want to uncheck the boxes for RSS and web slices.) Our example of this got through Gmail okay, but ended up in Apple Mail's junk mail folder.