Well, in my last post, I said that we could maintain an even 19°C in Closerie Falaiseau, our 400-year old home in Blois, but I spoke too soon. Also, I’m not convinced that 19°C is really warm enough when you’re sitting at a computer for long periods! To allow for the BIG FIREPLACE OPERATION, I’ve moved my office into the guest room. I still have more or less the same view, only a little more restricted, but when the living room is at 20°C, the bedroom is only at 17°C. Maybe it’s because there is carpet over the heated floor in the bedrooms. Who knows?
We ended up going to buy a stand-alone heater so that I won’t have to sit with my legs wrapped up in a blanket and gloves on my hands any more. We could heat the house more, as we did today, but the cost is prohibitive and we don’t need a higher temperature in the other rooms. I also bought some leggings. I asked the lady for a collant sans pieds (tights without feet) which is what they used to be called, but she corrected me : “ah, des leggings” (pronouncing it the French way). I didn’t catch what she was saying at first.
Relationnel has completed stage 1 of the BIG FIREPLACE OPERATION. He has put up a PVC curtain to separate the room in half so that the rest of the house isn’t covered in soot. He added another curtain around the fireplace while he was sweeping the chimney and donned some more effective overalls than last time. Also, he made sure the vacuum cleaner didn’t blow the soot back into the room this time. It’s all a learning process!
Today, my wonderful new Pavoni espresso coffee machine arrived direct from Milano. This is a great extravagance, but I have developed a fixation about being able to make proper cappuccino. It has an automatic cappuccino attachment just in case I still can’t manage to make that thick creamy frothy milk that I like. We had to buy a magnifying glass along with the leggings because neither of us can read the tiny print in the multilingual instruction booklet, with or without lenses/glasses.
The translations into French and English leave much to be desired. The translator obviously didn’t have the machine in front of him/her when doing the translation. That is quite obvious. Also, the English has more information than the French. I am going to have to make an effort and try and read the Italian, I think.
So far, my milk foaming efforts have not been brilliant. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a stainless steel jug (the one my sister-in-law bought me in Australia is in my missing suitcase) and they don’t seem to sell them around here. I might try the Italian shop in Blois tomorrow. Drummer brother says you have to use the “kiss” technique, but I don’t really get it. I can see that I’m going to have to look at a lot more YouTube videos. Any suggestions are more than welcome.
The coffee itself’s good though.
