Pretty dull day

Monday, August 16, 2010 Day 47
The rain continues. It fluctuates between a light mist and a somewhat harder rain, but no real gully-washers. The rain is very different from that to which I am accustomed. I tend to think of rain as accompanied by drama – thunder, lightening, wind, clouds moving in, clouds moving out. This is just gray skies and rain.

Despite the rain we went on an adventure which turned out to be, as some of my Louisiana friends would say, a blank trip. Saturday we received a flyer in our mailbox for Lidl, which appears to be Paris’ answer to the U.S.’s Wal-Mart. It sells groceries, clothing, hardware, craft supplies, back-to-school supplies, plants. I noticed that the sale starts on Wednesday, August 18. What I failed to notice, with my beginner’s French, is that the store doesn’t even open until then, at which time it will be there grand reopening. As with many grand openings in the States, they are offering a few items in limited numbers at steep discounts – you can get a 22” LCD TV for 199€, but there are only 10 of these. There are 40 surround-sound systems at 40€ each, 20 cordless telephones for 18€ each. I am betting the line for their 8:30 opening on Wednesday will be around the block! We don’t intend to find out, although we will check it out either later on Wednesday or later in the week.

Despite the walk we took, we have not even accumulated 5,000 steps today. This is the third day in a row. Sigh. Tomorrow we will HAVE to do something about that, rain or no rain. Maybe it is a good time to go to a museum – we still have two on our list. Perhaps the rain will keep the number of other visitors down. I don’t guess we will do the Louvre, however, as it is closed on Tuesdays.

Tonight I made biscuits again without using baking powder. We did find some in the store – it is sold in little envelopes about the size of a Kool-Aid packet (the non-sweetened kind), but we didn’t get any. This time I threw in a little parmesan cheese. I only had four ounces of yogurt, so I had to pump up the liquid a bit with water. Overall they came out quite nicely. They seem to rise properly without the baking powder, although I did up the amount of baking soda I used. Yesterday we bought 200 grams of bulk sausage at the market and this evening I fried it up with some onions, stirred in our last two eggs and some Laughing Cow cheese and made a really good concoction to go along with the biscuits. That and some cantaloupe made a delicious dinner.

Today we washed sheets and towels (two separate loads – it is a small washer) and we are having a struggle getting them dry by shower time and bedtime. We usually put them in the window to dry, either on the drying rack (towels) or hanging from hangers in the window (sheets). But there has been neither sunlight nor fresh air to aid in the drying process and we have been having to rely on a small fan and the ambient air in the apartment. I did warm things up a bit when cooking dinner!

We went for another walk this evening and managed to bring our step count to over 7,000 – still not enough for all the eating and drinking we are doing! Indeed, when we returned, we had some hot chocolate – an odd drink for the middle of August, but the weather is equally odd for this time of the year. The high today was 63 degrees. Usually Parisians escape the city to find relief from the heat in August. That is not necessary this year!