A shower! and an upstairs toilet!!!

No pictures yet, because i’m still in shocked overjoyment, but today Gaël came over and hooked up the hot and cold water for the upstairs shower, and also set up the upstairs toilet, so now, but for some joint work, we are a slight few steps away from having an upstairs bathroom (the floor, the counter, the second shower wall, the sink, the faucet, are all to come soon).  Tonight also i took the first outdoor solar shower of the season.  No pictures, we need some private time to process these major events, but of course they’ll come soon.

New haircut

It was a sunny day two weekends ago, the weekend of the Folles journées de Nantes where we puttered around the house and soaked up Bach and made lots of vitamin D with our skin in the beautiful light coming through the windows.  We are very impressed with the unexpected solar passivity of our little house – the insulated slab and the light-colored terra cotta tiles are a great combination, and now in the lengthening days of February the solar panels keep the slab heated enough during the day so that we only make one fire in the lovely fröling, at night.  And the lemon plant shares our opinion, and is now covered with white polka-dot blossoms, enough so that if they all come to fruition we’ll be making a big batch of limoncello just from one potted lemon tree.

We made some chappelle-applesauce too, with the great apples that M. Roullier père gave us, which we’ve stored in the chapel; and we’ve figured out a good trick, adding in dried figs and a browning banana will sweeten it naturally and give it a delightful crunch, and it’s very good with cinnamon, and the great fresh cheese called faisselle which is like cottage cheese but not chunky.

It was a good day for a haircut, so we got out the clippers and Gabriel got the Tintin cut, even though he would prefer a mohawk; tintin is our compromise.

Cip is still not better, he’s going to be the Million-euro cat in a short while here; his eye got reinfected, and so he gets drops in the morning and at night, and they might have to close his eye surgically so that it can heal, and then if that doesn’t work they’ll just take out his eyeball.  It sounds better in the latin name for the surgery, which i forget now, but ends with -echtomy.  He’s literally worth his weight in gold though, because he is a talking cat, and actually says ‘hello’.  I just wish that France had a Sécu for cats, otherwise we’ll have to loan him to the circus to keep him in antibiotics.

Heat

HP Energétik came back and are bringing the heat to our house in time for Christmas.  The lovely Fröling (it sounds like an endearment, to a non-germanophone, like darling  or liebling or something Madeleine Kahn would have said in Blazing Saddles) is ensconsed in its permanent resting spot every since last Friday, when Simon and Olivier came back and set up the chimney (with its gorgeous blue stainless steel innards, soon to be black) and started hooking things up.  It is a log-fire hot water furnace, and works in perfect harmony with the solar panels and the 1400-liter hot water tank that were responsible for our warm outdoor showers this summer.  Our fröling chéri is 92 percent efficient, that is, as long as i manage to find wood dry enough, 92 percent of each log will be converted to hot water, which sounds very much like a practical alchemy and very desirable now, in December, when everything is blue and cold at Maffay, and the laughing duck is back in the lake across the meadow.  It has its own computer.  It cost almost as much as my college education, excluding books and alcohol (but i did, after all, go to state schools, and one might posit that my education was not 92 percent efficient).  Also, the fröling will last about 30-40 years, so amortized over time, it’s a bargain.  It is quite possible that we’ll light the first fire tomorrow, and the house will then become hotter and hotter in two-degree increments over the next week.

Also Simon made a lovely boeuf bourguignonne and we ate it all up on Saturday for lunch.  He’s practicing to make it for Malin when she returns from Sweden.

As for our fröling chéri, I’m already planning on a delightfully long shower, once everything gets all hooked up, and we’re in the house.  Gabriel has a different goal:  he’s more worried about how Santa Claus will get down the new chimney, which very luckily was installed just before Christmas.  Simon and Olivier assure us that the all-weather cap on top will not prevent the entry of North Pole dwellers.

Bel anglo-saxon

Il y aura certainement d’autres photos à venir de notre nouveau camarade de vie l’autrichien Fröling qui va nous réchauffer les pieds et le cœur l’hiver venu. Il était livré le tout dernier jour d’avril, ensuite Simon et Olivier sont venu et Pierre-Yves a amené une poulie qu’il utilise pour soulever les vaches pendant les veulages, pour soulever notre ami et le rentrer dans sa chambre. Il a fallu ces trois hommes en plus de ladite poulie pour le convaincre de rentrer dans sa pièce, pourtant fait exprès pour lui. Il y a 2 cm. d’écart entre le chauffe-eau solaire dans son veste gris, et le mur en brique. Il pèse 400kg à peu près, ventre à vide, et rempli d’eau, en fait 1400l de plus. Mais déjà, c’est le sport journalier de la cour de Maffay de venir voir le temperature des capteurs, et celui de l’eau dans le ballon. Et grâce à lui nous avons desormais une douche solaire dans le jardin.

Mer licht

The rest of the solar installation: it must be said for HP energétique, but when they were here working on the roof installing our solar panels (which don’t work north of the Loire of course, but look nice on the roof), it was sunny non-stop. The day after they left it started to rain. So we can only deduce from this experience that if you want sunny weather, you should hire Simon and Olivier to come and install solar panels on your roof.

(Le restant de l’installation des panneaux solaires. A l’honneur de HP energétique, il faut dire que pendant les deux jours où ils installaient les panneaux solaires sur la toiture (qui même si les pessimistes disent ne marchent pas au dessus de la Loire, sont très beaux sur le toit), il a fait beau sans arrêt. Le jour où ils sont partis, il a commencé à pleuvoir. Donc nous ne pouvons que déduire de cette expérience, que si vous voulez qu’il fasse beau temps, il faut embaucher Simon et Olivier à venir chez vous installer des panneaux solaires.)

Going solar

The weather listened, changed its mind, and got sunny. Today it finally sprung here all around. The end of winter whispered in the air, riding back from dropping Gabriel off at the lake through the teeming fields (everything’s twittering, and skittering about and bursting into bloom and leaf). Gabriel’s sixth birthday is tomorrow, proof that it’s spring in calendrical terms. He’s at sailing camp at the lake this week, and fell in the water today while looking for shells. Pierre-Yves’s horse is on the verge of having a baby (horse). The tulips finally opened up just today. And, more evidence of recaptured light, Simon and Olivier (of the newly baptized HP energétique SARL) stopped by to install our solar panels into the roof, to catch the sun before it goes away again. And we are so pleased to see this transformation of our home, because it means that soon, very soon, we will have hot showers and heated floors, and lovely reflections of the sky in the roof for photographs.

Here’s what it looked like today.