Chateau de CostaeresOne of our favorite beach walks is on the top right headland
Well, we are here. We made it without fuss or drama, just the way we like it. We managed to visit Joe (who happens to be our pastor) and Charlotte, Ed and Marilyn and daughter Kami in Los Angeles. Together, we visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential library and had a blast. After wrapping up, we flew to Paris. Thanks to our cleaning lady Mireille the house was impeccable as always and we soon settled back in.
We have started making the rounds visiting friends even though the weather has been colder that we have ever seen it here at this time of the year. I had forgotten just how bone chilling, soul sucking, cold could be. (25 F, -1 C) Note to self: Winter in California, spring in France.
Janice with her mom
Friends Joe and Charlotte
Daughter Kami with us by a piece
of the Berlin wall at Reagan library
Touring the old Air Force one at Reagan library
In fact, we got here to a weeklong snowstorm in November that was a first for the area in the past 30 years. Al Gore, you charlatan, you let me down again. Where is that ‘global warming’ you keep promising us?
Janice immediately reported for her first treatment at our local hospital. In New York the treatments take about 90 minutes. Here the treatment was exactly the same except that it took 5 ½ hours to get around to it. We hope that it was just first time patient blues and that visits from the hospital shrink, esthetician and other assorted hanger’s on won’t be the rule.
Yearly maintenance on entry light
We soon got off to a start on this year’s projects. Nothing major mind you, just little stuff to make living here better, like a counter top for the washer and dryer to allow clothes and linens to be folded. Or, another cabinet in our dressing room for additional storage. Bedroom door trim here, 4 new room radiators there, repainting our entry light (a 5 foot rooster head sculpture), it all adds up. [Old stone homes cannot really be retrofitted for central heating so each room must have its own radiator. We have replaced 6 of them to date with 4 more rooms to go. Depending on the size, two can cost as much as a central heating furnace at home]
Before
During
Not bad for a slacker with a rusty hammer, huh?
Friends on both sides of the pond ask us what kind of odd items we brought over this time. 3 years ago we brought a kitchen sink with a bathroom sink wrapped in it and I have yet to hear the end of it. You would think that was weird or something. Last year we brought a kitchen food disposer for the sink and a reverse osmosis water treatment filtration system (R/O) as the items are either unavailable or exorbitantly expensive here.
The problem was that the R/O was defective and in spite of having a new part shipped to Europe, it simply would not work. So, we brought it back to the US (without the tank), exchanged it for a new one and brought it back with us. It works great and we no longer have to purchase and lug bottled water. We are nothing if not determined.
The only other item of note we brought was Ethel. Every night I put her into one of the rooms and shout “This floor had BETTER be clean by morning, or else”. Janice rolls her eyes and mutters something about my being a “sexist p.. ” Ethel is one of those newfangled robotic floor cleaners and is a testament to our laziness as to how much we love it. The only downside is that it doesn’t have a short skirt. It is the size of a flattened shoebox, weights as much as a toaster and cleans all the tile and hardwood floors in the dining / living room / kitchen / 2 bathrooms and 3 out of the 4 bedrooms (the master is carpeted).
It operates on an indoor GPS system and is meticulous in crawling under every piece of furniture, cabinets and around every chair leg. My job? Keep the battery charged and change the swifter cloths. Oh, and issue the nightly manly commands. Still, it might be best to keep it on the down low, just between us or I won’t hear the end of this either.
(AKA Jacques Cartier's digs)
Far be it for me to steal his thunder but it must have been quite a surprise to the indians to be 'discovered'. They seemed to think they knew who and where they were all along. Christopher Columbus probably held an opinion on the subject also as he seemed to believe that he discovered America some 4o years earlier. Then there were the Vikings.....well enough. Suffice it to say, he was quite an explorer. Well my Canadian friends, this one was for you.
Le Barrage de la Rance
It seemed silly to drive near the worlds first hydro electric plant powered by tidal action alone and not see it. So, after strolling the medieval walled city we stopped to have a peek (also in Saint Malo) and chatted with the technicians. I wonder what we will do for fun tomorrow.
Life in the French lane
Every time we transition from one place to another, we start a choreographed dance of sorts suspending and re-instating everything from satellite TV service to magazine subscriptions, home telephone and internet, car insurance, cell phone contracts and on and on and on. It would be silly to be paying year round for services we would only get to use for part of the year.
Invariably, there are hitches in the giddy-up, like magazines that continue to be sent to where we are not or requests for internet reinstatement that are incredibly slow. At the island, a phone call a few days prior to our arrival guarantees that everything will be up and running when we walk into the house. Here, a ‘show up in person’ visit to the phone company office is mandatory, where you stand in line for 45 minutes waiting to talk to a representative and have him place an order for your internet service.
This, of course, is after you have provided him proof that you are the homeowner (a utility bill) and a signed authorization allowing them to make a direct debit from your bank account to pay your bill. Then he tells you that it could take up to two weeks to get it up and running. After 9 days, we returned to check on another issue (45 minute wait, of course) and incidentally found out that somehow our request for internet had been canceled “…un issue technical, monsieur”. A new order was placed, fast tracking us to service “within two weeks”.
Finally, we got things sorted only to find that the service was intermittent. That is we were on for a minute and off for hours and it was up to us to guess when our minute of service was occurring. Another call to the company (30c a minute to talk to them) and we were given an emergency appointment with the technician to come to our home to fix the glitch…a week later.
One of the things that we find quite interesting here are the differences in TV commercials. Here you have the usual product pitches but you also see ads against human trafficking. Makes you wonder what kind of joint they are running around here anyway? They also frequently run ads for entire countries. For instance, Nigeria runs a spot touting itself as the “Gateway to Africa”. Macedonia plugs its infrastructure, its educated work force and believes that investing there would be “a wise profitable decision providing sustainable growth”. Finally, Uzbekistan would like to remind you that as far as they are concerned, it is a ‘tourist destination’ worthy of your visit.
As novel as these ads may be to us, they reflect the broader view Europeans have of the world. ABC news in the US touts its nightly broadcast as “World news tonight”. It should really say “World news tonight… that happened in the US”. The news coverage here truly covers the world on an order of magnitude from what we see at home. We Americans are embarrassingly, shamelessly insular.
Prince Andrew was recently caught up in the Wikileaks scandal when he was quoted as saying that Americans knew little of geography. I would say “the nerve of him” except that I hate the fact that he was right.
We are bracing ourselves for the onslaught of Christmas events and get togethers and hope your holidays are memorable also. C U next year.
[Editors note]
Last month I wrote about our home town in California having been rated in a new book as the happiest place to live in America. One of the two of you who read this blog sent me a link to a video news story covering this very topic. It’s pretty cool if you are of a mind to watch it. Go on, take a peek. Then you will both have seen it ;) Just click on the link below.
