March, 2018

No, we are not dostadning 

That is what the Swedes call removing unnecessary things to make your home nice and orderly when you think that the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet, to save precious time for our loved ones after you are gone. Translated, it means "death cleaning".  

My bucket list is far too long for me to contemplate an early departure but we have made an effort to reverse the American trend to be pack rats. Each time we return 'home', wherever that may be at the time, we have an opportunity to take a fresh look at all our stuff and decide if it has seen a better day and should reside in someone else's closet.

We too have things that we have hung onto for far too long and occasionally reinforces the 'let's keep it just in case' mindset when years later we do find a need or purpose for it. The one thing we seem unable to part with are pictures. OK, maybe pics of our exes are the exception :) Striking the right balance is challenging, but we are making the effort. The thing is, it takes a lot of stuff to do all the things we want to do.

It's not an easy life we lead.

Welcome to our modest abode

We often have great off the wall experiences wherever we happen to be, but this one definitely stood out. Last summer, we were puttering about when a friend docked his boat at our island, unannounced. Fair enough, but he had 6 people with him who came to visit at his suggestion and decided our place would be just fine to stop for a glass of wine.

You know you are on good terms with friends when they feel comfortable enough to do that kind of thing with nary a second thought. Turned out that the folks that were with him were all Turks (you know, from Turkey) with limited English but with a translator. The story was that the leader of the pack had just bought a local private school and was here with his entourage to see to its launch, so to speak.

Some of his administrative staff were going to be coming and going for a while so he rented our friend's island home for the year. Seems that the good fellow owned other schools too. As in hundreds of them, from K to universities all over the world in dozens of countries with a total of some 190,000 students.

 
Mr. Man was clearly a big dog. It was at this point that our friend quietly mentioned that the fellow just happened to be a Billionaire. That is spelled with a "B". Not being able to count that high, I ran into the house to Google it up (it's a thousand times a million dollars) and quickly returned with adoption papers for him to sign in the event that the subject should inadvertently come up. Any wonder why I suffer from low self-esteem? As hard as it was for me to admit, I was seriously outclassed.

He was a most unassuming fellow who was curious about everything (he pretty much took a self-guided tour of our cabin) right down to the functioning of our Swedish composting toilet system. He didn't even flinch when I broached the subject of the attempted political coup in his country. Wise way beyond my years, his focus was to spend the rest of his life providing as many free scholarships as he could to needy students all over the world, to educate them and turn them into responsible productive citizens. With his billions and my hundreds, we could surely make things happen.  

After barely 10 minutes of conversation, he invited Janice and I to visit him when we returned to Europe. Not wanting to look to anxious, I resisted the urge to run inside to pack. This might not be a big deal to you, but breaking bread with billionaires is out of our league and all jokes aside, we saw it as a great opportunity to understand what makes this kind of man tick...ok, and to see his country from the deck of his 104-foot (34 meter) yacht. Alas, the initial invitation was not extended beyond our initial meeting. Pity.

The moral of the story is don't invite us to visit you unless you really mean it, because we will show up.

This month's news

Janice, the arborist, climbing up to trim one of our 100+ trees.  I told her that female arborists excite me. Janice says that just her breathing excites me. Point well made.

Other than working our buns off on our current projects, we have made time for a serious amount of goofing off. All work and no play makes us seriously cranky. This month we attended the Menton (name of city) Lemon Festival. Think of it like the New Year's Rose Bowl parade, with floats, costumes, parades and the like, only here it lasts 2 weeks. 

There are numerous festivals in this area (they have never heard of a party they didn't love) for all manners of reasons and occasions. The lemon festival though, was new to us and not a disappointment. We walked through about 20 of the static displays, some as tall as 50 feet (17 M) and up to 100 feet (35 M) long. The name 'Lemon Festival' is partially correct as they use both lemons and oranges to create the floats and displays. 

As seen above, the 145 tons of fruit used are all held by rubber bands, preserving them to prevent rot and to allow them to be removed after the event and sold for consumption, for commercial buyers to make orange juice, marmalade, limoncello or donated to charitable organizations.

Next, we had friends John and Claire and 3 of the kids from our old stomping grounds in Brittany who planned to join us for a week-long visit. We had not seen them since we sold our home there and we planned to catch up. Unfortunately, we had massive storms that prevented the plane they were scheduled to take from arriving from Geneva and they were re-scheduled for a flight 3 days later. This killed their trip.

Days later, island friends, regular Epistle entries and fellow party animals, Ian and Lyne who have a second home nearby, showed up for a few days and joined us to take the short drive to 'La Turbie'. It is the Roman trophy erected to Emperor Augustus above the hills overlooking Monaco.

Speaking of the dynamic duo, they will accompany us next year where we have already reserved a place to stay on the canals in Venice Italy, for the world-renowned carnival there. Meanwhile, we put our new pizza oven to work.

The Epistle loses a reader

For the first time ever, we had a reader who wrote asking to be removed as a recipient of our monthly newsletter. He is a neighbor in California who said that he wanted to be removed because he did not care for our politics. 

I am well aware that not everyone shares my (our) point of view on all manner of things and that is fair enough. I try not to be particularly offensive to anyone, albeit not always successfully. This is not a news magazine intended for public consumption, but our monthly letter to family and friends, sharing our news about where we are and what we have been up to in the past month. I am not trying to build up sales figures here.

Each month, there is often a bunch of blah-blah-blah about what we have built or renovated because, well, that is what we do. Other than that, as you know, we write about how our lives are affected by where we are and what is happening around us.

I want to keep it real and transparent. I have no problem with anyone reading it and thinking "...there goes Michael, again" but I want to -and I will- write what I think without the PC police diluting the content. I know some will not agree with my point of view on all subjects and that's OK, because I don't necessarily agree with theirs. Friends accept each other's foibles. Family has no choice.

The good news is that I am sincerely and genuinely sorry if I hurt anyone's feelings by what I write. The bad news is that I still mean every word of it. You get this blog because I believe you have expressed an interest in keeping you in our monthly loop. We do not want to ever foist ourselves on anyone, so if that is not the case or you are losing sleep over my insensitivity, I will renew my offer to remove you from the mailing list for 4 easy payments of just $29.95 ...

"...There goes Michael, again" 

News of little use: The chip

I like my salsa and chips like my women. Blazing hot. Of course, in this household, I seem to be (understandably) the only one to appreciate that kind of prison humor because, I don' t really think like that, right honey?

...Right.

Still, I have come across an interesting challenge. Seems that the Paqui tortilla chip company will sell you one (not a typo) chip for a mere $79.  Reportedly the hottest tortilla chip in the world, it is a blistering spicy chip to rival the NYPD pepper spray. If you chose to indulge, please report back, as it will surely be Epistle worthy.

https://www.amazon.com/Paqui-Carolina-Madness-Challenge-Tortilla/dp/B01M748NRN

February, 2018

Go ahead,
make my day.

In 1972, I finished university in Montreal Canada, immigrated to the USA and moved to California. I was so anxious to go that I had even attempted to defect -unsuccessfully- two years earlier. See 'Taking a stroll down memory lane: The defection' Click here The epistle, October, 2009

California was the epitome of being on the bleeding edge of technology, was light years ahead in lifestyle and had killer weather. Over the years the politics deteriorated but I could put that in a mental box of sorts and just carry on. Lately, that has become difficult. There is an old joke that says that California is the land of fruits and nuts, but the nuts part is becoming less funny every day. 

Don't get me wrong, wild horses could not drag me out of here permanently, but some elements of life here have become more taxing. We may have to turn our home into a safe space to help the feds keep the mongrel hordes from breaching the wall. The state has become a land surrounded by reality and has done things and taken positions on some national issues that are quite vexing. 

Unless you have been stuck on the back side of the moon, you can't have missed the fist-a-cuffs between our Golden state and the federal administration. In wild twists back and forth, they have sniped at each other, trying to gain the upper hand at every turn. Admittedly, California has come up with some pretty creative ways to circumvent Washington's decrees. The creativeness has worked both ways though, as seen in the signs some citizens have put up.

There have been a number of cities all over California (and elsewhere of course) who had declared themselves 'sanctuary cities' and the federal government has been cracking down on them. Not to be outdone, our Mensa leaders declared California a sanctuary state on January 1.

When the federal government sought to arrest illegal aliens, who had committed new crimes after the initial felony of being in the country in the first place, our governor began issuing pardons. This made them ineligible to meet the federal criteria for deportation.  He said that he refused to do anything humiliating, which is ironic since he’s already a Democrat. (Oops, that slipped)

When the new federal tax laws that were recently passed limited some deductions, the state began working to pass work around legislation to declare state taxes a 'charitable contribution', making them fully deductible.

After a proposition to make growing and selling marijuana legal after January 1, the feds warned that they would flood the state with agents to enforce the law prohibiting it. Then the state announced that it would prosecute any law enforcement official that cooperated with federal authorities in the identification and deportation of illegal aliens in the state.

Had enough? No? Ok, how about this. Our legislature has introduced a bill to stop sit-down restaurants from offering customers straws with their beverages unless they specifically request one. A waiter who serves a drink with an unrequested straw would face up to 6 months in jail and a fine of up to $1,000 to mitigate the environmental damage done. Our town of San Luis Obispo is one of only two in the state to have passed the no straws policy a year ago.

Meanwhile, all state government forms now allow anyone to self-identify themselves as either male, female or "X"...(!)

This is the land of OZ.

Not to be outdone, there is a new movement afoot to declare a large portion of the state "New California", creating the 51st state and splitting it like North and South Carolina. The rural eastern part is far more conservative, while the western more populated coastal area is rabidly liberal. We love where we live (coastal) but politically, we are like fish out of water. It is not an easy life we lead.

Our system is being hijacked by folks whose idea of utopia is a place where you have free housing, free medical care, free food, free clothing, free education, no taxes, no bills of any kind and only law enforcement have guns. Before you scoff at such a ridiculous notion, I can tell you that there is such a place. In fact, I spent 30 years there. It’s called prison.

Needing to escape to a 'safe space', we thought it might be a good time for a little trip out of the continent for a spell, while they figure things out.

As we get older we might not get smarter, but hopefully we just run out of stupid.

The transition

Yup, it's that time of the year. The swoop-down-on-the-grandkids (9 out of 10 of them) in the Northwest [Oregon and Washington state] before making the hop over the pond for our season in Europe.

In our first 5 days, we... 

...loved up the 1 year old (you would smile

too if you had nothing in your pants)

...toured a fire station and a police car with the 4 year old

...went on water slides and to the maritime museum with the 9-year-old

...then drove 200 miles north to the next batch of 6 kids to wash, rinse, repeat.

The activities there consisted of playing board games and building a bird house with the little ones, playing hide-and-seek with the medium sized ones and taking the teenager and her boyfriend to visit a former mental asylum and roam the haunted buildings where they had performed lobotomies on patients (when in Rome...) By now, I was ready to be checked in and undergo one myself. 

Thing 2 and 3, teaching grandma the moves.

 Thing 4-5 and 6 keeping grandma company.

Daughter Amy is the principal of the very successful local home school group, which were putting on a science fair competition where Megan Grace and Christopher gave it their all.

Scientists in training

Next came Janice's absolute favorite activity.

Boarding our flight to France

What else is new?

We are home in Europe, so we have begun our routine of visiting cool new places, hanging out with friends and of course launching our projects for the season. The plan this year is to seriously upgrade the entrance area to the villa, finish a second lower level dining and living area and a bedroom. These areas, you might recall, currently look like WWII concrete bunkers. Think cement walls, ceilings and floors.... with no electricity. Janice's laborer has his work cut out for him.

Those areas are part of our summer rentals so getting it done is not only what we want but is now not optional. We jump at any excuse to temporarily walk away from it but fill our in between time with the fun of pushing that ball forward.

Happy Valentine's day from Saint-Tropez