Still waiting for summer to appear

Seeing we had a bit of a time for a break, we took ourselves off for a long weekend in Paris where we walked our little tootsies off visiting primarily the Lourvre and the Musée d'Orsay. We didn't take many photos, but here are a few at Facebook. We're having a bit of trouble figuring out when we last visited Paris; it may be something like 15 years ago. My how time flies. This is certainly the first time we've gone at high tourist season. The lines were interminible. (You can buy tickets online for the museums now. This allows you to shortcut the lines, but we didn't realize it would be such a problem.) And us country rubes felt assailed by the big city noise. But we ate well and enjoyed our time.

Work on the kitchen moves with forwards and backwards. Ed installed the lovely new wall-mounted faucet. Oops, we didn't pay enough attention to the measurements, and it turns out the end of the faucet is too close to the countertop, even now. When the new, normal height counter is installed, it will be closer still. So this is now uninstalled (before we even took at picture of it!) and the wall repaired. Back to the drawing board we went. This morning we visited our kitchen guy in Angoulême and chose a counter-mounted faucet. It will be installed with the counter because the way the taxes work it's cheaper for him to install it (lower tax) than for us to install it (higher tax). After some deliberation, we also delayed delivery of the sink and counter until September. This will mean we can wait till the hearth tiles are in installed before installing the rest of the floor, which will make things somewhat easier.

The weather continues to be a major problem. The official report shows that spring has been several degrees C colder than usual, with just over half the sunshine as normal and about a third more rain. An especially stormy period started the day we left  Paris and has caused flooding in the northeast and southwest of the country. Predictions for farmers are looking now if it doesn't get closer to normal.

To close things off, here's a picture of a baby pear: