More Water Follies and Updates . . .

Well, we received an e-mail from our OTHER WATER attorney telling us that the flooding in Serge's noyer (walnut grove) is our responsibility. It was a good French lesson to decipher the three page legal opinion.

So at 4:30am, my time, this morning I called Roger and asked him to open up the little dam, or vanne, to our basin. He said that Serge's noyer is still flooded. Roger will call the forgeron, or blacksmith, who made and installed the vanne last summer. The night before we left France, my husband and I accidentally jammed the vanne so it can't move up or down.

Roger was happy that we finally realized the flooding problem is our responsibility. I will call him tomorrow, seven p.m. his time, to see what the forgeron had to say.

The Count's appellate case was heard on the first of February. We have not received a report back from our ORIGINAL WATER attorney nor from the AVOE we had to hire to plead our case in front of the appellate court.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that the day after we left France, one of our neighbors was walking through our property and saw that water was flowing profousely out of a pipe on the side of our house. He called Corinne, our housekeeper/caretaker/mediator and she came down from the village on a Sunday night. Again, poor St. Roger was pressed into service to help her figure out how to shut off the water to the house. (No wonder he's threatening to move into town into an assisted living center!)

The pipe to the outside faucet had burst in the freezing weather. We're thankful it wasn't an interior pipe. But that must be next . . . or maybe we'll be swept away in a flood. My zodiac sign is an earth sign but my husband, he's the problem, for he's a PISCES!!!!!! A Pisces should never buy a water mill in France.