April, 2022

And Cedric makes 12

A proud mom who looks like she is saying "I did this!"

We have the pleasure of announcing and welcoming the birth of Mr. Cedric Siebenhaar, son #1 of daughter Mandy and husband Markus. That is Cedric Constantin Justus Siebenhaar (the first), to be exact. Rolls right off our American tongues, no? He joins the extended clan of his cousins in our family and rounds out our number of grandchildren to 12. He was born on April 3rd and mom, dad and Cedric are all doing well. We will give the family a little time to adjust and plan to visit mid May before our return to America.

Ukraine refugees  

So obviously, everybody knows that there is a war going on and there is a lot of refugees looking for shelter. I felt terrible about the whole thing so I decided to act and offer our place to house some of these poor people. When I saw a busload of them, my heart just went out and I couldn't chose so I offered to take them all in, if Janice agreed. Heck, we have a big house so I definitely know I would find a way to make it work. You can see them here and you decide. If this pans out, I may give up on deploying with Team Rubicon and just care for refugees.

Project update

What? Again? Is the nothing to do but work, work, work? What ever happened to being retired? I want a rocking chair! This is all coming to end, believe me. I am seriously missing our past travels to hither and yawn but the decision to buy this place committed us to do what needed to be done plus doing what ever Janice dreamed up in the meantime. This our 5th season here and it has become a wrap in spite of my thinking it could all be done in one or two. HA! 

We have a 1600 sf patio (150 sm) that was covered with uneven patio stones that had been improperly laid originally. We decided (we, meaning Janice) that we had to bite the bullet and fix it.  So last November, we hired a contractor to pull all the old stuff out and pour a slab so that we could stain it like we did our patio in California. 

A portion of our sorry looking patio (before)

During

 I did the staining myself this past month as it needed time to cure first

As long as we were at it, "we" decided to clean up the surrounding area too. As for money, well, as my grandfather used to say, "it only hurts for a little while". In for a penny, in for a pound. It's like getting married. You THINK you know what it entails and so does she. Only to find out your expectations are quite different. But I digress. It may have taken a lot longer than planned and surely cost a whole lot more but the result is worth it. 

No, it is hardly a 'French' look but we are not French and we are not pretending to be. The flagstone walkway leads to the poor mans mini workshop.

Janice, enjoying the fruits of her labor.

So, how do you know that you live in a Hoity-Toity area?

When there are more Uber helicopter rental counters 

at your local airport to take you home than...

...car rental counters. And...

...when local taxi drivers drive Porsches.

My 15 minutes of fame

It is often said that its not what you know but who you know that gets you ahead. True to form, we have a friend that is the editor and top dog of an on line publication in the Thousand Islands with a readership of over 5000 subscribers. Being one of a handful of people that read The Epistle, she got a kick out of what I wrote in January about my deployment with Team Rubicon, and essentially re published the story in this months edition of Thousand Islands Life. You can take a peek and see it  click   HERE

On the road again..

Finally, we hit the proverbial road and traveled clear across France to our old stomping grounds in Brittany to see friends. We spent a week catching up and stayed with long time friends Loic and Catherine at their home.

Years ago when we lived in the village, I used to help bottle apple cider from a friends Castle (a real one, built in 1624 and has been occupied by the family continuously for over 400 years) and later, took the dregs or bottoms of the barrels to a mobile distillery to turn it into what here is called Calvados. At home, we would refer to it as moonshine, hooch or fire water if you are an Indian. The difference between this happening in the back woods of Kentucky or here is that this operation is legal as it is carefully monitored by French Customs to make sure you are charged taxes based on the quantity you distill. Similar to maple syrup, we distilled 50 gallons of dregs to get 5 gallons of moonshine. This stuff is so potent, it could probably strip paint.

The distiller

So once again off we went to replicate the memory. The trick to drinking it, I am told, is to put your hat on the table next to your bed. You drink until you see two hats then it's really time for bed. The problem is that by then you also see two bottles and two beds. Getting into the right one can be a time consuming challenge, building a real thirst during the effort. Remember, I am told.

On our way back home, we spent a few days scoping out a few castles in the Loire valley. One was the Chateau Cheverny where during WWII France hid some of its national treasures including the painting "Mona Lisa". The other is Chateau Chaumont Sur-Loire.

"Honey, I'm home"

No self respecting person would visit the Loire Valley without doing some serious wine tasting, and it did not disappoint. We found a private winery that produced wines from grapes available only in their small immediate area and took the name Romorantin. Their vines were introduced by King Francois the 1st in 1519. Yea, we snagged a bottle or two.

Life here is... different

It's to be expected that living in a foreign country will have its benefits and challenges. After all, it's why we want the experience. There are things we experience here that we wish we would replicate at home. Like traffic circles, for instance. Being unaccustomed to having roundy-round traffic circles at home, they can seem weird and downright confusing or dangerous. But, once you master them, you quickly realise how efficient and time saving they are as you rarely come to a stop at intersections and never have to stand still at a red light. Then again, French bread and salted butter is enough to make us cry. We covet them the 8 months we are away.

Menus at fast food places are unidentifiable. Dominoes pizza has unrecognisable toppings. McDonalds not only serves wine and beer with your burger (that can be on a baguette) but has a desert that is, eh... unique. A hamburger bun stuffed with peanut butter and chocolate M&M's.

On the other hand, there are other differences here that can be...eh...different. Some gas stations (not all) do not have credit or debit cards systems at the pump and operate on a cash basis. Fair enough. They have up to 8 pumps for self serve, where you pull up behind the current customer at one of the pumps and wait your turn. When he is done pumping, he pulls out to get in line with all the other customers who have pumped their fill and are waiting to get up to the kiosk to pay their bill. There is only 1 kiosk and all must wait in a single line for their turn. Meanwhile, you pull up to the pump as the previous customer has left but you are unable to pump any fuel as the preceding customer has not reached the kiosk yet to pay and your pump has not been ‘cleared’. Once the previous customer at your pump has reached the kiosk and paid, your pump is cleared, you fuel up then YOU get in line to reach the kiosk to pay.

By now, I am fuming, the smoke is coming out of my ears and since no one has asked me if I am fond of the system, I remind myself that I am just a tourist with a house.

A similar system is in use at many building supply houses. There is only one entrance and exit and the space is only one lane wide. Once you enter you are in line behind all vehicles, picking up what you need as you are in line to the  exit where the attendant at the exit kiosk will all but search your car to charge you for what you took. This is a slow, methodical process with all the attendant chit chat while a line of drivers cool their heels waiting their turn. It can easily take a half hour or more to purchase as little as a bag of cement (something I have been known to do).

Cars lining up at building supply house. 

There were 4 more more in front of these.

By now, I am fuming, the smoke is coming out of my ears and since no one has asked me if I am fond of the system, I remind myself that I am just a tourist with a house.

We live on a cul de sac with 10 homes on it. 8 are small Fisherman's cottages (roughly 700 sq ft ea), our nearest neighbour with a real house and our 3000 sq ft villa. As best we can tell, there are 4 different types of addresses in the area. There is the street address like you put on your house, there is a civic address registered somewhere, there is a tax address and some other type of address that no one I know has been able to explain. My point here is that delivery trucks, service staff (phone company, power company and others) regularly show up with addresses that do not correspond to any of the above and are totally flummoxed as to where they should go. Pity the poor fire department, police or ambulance drivers. This is a phenomenon we have witnessed all over France.

The entire society is fanatical about proof of residence. You can hardly do anything without ‘proof’ of some kind. Flying into the country for a period of time to stay at your own home? Prove it! (A RECENT utility bill with your name and address) You want your mail forwarded? Prove you have another home. You want to change your TV programming? Prove you are a customer of ours!!! You want to take something to the city dump? Prove you live nearby. (No, I brought my garbage from 6,000 miles away to bring it here (!!!)

By now, I am fuming, the smoke is coming out of my ears .....  well, you know...

Here, we have an 'Environment Brigade' who seek out scofflaws who put their household trash in the wrong recycling bins. Huge fines are in order, of course. They have been know to install hidden cameras by public dumpsters when unable to identify recalcitrant lawbreakers. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you. I report, you decide.

Now seen on many US gas pumps

March, 2022

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...

...and their statues

Meanwhile...

February, 2022

 

CALIFORNI-I-A!

So, what is there to do in the middle of the freezing cold winter in California?

Go wine tasting with Maggie and Bobby at one of the 500 wineries in our immediate area or over 5000 state wide. California is the home to half of the wineries in the US so an emergency hydration station is never far away.

So what do we do when we have finished sampling the wines at the winery? Find another one!

Piper and Bruce, herself and what's his name

The Baby comes home

Our youngest, Cassie Anna, came home for a few days this month. The purpose of the trip was to accompany her grandmother back to Oregon where she will move in to her Taj-Ma-Trailer on their property. Sweetie Pie, as she is affectionally known to the whole family, is needing a little more daily help and Cassie and her husband Art wanted her to be nearby on their large property. Coming from the cold wet North West, Cassie was quite pleased to spend a few days in our warm sunny clime. Janice and I spent the past several weeks packing her mom's stuff up, preparing her for the transition. Art showed up after she left to drive her stuff back in his pick up.

A real bonus for me was having Art (an electrician by trade) oversee the preliminary wiring for a future Sauna on our property. He worked so fast that I didn't get a chance to get a picture!

Showtime!

As we go to press, we are 48 hrs from pulling the plug and heading to Seattle Washington for a week before boarding our flight to France. We have been here in California for only 2 1/2 months, much shorter than usual in order to try to get back on our pre Covid schedule and be where we should be at any given time of the year. Add to that that I spent a week of it on deployment and two weeks on quarantine and the time left to take care of business around here was pretty short. Still, we managed to get things and the property back up to snuff, so we are leaving it in good kit. No, no major projects got done but we are satisfied with what we did do. 

Always looking for a new skill set to pick up, I came across 

this in our hometown recently. Never know, could be handy.