Unfortunately we ended up sitting outside for much of the concert since neither of us could suppress our coughing. We enjoyed listening to what music we could here through the closed doors and watching the swifts fly around around the tower. There are only two in this photo, but there were squadrons of at least ten zooming through.
We stopped for a nice lunch in Villebois-Lavallette on the way to Chalais. At the champagne reception in the cloister after the concert there were enough munchies to call it our evening meal.
We spent the night at a chambre d'hôte nearby, where we met the friend of the proprietress, a M. Mazerolles, the name of our commune. He said that the name means "red house" in either Occitan of the Charente patois (we had been speaking of both and now we can't remember which applies to our town). This is no red house in Mazerolles that we've seen.
Our French taxes for two months of 2008 and all of 2009 are in the mail now, just a week and a bit late for 2009. Now we wait until August, when everyone receives their tax bill, to be paid by 15-September. We still have no idea how much our taxes will be or how much penalty we'll pay for being late. But we're wondering if we might need to find ourselves some part-time work just to earn enough to pay taxes.
Monday afternoon Ed went to the dentist, who decided that a root canal really wasn't necessary. He'll go again tomorrow to have his new crown installed. After the non-root canal visit, Ed went to get pictures for his Carte Vitale, resulting in one of the most grim photos you can imagine. But it will do, and is now on it's way back into the maze of bureaucracy. With luck, his very own Carte Vitale should appear in three or four weeks.
Our weather is being very up and down, cold and hot, rainy and dry. It was sunny and 30C the day of the concert in Chalais and rainy and 20C the next day. In the last days the forecast is showing storms, but they have yet to materialize, knock wood!
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