Another week ...

We're just back from a lovely mid-day concert in Angoulême, part of the annual Piano en Valois festival. We saw a young pianist, Gaspard Dehaene, play some Chopin noctures, a Lizst sonata, and a strange modern piece, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, by a contemporary American composer, Frederic Rzewski. On the way into town, we joined a long traffic queue caused by strikers blocking the road. They're still expressing dissatisfaciton with having to work till sixty-two. Apparently, they've also stopped delivery of aviation fuel to the airports, and we read there is a gasoline shortage in the Dordogne also.

After our bespoke linen cabinet was made and hung on the mezzanine last year, we decided to stain it a red color that seemed to match the walls closely. Our idea was to make this massive thing blend into the walls. Taking advantage of the last open windows days of the season, Ed set to work staining the cabinet. Only to discover that the color doesn't match as well as we thought, and, in fact, is just enough off to be jarring. Time for Plan B. New color choice and painting underway.

Last Sunday we again visited the Fête du Pain in Cruzeau. We bought lots of bread made in the old ovens. There were new bakers this year. Apparently last year's group pocketed a bit more of the profits than they were supposed to. We had our lunch there, which turned out not to be one of our favorite meals, strangely unbalanced in the fat and protein direction. The starter was two huge portions of rillette and pâté, both delicious, but much too much. Then a slab of grilled pork, delicious, accompanied by ... a sack of potato chips. Then a chunk of cheese. All this accompanied by stacks of delicious bread fresh from the oven. Finished off by some canned fruit salad, heavy on the maraschino cherries, accompanied by freshly baked brioche. It took our stomachs several days to recover.

We're having some beautiful fall weather now, foggy mornings and crisp sunny afternoons.

There's scaffolding around the kitchen-bedroom part of the house now. If the weather holds, they'll start replacing the roof tomorrow.