A Trump supporter?
A white supremacist?
A Russian mole?
A shoe bomber who forgot her shoes?
Note the Sherriff standing by to take her off to jail. Oh wait! It's just Janice being all but stripped searched before we boarded our flight. After the TSA assured me that it was safe to fly with her, we continued on. Whew!
And we're off!
So, as I write this, we are back in France. But, before we arrived we spent a week in Northern Washington before taking our flight out of Seattle. While there, we visited a glass blowing studio and got an up close personal tour of the process. Such fun! Then, a binge visit of a number of other museums and venues got underway.
You see, all work and no play makes us cranky.
A commercial glass blowing studio
Airplane museum 1
Airplane museum #2
I just can't get enough of this stuff
Stopping by my local dealership, shopping for a new plane.
(Just kidding, Janice)
Visiting the Seattle Space Needle
Hanging out at the Chihuly glass exhibit
This display is 40' long
The precursor to the first helicopter (Leonardo da Vinci exhibit)
Truer words were never spoken
OK, once we woke up after a week of adjusting to the jet lag (9 hours time difference) we started putting the finishing touches on projects we had nearly finished before we left last December. The first was to assemble a 'mezzanine' bed (the upper half of a bunk bed) for the 5th bedroom we had just finished before we left. Next was to install the spa and outdoor shower we got.
Finally, we found a lovely wall mounted wine glass holder online. We loved it as it was perfectly suited for our wine cellar themed lower living room but as is usually the case, it was outrageously priced. At $525. it was beyond what poor Americans could afford so we had to resort to what we usually have to do, that is to send 'what's his name' to the workshop and build it himself.
Speaking of the wine cellar...
The cellar
Some years ago when we had our home in Brittany, I spent a good deal of time being taught the art of blacksmithing from an old 3rd generation master who lived in our village. I ended up making a number of things for our home there and brought some back to the island too. My 'masterpiece' was a set of doors for our wine cellar. When we moved to the south of France, I was not about to leave it behind and so I brought it with us. Fortunately, I found the perfect place for it in our new home.
The shop was a virtual medieval movie set with a dirt floor
and was like something out of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
The apprentice working with the master.
If in doubt, the master is on the right :)
The set of doors took me over a month to make and required over
30,000 hammer blows to shape and imprint the forged marks on the steel.
Quite modest by French standards, our wine cellar holds only 63 bottles.
But what we may lack in quantity, we more than make up with quality.
Seriously, we often buy our wine in bulk directly from a local winery and bottle it ourselves
for a fraction of the price of the same commercially bottled product.
Old school manual corking machine in action.
All this works sure makes a guy thirsty.
The War
Not writing something about the current war going on 1500 miles from us is like writing about the Titanic and forgetting to mention that it sank. I have wined about the price of gas here many times over the years and this will be no exception. The price of gas is going up daily like at home but knowing that we started at twice the price in the first place makes it all the more painful. We follow the US news daily just like we do at home ( We are subscribed to a US network here)
We have seen prices jump in the US by as much as 8c daily but recently saw a price jump at our local station by $1.16 US per gallon, [25c Euro or .38c Canadian per liter] in a single day As of this AM, our price for a gallon of gas is $10. /gal (2.50 Euros / lt, $3.50 Canadian / Lt)
President Zelensky (Ukraine) has gotten a lot of great press for being such a staunch advocate for his country. Many people know that he was a comedian before getting into politics so entertaining was thought to be his forte (especially when he won the Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars) and he was not taken seriously when he sought office. Little did anyone know he could fight well above his weight in world affairs. Still if you want to see another side of the man (and his wife) that took my breath away you can see it
HERE. If you are not blown away in the first 5 seconds, you can go back to watching Putin's speech.
Cultural differences
So, in America we do this to our statues...
In the Ukraine, they work hard to fill sandbags to protect their buildings...
Meanwhile...
