wow mitraillette #399

I kinda can't believe I haven't posted in so long and yet at the same time of course I totally can.

What can I say, funk/time warp/space out/veg out etc.... whatever. Probably time for a machine gun post...

• Griz is doing awful. His wound from spring which I assumed would be healed by the time I got home is still there and even bigger due to his scratching it all the time. I got a Hav*hart trap and am trying to catch him for TNR/doctoring of the wound. Of course the TNR is way late; I'm sure he's fathered umpteen litters of kittens... but I'm trying not to feel guilty for not getting it together enough before to try to help more. 
• Of course my head being my head I'm freaking about the risk of catching either TC or Beau (big white tom who recently deposed Griz as King of the Porch and another reason I finally got the trap) instead of Griz. They both need TNR/vetting too but Griz is in more need plus I don't have money for all three right now.
• Plan with Griz is - assuming the vet thinks there's any way to get him healed (i.e. to leave it alone and let it heal) and assuming he doesn't have FIV or feline leuk already (miracle if he doesn't have either or both) is to bring him in and doctor him in the den and try to either get him to an adoptable state or adopt him ourselves (Sam & Lucy do not yet know that they are part of the "we" there). But as I said, his not being infected would be the miracle of all miracles.
• Ideally I would be able to get him first and then the others little by little. 
• Beyond all this cat stuff is school of course - I'm pretty caught up on the course I'm teaching currently but still finishing Paris grades (one month after re-entry) of course. This year things went mostly better during the program itself but I won't see it as real progress until I'm able to keep up on grading DURING the program. At this rate I think that will be another couple of years but I hope I'm wrong.
• I got great pics from the plane window on my way out of France which I'll post for you soon. Even fun aerial view of the point of Brittany where Lydie & Pierre & I were just a week prior to that. We flew right over it. :)
• S&L are great - Lucy gained a little weight in my absence; Sam is looking nice and trim. Various weirdnesses in the house but I keep telling myself the essential thing was the cats were good so I'm slowly getting better at letting the other stuff go (missing salad fork, missing cat brush, the fact that for various reasons I'm pretty sure she didn't spend as much time there as she was supposed to, etc.) Nothing broken or destroyed this year at least (first year you got the gory details here in HOV, last year one of my favorite tin serving trays inexplicably set out on the deck in the sun and rain for the duration of my absence - hard to decide which was worse, the rust or the fading)...
• Mostly just watching TV a lot and reading but almost nothing done around the house - neither regular things I should do like cleaning, nor project-y things I had in mind for the return - and no emails or letters outgoing (as some of you can attest). Same old same old - it's hard to write people when you have nothing to talk about that isn't depressing or at best blah.

I guess this was more of a small artillery barrage than a machine gun post. Eh ben... 400-year-late grading calls...

Please cross your fingers for me re the porch cats and send some mental offerings to the animal gods or to St. Francis of Assisi.

there's no place like...

Writing this in the plane - to be copier/coller'd later (full disclosure, quoi).

What is it with transports and having really icky flaky heads on seats in front of me this trip? I never told you guys about the guy in front of me on the way to Caen that first weekend. It's pretty hard to gross me out but after one glance at this guy's head (le pauvre - he must have had eczema or something - c'est pitoyable) and I have to close my eyes and turn the iPod on extra loud and force myself to sing along to distract myself. Anyway the guy here in the plane is not that bad but still...

Definitely on my way back to the U.S. The nice Air France/Delta flight that usually can be counted on to be almost luxurious, even in economy, BOTH ways, has let me down this year. Obviously AF decided just to let Delta deal with this particular flight - we have the smallest plane I've flown overseas since 1985 or so (2 seats on the sides, THREE in the middle [had to spell that out for effect] - it's pretty ridiculous).

The next part shows both how spoiled and addicted I've become re: visual media/stimuli. Since it's an older and smaller plane we don't get our little personal movie screens with the individualized channels; we have the (not-so-)old school big screen in front with the little ones hanging from the ceiling every so often. (On the bright side there were technical difficulties 15 minutes into a Paul Giamatti movie whose characters mumbled too much for me to be able to hear all the nitty gritty and now we're watching that Matt Damon/Emily Blunt movie - I missed the very beginning plus I'm old so I'm blanking on the title - which is turning out to be much better than the previews ever made me suspect; aside from being pretty good it has Terence Stamp and John Slattery, who has yet to realize he needs to marry me.)

Sidenote: a girl up ahead is wearing a purple béret.

Air France apparently did give Delta some food because the chicken dish we just had was ultra yummy (for airplane fare anyway). The things served with it were various degrees of icky-passable-ness, and nationalities. English cheddar (c-a-d almost white but so yummy - why do Americans make cheddar so orange? and don't get me started on Kraft mac and cheese), dreadful fruit salad (definitely American - when fruit has absolutely no flavor what does that mean nutrients-wise??) I seriously regret eating it... and ordering coffee when I KNEW it would be American-style, i.e. brown water and what little flavor was present was somewhere in between insupportably bitter and downright rancid.

So there. I'm going to pay attention to the movie now; promised myself I wouldn't sleep so that I can be on US time faster - the transition to FR time this year was much more work than usual and normally my US time change upon re-entry is even rougher.

Marché aux Puces, Day 2

More good stuff. I still have a few people to buy for so I'm probably going back out July 2, plus there are a couple of other places I'll get one or two things.

 Antique terrine.

 I can taste the paté already...

 Watercolor of Azay-le-Rideau - this one is something of a panic gift.

 For KT - she and I share a love of antique silhouettes - this one is different but I think she'll still like it.

 I neglected to put the pen with this; it's about 7 inches long.

 Every year I see old pencil boxes and never get them.

 This one has an added comparment inside; most have one big trough or two, not the little section.

 And the lady gave me the fun old rickety dip pen as a bonus; she said it was sad to not have something inside the box. :)

 Two more bistrot cordial glasses.

Very fun.

The lady at the stand where I got the glasses was super fun to talk to. First she thought I was French :) which is always fun, but when she found out I was American she said she used to work for a company that had lots of American employees who would come to France for training (kind of like Michelin). She was in charge of getting them housing and helping them get set up with utilities and all the practicalities.

Especially fun was next... After she retired, she kept in contact with her boss from there who was also retired. One day he called her to give her new contact info because he was going back to work and was starting a new business which would call for his traveling back and forth between Australia and the U.S. She was 65 when she got the call and the boss was 83!! She said she had always wanted to get into brocante (selling antiques/bric-a-brac) and she thought if he could start a new business at his age she might as well start her brocante business! I think she was nearing 80 or maybe a tad over so apparently she stuck with it.

Mitraillette #319: Good Stuff

OK, I'll make an effort...

• Went to St. Germain l'Auxerrois today and I think it's the first time I've ever been in it. Pretty cool and extremely fun porch, which you don't see that much on Paris churches.
• Fun very light spitting rain that lasted the better part of an hour before increasing in intensity timed perfectly for my 30 minutes that I was killing in the park before meeting one of the students at 15h.
• Bus!
• Nice lunch with CVK.
• Didn't get lost on the way home from lunch even tho I had to go thru la Place des Victoires, which seems to be sort of a black hole for me normally. It's like a mini-Luxembourg - I almost can't go thru it without getting lost.
• Controlled myself admirably at THREE different potentially spendy moments.
• Got a good deal on the train tickets to see Lydie et Pierre in Caen next weekend - saved about 18€!
• The afternoon guy au Lutèce was really nice as usual.
• My mosquito bites are letting up a bit.
• Extremely fun Japan style dog in the park. Inu desu!
• Remarkably free-of-pee-odor stretch of the park where usually it's strictly hold-your-breathville.
• My favorite guy at the FranPrix cash register.
• Finding out that the laundry detergent I'm almost out of and will definitely have to buy a new box of will only be 5€ instead of the 8-9€ I was expecting it to be.
• Remembered to buy more Toilet Duck.
• Giggled as I grabbed it because it always reminds me of Smack the Pony.
• My so fun and quiet bedroom with the great breeze (nothing, nothing, NOTHING like French air coming thru wide open windows on summer nights - so nostalgic too) and the nice hard mattress, where I'm heading now... :)

This is how much I am addicted to coffee tables...

I never knew that if I am sitting on a couch I absolutely HAVE to have something in front of me upon which to put all my crap!  That's a plastic drawer organizer thingy if you can't tell. I don't have nearly enough clothes to fill the two other dressers in the bedroom let alone that thing, luckily. It's actually doing a pretty fair job as coffee table stand-in.

This doesn't have anything to do with the coffee table, I just think my toilet paper rocks. Unfortunately it comes in a six pack of rolls of which three are this, and three are  FLOWERY :(  plus it cost: 2,77€  ($3.92 by today's rate). The rolls are downsized, like everything over here except the cathedrals :) , about 2/3 as big as our rolls (1/2 if you like those jumbo rolls the sell in the U.S.)

Then again I'm drinking a very respectable red wine from Ardèche which only cost 2,30€ but came in a normal-sized bottle so it all evens out :)

The apartment is not as charming as last year or the year before but it is quaint and has lots of fun quirky French aspects. I'll probably do a vid this weekend sometime.

Ma nouvelle pub préférée

C'est trop marrant et c'est parfait avec le bouledogue français.

Paris digs and other stuff, or: Fun With Links

This year I started out just as stressed as usual about my Paris apt., but it worked out to deal with one of the apt. companies this time, and the more sane one, to boot! So lease confirmed, just sent the invoice to Study Abroad, just waiting to hear from landlord to arrange arrival stuff, etc. Oh and I have yet to line up my personal residential insurance policy (nominal sum - required for anyone renting a residence in France). This one is a little weird looking but there were a lot of my main picky issues that it fulfilled; and for all its weirdness it's still a little more expensive than I would have liked but honestly for all my parameters' being filled this one is not that much. (End of rationalizations. :)

They have some kind of mojo on the pics on the site so that when I save them and try to post they get refused so you'll have to just go look here if you want to see. I'll of course take (better) pics when I'm there. :)

Progress on other Paris stuff:

• Rennes hotel lined up
• Tours hotel lined up
• Homestays - just waiting to hear back from the housing lady re the family assignments
• Sorbonne - scheduled the placement test and sent student info to Maria, my contact there
• Paris hotel (first two days of students' stay) in progress
• Opera/ballet outing... next on the list... We're either going to see Les Brigands at the Opéra Comique, or Les Enfants du paradis at the Palais Garnier. This is the only current stress-inducer which hopefully before I leave today will be settled.
• Sent excursion (Mont St. Michel/Touraine) info to my contact at RailEurope - so much easier when he can do all the tickets for us, etc., and then we can just pay via Study Abroad

Next:
Versailles réservation (hopefully June 10)
Other museum outings, reserving for group everywhere and tour guide in some cases
Writing out château/wine cave tour guy in Tours to set up our tour for May 29
Get started on any revisions to syllabus, etc.

Qu'est-ce que c'est Thanksgiving?

(my part of our lay-led service at UUFC yesterday)

That’s French. “What is Thanksgiving?” French is a big part of me and the beginnings of its hold began at Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a big part of me, too, or I of it. Growing up with Thanksgivings at my mother’s hand formed a big part of who I am.

There’s my meticulousness and attention to detail, what some people might call being picky, but which has its strong ties to those Thanksgiving dinners, and our daily dinners of course, where Mom taught me the proper way to set the table: glasses and plates and silverware “just so” even if for our standard farm supper, everything lined up an inch in from the table edge (nevermind that on days when I was particularly mad at Dad I’d put his silverware all whopper jawed – really showed him). We upped the ante considerably at Thanksgiving though, not only with the fine china coming out and the bronzeware eating utensils Mom loved so, but the elaborateness composing each setting:  two glasses, three plates, two forks, soup spoon, dessert spoon, butter plate and individual butter knives. Usually there were place cards made by me, upon which I had glued leaves or heads of wheat, another side of Susan, the art part, sprouting.

Thanksgiving was the dinner each year where we had actual courses: salad and soup before the principal victuals which of course were the same Thanksgiving menu each time with Mom’s special sage dressing (that’s “stuffing” to some of you probably), an extra batch of oyster dressing for Dad (which I grew to love later) and the other standard Thanksgiving fare although we favored candied sweet potatoes to sweet potato casserole, and Mom always made her fried parsnips – a true melt-in-your-mouth delicacy. This yearly pomp is in me, too.

Qu’est-ce que c’est Thanksgiving? It’s learning who you are and how you like to do things, feeling proud when people ooh and ah over the beautiful table, learning how to converse politely and only when spoken to with 7-10 adults at the table each year (we never had a kids’ table at our house, my brother was 8 years older than I and no other kids were ever there for Thanksgiving).

Thanksgiving had a lot to do with the French side of me, too. Yes I teach French but it’s always been more important to me personally and privately, than it has been as a vocation. Two of our yearly invitees to the Clay Thanksgiving were maiden cousins of my grandfather, Rachel and Elizabeth Loughridge. They had long been retired by the time they started joining us for the dinner. Elizabeth had been a librarian and Rachel, my idol, had spent her professional life as a French professor, and had been chair of the Romance Language department of Central Michigan University; I never knew her before her 70’s but still from the age of 7 or 8 onward I wanted to emulate her more than almost anyone. She was a beautiful bird-like woman with cute little tailored suits and short white Audrey-Hepburn-in-Roman-Holiday hair. I adored her. Starting languages in 9^th grade there was never any question but what I would take French, mostly thanks to knowing Rachel and wanting to be like her.

So qu’est-ce que c’est Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is dinner, and yearly traditions and people that form us. Of course later we learn to take Thanksgiving with us. Any year when I don’t happen to cook all of Mom’s standard Thanksgiving items, Thanksgiving is no less crucial. We realize that even when every box is not checked for things we used to consider essential to Thanksgiving, this time is just as fulfilling and nurturing. Thanksgiving is about people and fellowship, fried parsnips or not, Mom and Dad and Rachel or not, Ohio or not... etc.

I’ve celebrated numerous Thanksgivings overseas of course, and they’re no less nurturing when they’re completely out of the American context. The biggest Thanksgiving feast I ever attended was in France, actually. The organization France-Etats-Unis (France – USA) hosted it. France-Etats-Unis was a national club with local chapters in most decent-sized French towns where French people who were interested in the US or who happened to speak English for whatever reason (many were WW2 vets) got together monthly with Americans (we’d let Brits in regularly too tho :) to have coffee and speak English together. (It was common to hit it off with a couple or a few people in particular who would occasionally invite you to dinner or out for a local sightseeing trip, too; many of these friendships lasted for years to come.)

The chapter of France-Etats-Unis in Tours, France, used to hold a MONDO Thanksgiving feast in the wine caves of Vouvray each year. The caves are huge, but of course there is not one big room, the tables snaked through the various tunnels of the caves, so though there were 70 or so of us there that day, French and American, you could only see a couple of tables’ worth of people around you.

We got to the table to see the most charming little individual menu cards on our plates. The items on them entailed a not-entirely-accurate but thoroughly well-meaning list of Thanksgiving food: Turkey, yay! Chestnut purée (um most of us had only heard of that thanks to Dickens or someone but OK sounded good). Apple compôte (far more French than Thanksgiving-y but we all loved it so absolutely bring it on!) The list continued with various vegetables, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, etc. We tucked in and eagerly awaited the spread.

A handful of items were served as individual courses (the chestnut purée for one) until the turkey came with a couple of vegetables on the plate and a mound of mashed potatoes. At last! We had just noticed the absence of the sweet potatoes when almost simultaneously we looked at each other, mouths full, in complete confusion, then lightbulbs started going off and we were met with the challenge of trying to chew and swallow and laugh discreetly all at the same time. The sweet potatoes were already present. The mashed potatoes we had mixing around with turkey and other goodies in our mouths had been diligently sweetened with sugar. I should say too, excessively sweetened, but any sugar in mashed potatoes already qualifies as excessive.

In retrospect I see that in a way those were the best sweet potatoes I ever had, prepared with friendship and generosity and the most tangible intent of making someone feel at home. (No matter how crazy – I still picture the French people cooking and taste-testing – rolling their eyes “They EAT this stuff?!” they would ask each other, incredulously.)

Nowadays I’m learning to broaden my mental definition of Thanksgiving even further. My hiking group put on a pre-Thanksgiving feast at Oconee State Park last week where 3 different kinds of dressing (none like Mom’s and yet delicious in their own right) and deep-fried turkey on paper plates made up the perfect Thanksgiving, because 25+ people had all pitched in, lending camp stoves, trading off stirring things, sharing wine from Nalgene bottles, helping make sure the coals on the dutch ovens were duly hot, and especially: sitting around the campfire afterwards digesting and communing.

Qu’est-ce que c’est Thanksgiving? What is Thanksgiving? It is something which we sometimes plan out to the N^th detail only to find out it is molding us much more in return. As much as we have clear, distinct ideas and memories of what Thanksgiving is all about and how it should be, we are equally capable of transmuting it to other experiences, other dinners, other venues. Thanksgiving is fellowship, friendship, caring, mutual giving and mutual thanks. Thanksgiving is inside us – we take it everywhere – if we choose – it is at your parents’ house, then your house, at friends’ houses, and even abroad or in the mountains; it’s with family and friends or whomever we want it to be with, or sometimes with whomever we happen to be with. Like most good things, Thanksgiving is there in our hearts if we take time to look and honor it – for me it’s right between the fried parsnips and the mashed potatoes with sugar in them.

La perspective française??

Notice anything slightly strange? These are pics I wouldn't show to just anyone, you know. Too many people would say they were proof of the closed-off-ness or maybe a certain egotism (to avoid the word some of the students have used this year due to a couple of unfortunate incidents: "meanness") of French people. To me they seem quite incongruous since I don't find French people to be closed-off at all. In fact I thought the first one had to be a mistake but the other day the other one appeared in the apt. building, so I decided it wasn't.

And deep down I think it's kind of fun that a doormat should be at least equally concerned with cheering the residents of the home as it is with visitors. It's kind of a command as you leave each day: hey! rock on! or sim.

(In case it's not obvious - these are the outsides of other apt. doors in my bldg. - it might seem like it's from inside the apts but remem. we're in City Apt Heaven.)

Rain

It never really bothers me in France. Well as long as I just have activities with myself. It's problematic with group stuff with the students, or can be.

I'm at café Notre Dame, just ran some errands and am taking advantage of the rain's having emptied out the café before I head home.

Brief hello to test the blogger app on the touch mostly just so you all know I'm still kicking. This won't become a habit, partly bc it takes forever for me to text on here with my fat thumb hitting delete every time I try to hit an M, mostly bc my french is gettig relatively little practice so far this year.

So here's a pic to celebrate.

Considerably less rainy than today.





- Posted via BlogPress & my iPod Touch

This year's shoes

How big a difference fun shoes can make! I was in a really bad mood yesterday (yeah, I know - crazy, ungrateful, and just downright wrong) but today has been going much better, even before the shoes actually but it's fun to think they're responsible. Being in a better mood AND having got lots of work done AND having feet that are chic but also no longer mad at me (for some reason the shoes I brought with me have been really making my feet hurt altho they were broken in and not too small and no heels and everything).

We did Rennes, Mont Saint Michel, Tours, 2 châteaux and a wine tasting this weekend and of course I have loads of pics (added plus tho she didn't see it that way is one of the students' camera broke so she took pics with mine the last day - they should be fun and probably more numerous than my standard fare altho I actually was taking quite a lot more than normal in general) but I'm off to run another errand and then work at the Café Métro at Place Maubert (right by my house) while I wait for Natalie (student from last year coming thru town and will stay with me a couple of nights) to get in from Brussels.

So feast your eyes on these first with a promise of more to come - probably tonight sometime...

elevator moratorium

This year I have an elevator but I've successfully eschewed it no matter how tired every day and no matter how many times I stop back at home for stuff or to drop things off.

NB: I'm on the 6th floor (US) of my building (5th FR).

yay.

I even took the stairs the two times students have needed to stop over with me real quick - one time I BEAT them to the apt. even tho they took the elevator (and got in the same time I started up the stairs); the other time I got up to my floor just as they were exiting the elevator. Yes, my elevator is fairly old and slow, but still... not too shabby I think.

If I don't get in shape this summer it won't be my fault!

gauntlet o' fun tidbits (a.k.a. mitrailleuse #19073)

Sans ordre particulier...

• pretty much keeping the TV on MTV-type channels nonstop while I work - every so often I get sucked in but not as much as the first couple of days - ANYway every time there's something particularly cool I add it to my YouTube summer2010 playlist (or I add it to the postit that has future candidates for the playlist on it if I don't want to risk getting sucked into 4 hours of Web2.0 playtime)
• lunch with Christina yesterday - SO yummy little tarte-specializing bistrot (I had broccoli/carrots/spinach - miam! and we split a carafe de chardonnay - as I told Christina, I HATE chardonnay in the States - it's just downright insipid. But chardonnay here always is yummy.) The resto itself went straight into my Paris address book for future ref. - also we had a fun chat of course plus a nice walk to see cool stuff the likes of which only the famous CVK can seemingly just pull from thin air regardless of what corner of Paris one happens to be in
• Friday Christophe and I got sandwiches and sat at the Pompidou (I have one sunburned shin to prove it) and yacked and ate and watched people. Very cool - not least because he is someone who not only had my exact job before and so knows that there are cool things about it but also truly knows the more crap side of certain Clems*n things so I can bitch with impunity and not feel like I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth like I do when I'm griping to some people
• remarkably uppity fruit guy yesterday down the street - especially as he had no apricots - shameful!
• apricots in general seem weird in France nowadays - I noticed last year that they seem much less common than in the old days but when you do find them they are quite iffy - weirdly pale and never ripe - kind of like produce sections in American groceries - NOT like it used to be buying fruit here - will have to try to find a fruit market sometime so I can feed my apricot fix - it's not France if I can't have apricots!
• conversely the Clementines are as yummy as ever and still make you do a gustatory double take b/c they're sooooooooooooooooooo sweet - almost too sweet - honestly if you could open a clementine in the U.S. and put in some kind of jam that was clementine flavored that would almost be as sweet as this - but more orange flavored and less syrup/jam-ness
• my copy guy is still alive and well and -again this year- is great at taking in stride my strange requests - he might be channeling my dad, too, because he is tremendous at looking at a situation and figuring out a simpler way to do it - he helped me several times last year with stuff like that - yesterday it was scanning to pdf a bunch of stuff that the students needed since I found out from the FNAC that our book will not arrive until next week - so I (don't tell the copyright gods) xeroxed the first little bit to hold the students over until the book order arrives - then put my pdf on Blackboard last night so they can print it at home to bring with them
• ah the convoluted ways of going about things here in Paris with no printer and no fun email scanner like in the dept. office at Clems*n
• have yet to have a baguette! I'm not kidding either!
• have yet to have a crêpe! oh là là là là!!
• Joseph from the dept. is going to be here next week and kindly offered to take the students to the Cinémathèque - very cool impromptu outing and very nice of him
• Natalie from last year's group will be here a few days next week as well and will stay with me again - I enlisted her to direct an outing to the Catacombes since I've never been and the students might like it - that one will be voluntary - that week is filling up and how! so if some want to do their own thing totally cool - I still want to go! :)
• dream that the kits were here the other night so real that every so often I feel like I've seen one of them out of the corner of my eye and when I came in yesterday eve I looked around to see where they were sleeping :)
• rather fun cat at the librairie where I stopped yesterday to buy a used copy of Mauriac - kind of a Lucy-mooded kit - I held my hand for her to sniff and she promptly bopped it with her paw - no claws but quite a hard tap like the Lucy Boo does - then she put her paw down and returned to the sedate look she had when I walked in (which was another reason the bop surprised me so much)
• need to get serious about the cat and dog pics this year - I've already seen way more than last year - want it to be more of an official thing this year - there are so many fun cats and dogs in all the stores and cafés
• 4€ at my corner grocery for a truly yummy Touraine sauvignon blanc.
• Just remembered I have yet to open that rouge that the landlady left me as a housewarming. Must remedy that situation - probably Tuesday night if all goes well that day.
• French TV shows (i.e. original French, not dubbed US or German stuff) seem particularly few and far between this year - things with plots that is - seems like way more reality TV and game shows and shows that digest other shows - consequently I'm watching a lot more US stuff in translation than normal - last night I watched 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old episodes of 24 Heures Chrono and New York Police Judiciaire and Lost: les Disparus. I did NOT watch Les Simpson even tho it seems like one particular channel is entirely dedicated to them, right next to the one that seems to be dedicated entirely to Stargate SG-1. (NYPJ is Law & Order, the others you should be able to figure out)
• I really really really really really really need the Parishuttle people to call me back! gah!
• Of course I have plenty of other stuff I could be doing. But I was already working straight thru from 7h50 to just before starting this post (maybe 13h30?) so I've kind of lost momentum. Glad to have found that much in the first place actually - my head is way less wonky than it was all spring but I'm still having a fair amount of trouble concentrating and staying on track.
• OK these Stargate people have dreadful aim. They're trying to kill some big blobby monster thing and they didn't even come close - with machine guns! I haven't shot a rifle since I was 12 or so probably but I bet I could have hit it better than them.
• The last thing I did work-wise was to clean out my school email a bit - it is down to one single screen of emails for the first time in months. France makes everything better!
• Message from Leah on Facebook and an email from Paul today - I guess everyone in my brother's family is holding their own more or less (my sister-in-law's brother committed suicide last week). Aunt Charlette had surgery Thursday and I called her beforehand and she said my cousin's neighbor's baby just died. Kelly's Westie, Hamilton, died just a few days before I left, and that's just the tip of the iceberg where crazy awful turmoil in people's lives right now is concerned. Anyone know if there is some planetary alignment causing all of this?
• weird place to end this and not very fun (belying the post title) but I'm pooped - better get out and about a little bit to clear my head before digging back in on work - thank goodness for French Sundays - even in Paris lots of things are closed so it kind of forces you to chill a bit - and tomorrow's one of the less-official holidays so lots of stuff will be closed then too - by the time I head to the airport Tuesday morning to greet the students I really might be all caught up on work!

N'oublie pas le Dramamine!

J'ai fait cela hier alors j'ai le droit de la poster puisque l'anglais n'est pas nécessaire :) Maintenant sur FB aussi...

Stills of Flat (formerly titled: "Video of Flat")

First the warning... I'll be blogging regularly in the French blog Va te faire bloguer (linked in sidebar of HOV as well if you lose it and are interested). But I will be blogging less and less often here b/c I want to really be controlly about my English use during this year's program. I think I may take it down to certain times of day only and for extensive English use on the internet I'm going to limit that to one day a week. So what I might do here is either just post pics with French titles and then I might go back periodically and add more details, or I might go crazy on the weekend and plan a few English posts in advance, to actually post during the week little by little... We'll see. So color yourselves forewarned altho most of you can deal with it pretty well I think, at least my standard passel o' readers :)

As a prize in advance for putting up with the upcoming few and far between bits of English, I tried to post a really bad video (technically speaking) but nice views of my apt anyway. Mostly it was to play with uploading from the Flip camera (the students don't know it yet but they will be videoing their walking tours [they have to do one walking tour each week - something they found online or in a guidebook or whatever, plus another with Christina and me, then towards the end they have to create their own - something with a personal connection to them and a very clear context: historic, thematic, whatever] as well as interviewing on video their Sorbonne profs and host family members or other Frenchies they may know - questions re culture - part of the culture component of the course "History and Culture of Paris" yadda yadda yadda).

By the way I have some weird allergy thing going on but just way high up inside one nostril, not both. If I were home I'd think I had a cat hair up there - maybe I got one from the street somewhere. Didn't see any kits altho lots of fun little store dogs were in evidence, as well as a bunch just walking around with people and hanging out at the Café du Métro, where I had my second croque monsieur in as many days for lunch :) (with a salade verte this time at least).

ANYway...... feast your eyes and then I have GOT to go!!! You guuu-uyyyyys, I MEAN it!!!! (invoke 10-yr-old voice :) - or tee hee - just invoke my voice since it still sounds the same :) nyernt nyernt). Surprisingly productive morning - must not lose momentum and there's the whole JET LAG thang, ya know.

Lefthand window looking out from living room.


Right hand window and my desk in front obviously - this is the office corner of the livingroom.


TV etc. between the two windows, desk again to right.


Note right edge of desk, so you see we're really dealing with one room, 1/2 living room, 1/4 office, 1/4 bedroom :) Anyone who ever saw my Aub*rn apt. (the last one), or my casita in Tucson, knows that I actually kind of like smaller living spaces. (This will be a problem if I can ever afford to buy and try to aim for something too large, but somehow it makes me scatterbrained to have too big a space to contend with. My 2BR apt in C*ntral is just about the limit. I'll have to work on this.

Anyway my bed here is super comfy - nice and firm like I like and I guess the Susan Shui is cool b/c I didn't feel weird like I couldn't figure out what position to sleep in, etc., which is what it takes forever to do if a bed is situated weird in a room. Sometime I'll take a pic for you of the inside of the wardrobe - before I buy anything - I'm really proud of myself on this year's packing; some would say spartan, but 4 tops, 3 skirts and 3 capri pants seem like plenty to me (fully half of the items are super thin jersey or linen or gauzy so they packed down super tiny too!)


Turning to our right again, here is the LR half, in front of the lefthand window. The fireplace is too frigging cool for words, honestly. The black suitcase you see there can be regarded as scale (it belongs to one of the two students who came in yesterday too and went to travel in the south before we start our program next week) - that suitcase is pretty deep but its height is that standard one between the little carry-on roller bag and the one that is kind of the standard large one.

Wow that was totally incomprehensible.

Let's try: it comes up only to my mid-thigh and I'm 5'3" so... anyway it's not a huge suitcase and yet look how big it is next to the fireplace.

The weirdest thing about this whole spring/semester/year/couple of years (pick whichever you think most accurate) is that thing in my head that used to let me keep hold of the most buried, 400-digressions-ago, convo or writing point is in pretty much total meltdown.

But I digress.


On around, obviously. Here's the couch. As Tracy-chan pointed out earlier in the spring it is exceptionally uggo-scuggo with that leather thing on it. Come to find out it is attached - it's like a faux cover made of faux leather but which produces, unfortunately, an anything-but-faux ugliness. Ah well. It's fairly comfy except I have never liked leather or vinyl furniture much anyway so normally I'm sitting at the desk or on my bed.


Vooooiiiiiilà, now you see how the room comes full circle, so to speak. The thing that looks like a fun louvered room divider is actually a floor to ceiling radiator. Then the end of my bed. Straight back the middle is the mini-hallway towards the kitchen, bathroom and front door.


Entering the bathroom. Unusual to have the toilet in the BATHroom actually, traditionally. But lots of these little apt's in big buildings have things scrunched together in unorthodox ways.


Farther in.


My fun French-style shower. Love it. Did I tell you guys I installed a pomme douche (handheld shower thingy à l'européen) in the shower at home this spring? I also put one of those little valve things so you can turn off the water for a few minutes but not have to re-calibrate the stupid hot/cold water ratio (my tub water knob adjuster thing - mélangeur in French, so succinct!) is crazy hard to adjust right - one of those clear plastic ball kinds - whenever Sam & Lucy & I buy a house we are replacing that shit toute de suite if the house has it, make no mistake. Likewise in the kitchen I think there should be a law that kitchen faucet handles have to be the long lever kind where you can do them with your elbows - and one per temperature - OK I'm done now). ANYway the shower test this morning proved quite satisfactory, good water pressure, good temp on the water heater (Barmy Barbie, the landlady, had told me I could turn up the temp if desired but it seemed fine to me) and fun bright shower. Nice that they had installed a shower curtain at some point - that's the one thing I am not very good at - taking a TRUE French shower, i.e. sans shower curtain, without getting the entire room wet.


More bathroom.


Heading back out - another part of my tremendous packing: 3 pairs of squishy shoes! OK sure part of packing light is so I have lots of room to buy stuff to take home so it's a given I'll have at least twice as much clothes (and shoes probably too) on the trip back.


Turning to the right as you exit the bathroom here's the front door and coat rack, plus two step stools - one for use in the hallway there (the shelf you see at the very top has a twin facing it which is holding my suitcase :) The super tall step stool is for the kitchen shelves (see below :)


I have a washer! For some reason I never remembered seeing mention of it in the original ad and when it dawned on me I just decided to bite the bullet and go the laverie route if nec. But I was really happy to see this. The only weird thing is I asked Barmy Barbara if there was something upon which to hang wet clothes and she looked at me like I was from outer space. It was finally decided I would hang them on clothes hangers and hang all those from the shower curtain rod. I'm thinking of buying a drying rack tho at BHV or somewhere else cheap.


Way more prep room than last year, plus more stove burners and three of them are gas!! yay!! I have to find time to cook more than last year now since I get to do so on gas, which I haven't had since leaving Alabama. Yay! Fun lived-in cutting board, electric kettle and 3-way window (love those and they always remind me of those Ibis waitressing summers. I didn't get a picture but one of those crazy bleu-blanc-rouge Obama magnets is on the side of the microwave. (I'm all for Obama, actually, just think it's funny for another country to sell magnets of OUR prez).




Scene from the balcony - Notre-Dame contending with some fog this morning, just a tad.


Looking out the balcony to the left right (full disclosure -I'm editing this 8 hours later than when I originally posted - I was literally falling asleep while doing the captions earlier and will be amazed if this is the only thing that turned out wacky).


The right hand view again but closer up - I was hoping you could see the incredibly fun little cafe down there on the right, where it looks like a driveway; very fun little cafe in a shady impromptu square kind of thing. Other cafés and restos abound around this house tho; probably plenty just as charming in different ways.

I'm off for a quick café near last year's flat then a couple of errands over there. Probably will trek past St. Séverin then and head over to say hi to Notre-Dame, which I have yet to do this time (crazy! in the 5^e for 29 hours and no view of N-D yet except via the balcony).

***** later - um, yeah, never made it - conked out completely right after that - it took me about 12 tries to finish those last two sentences in fact because I kept nodding off and dream-typing... you can imagine how comprehensible that stuff was. :) then I'd wake a bit and try again, etc. etc. etc.

1989, Paris, France

Curbside secretarial skills... I had scanned this a while back but now that I figured out (finally) how to make the scanner work with the mac I will be able to post lots of old France pics!

Mes bagnoles préférées de l'été dernier

I.e., my favorite French wheels from last summer.

'Cause I completely forgot to post them for you after Paris last summer. And 'cause I'd rather be in France driving one of them than grading compos... Well yeah, I'd rather be in France being run over by one of them than grading compos for that matter.

You saw this one already on the blog and by now you might have seen one or two here in the US, altho the 4-door model over here is a bit bigger I think.

A wacky car you've probably seen here altho likely not as many as you'd see there. There are now actually 2 smart cars in the Clems*n area that I see regularly. Crazy!

And you might not have seen Citroën's version. Lots of car companies have smart cars there - Toyota has a really cute one, too, called the IQ. I like that some of them are curvier - seems like the ones I see here are very angular.

A wacky car most of you probably haven't seen over here (barring those of you in big cities that is).

I surprised myself by liking it. This one was in Bruges, by the way.

Then you have cars which exist here but seem to have shape-shifted in France. Honda Civic anyone? If they looked like this here I might have stuck with Honda.

The French do have their cheesy (npi) side but this still surprises me.

My favorite car in France last summer. Well, really my favorite was one like this but pale metallic green that I saw in Paris on a regular basis passing by Café Notre Dame, but I never got a shot of it.

This one was in Tours. So put green paint on it in your head and that is the car Sam and Lucy and I will be driving when we move to Touraine. (I specify Touraine b/c if we were in Paris we wouldn't bother with buying a car of course.)

Or we could just take Tully! This is really how he would look in France (as opposed to the photo last summer of the 5-door version). I finally saw a two-door one that was the same model as mine that same day in Tours. (Most of the Yaris examples in Paris [snort - Paris Yaris - kee] were the 4-door hatchback; never ever saw the Yaris sedan we have in the US.)

keep forgetting to share this

Some of our more fragile-sensibility students were a bit taken aback by their Louvre card this summer - I finally remembered to purloin an image off the net for you. I was kind of jealous actually - not that I wanted bosoms on my Louvre card but mine was a quilt-effect des têtes de chef-d'oeuvres, all too small to really enjoy.