Weather, weather, everywhere

Seems like the whole northern hemisphere is having a strange, cold winter. Like everyone, we're getting quite tired of the cold. The snow is a bit of fun (Pogo and Sophie enjoy it too), but the roads are not cleared around here (snow in the Charente is not a normal sort of thing) so we're a bit housebound. The postman missed deliveries on two days last week, the sacs jaunes (with paper, metal, and plastic for recycling) didn't get picked up, and the mobile boulanger didn't show up on Saturday. We have a package that's gotten as far as Bordeaux, but UPS hasn't been delivering because of "adverse weather conditions." The forecast shows above freezing temps (with more snow followed by rain) starting on Tuesday afternoon. Meanwhile, brr!

Tuesday the tree surgeon came again to trim the willow and the lime. In August, he removed a tree that caused the willow to be misshapen. With a severe trimming, we're hoping it will come back with a more graceful shape. Here's before and after:

In the summer he said the lime just needed a light trimming, but he cut it back pretty hard too. It did look a bit overgrown in its spot and frequently shed limbs in a high winds, so we hope this works out okay.

Both Pogo and Sophie are proven rodent catchers now. On our evening walk one snow-lit evening, Pogo tossed a shrew out of a clump of grass. The next day Sophie caught a mouse in the yard and spent an hour tossing it in the air and running after it (of course, it was a well expired mouse by then). This would be fun to watch if it hadn't been a real mouse once.

Here's some trivia from a recent newspaper. (The numbers are from 2006, provided by INSEE, Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Economiques.)

• There are 11,004 foreigners living in the Charente permanently; 150 nationalities are represented.
• 5,083 Brits live in the Charente permanently, giving the Charente the fourth largest Brit population of the départements. Half of these people are 50-74 years old.
• 1,531 Portuguese in the Charente, the second highest group of foreigners, followed by 684 Moroccans, 604 Algerians, 347 Dutch (this is where we'll count, starting in 2008), 312 Spanish, 224 Belgians, 193 Germans, 149 Turks, 64 Italians, 56 Russians, and 29 Chinese.

Kaye finally finished this season's xmas decorations, which hung on the tree for about thirty minutes before we started disassembling it.

Ed's still busy finishing around the new windows in the bedroom. There are lots of challenges from the way the openings were originally made and finished. If the roads ever clear, we need to go to Angoulême to get more of the textured wallpaper to refinish the window "nooks."