Note: Blaise is my husband. Well, actually he's a pseudonym for my husband, because said husband is currently at a talk and so can't be asked whether he cares whether this gets posted with his actual name. Points to anyone who knows my husband and can identify why this is a fitting pseudonym.
When my children were young, my mother used to insist that it was important that we get out of the house and have an adventure every day. And she would tell me about how when we (my sisters and I) were small, she made a point of having an adventure with us every day. Fortunately for her, apparently I (and my sisters) were sufficiently docile and innocent to think of going to the grocery store or the library as an adventure. Unfortunately for me, my intrepid travelers are extremely jaded, and would never consider a trip to the grocery store to be an adventure. (Unless of course someone let a bear loose inside the store or it could only be accessed by tightrope stretched over a ten lane highway or something of that sort. Actually, an "all you can eat" chocolate sampling station might work too, come to think of it.) Of course, Blaise's adventure did not, so far as I know at least, involve any bears or tightropes (or unlimited chocolate). It also did not involve the grocery store or the library.
For the last decade or so, Blaise has slept with a CPAP machine at night. This has (at least) two positive effects. The first is that he sleeps. The second is that I sleep. There may be others. In any case, the mask that goes with it should really be replaced about every 6 months or so because the bands holding it in place get stretched out and the tubing cracks and various other things like that. His mask dated to our initial move to Marseille nearly two years ago, and so it wasn't working as well as it should have been. Of course, getting a replacement mask meant getting a prescription for one from the doctor, and that meant getting his sleep study redone. So on Monday night he "slept" without his CPAP on (and I slept on the couch, which was quieter) and on Tuesday night he went to the hospital to spend the night hooked up to tubes and wires and electrodes to confirm that he did indeed still need the machine. Naturally, he did. When he checked out the doctor let him know that he would be getting a call that morning (Wednesday) to get him a replacement machine.
At this point, Blaise has had two nights of not really sleeping, and so when he gets back to the house around 9:30 he isn't exactly at the top of his game. As promised, the CPAP company calls around 10:30 and sets up an appointment for him at 1:00 that afternoon. Blaise keeps asking where the company is located, and the person on the phone seems reluctant to give him the address, which seems a little bit odd, but after all, it's the company that the doctor told him would be calling, at the right time, and on his cell phone which doesn't exactly have a widely distributed number. And the person is calling him by name. So he looks it up on Google maps, and discovers that it's way over in a different suburb of Paris. And that said suburb is not very well served by public transportation. No matter. He keeps hunting around and realizes that there's a bus that goes there from Melun at 12:23, and that he can get the bus to Melun at the gare at 11:00. If he does that, he'll only be about 10 minutes late for the 1:00 appointment. Of course at this point it's 10:48 and he's neither showered nor really eaten, but he throws on his shoes and hustles out the door to catch the bus.
A couple of hours later the rest of us are sitting down to lunch (Wednesday's are half days for French students until high school, and so Cherry and Ezio are both home, and Sapphire finished classes last week because her school is hosting Bac testing) when the doorbell rings. That seems a bit odd to me, as our doorbell almost never rings except when the kids are getting home from school. In any case, I go and answer it, "SOS Oxygène. J'ai votre CPAP." is the reply. I realize that the reason that the guy on the phone was being so cagy about the address of the company was that they were going to come and deliver the CPAP to us. Blaise didn't need to know the address at all. Meanwhile, he's just gotten off of a bus in the middle of an industrial zone, and is walking toward the address that he found on the company's website. I tell Sapphire to grab my cell phone and call Blaise, and I head downstairs to meet the delivery technician and to explain that Blaise is, in fact, most of the way to the company headquarters rather than being at home waiting for delivery. So Blaise talks to the technician on my phone and then the technician calls the company and asks them to take care of Blaise when he gets there and then he comes upstairs to get the settings off the old machine and to figure out what kind of mask Blaise has been using. And then he calls the company to let them know what the settings are and heads back to headquarters.
An hour and a half later I'm sitting at the hair salon with Cherry, and I get a text from Blaise. He's now been set up with his new machine (and new tubes and face mask) and they've just offered him a ride home. This is fortunate because it turns out that the second bus that he took going there only runs a couple of times a day, and the next return bus leaves for Melun at 5:45 (which would mean that he got home sometime after 8:00). So he ends up walking in the door around 4:00, and we promptly try to figure out what went wrong.
We ended up deciding that the problem was really quite simple. In the United States, one would always have to go and pick up something like that at the store. Getting it delivered would be exorbitantly expensive. Conversely, in France, getting things like that delivered seems to be pretty normal. And so Blaise never thought to say that he was going to the store to pick up the CPAP machine, because it was so obvious to him that that was what you did. And the person at the store never thought to say that they would be delivering it because it was so obvious to him that that was what you did. But there are a lot of things that make more sense in retrospect.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Saturday, June 4, 2016
French school structure (vs. American school structure)
Note: I'm going to reserve the "In which" title constructions for posts about things that we actually do. Since this isn't really about something of that sort, I'm going to give it a non standard (for me) title.
I promised last night (or rather, early this morning), that I'd write something more about the big test, the baccalauréat, that French students take at the end of high school. And, well, I will. But that may be a post for another day. After all, it takes place toward the end of things, and it's worth beginning at the beginning, in my not so humble opinion. So, we start with the French school structure and how it compares with the American structure. (After all, then I can drop in a lycée or a collège or a primaire and you'll all know what I'm talking about. Mostly I'm just lazy.)
As you can see from this (oh so elegant) chart, the French system has four levels of school. (Before university that is. In a couple of years, when I've got a kid in university, I'll go back and update with useful information about the way that works. At this point, you can just assume that there's something called université that comes at the bottom of the chart.) Right now, I have kids in three of the four levels: Cherry is in CM1 in école primaire, Ezio is in cinquième in collège, and Sapphire is in seconde in lycée.
I promised last night (or rather, early this morning), that I'd write something more about the big test, the baccalauréat, that French students take at the end of high school. And, well, I will. But that may be a post for another day. After all, it takes place toward the end of things, and it's worth beginning at the beginning, in my not so humble opinion. So, we start with the French school structure and how it compares with the American structure. (After all, then I can drop in a lycée or a collège or a primaire and you'll all know what I'm talking about. Mostly I'm just lazy.)
In which there is an industrial action
In case you were wondering, this post won't be about a strike. Not that there aren't plenty of strikes going on in France right now. Not that I couldn't write about a strike if I wanted to. But it isn't about a strike.
The reason that I waited until this evening to post, is that Sapphire (it feels so, so, so wrong to call her that, but I suppose I'll get used to it) is a member of her lycée's club de théâtre. Mostly, it exists because high school students finish their high school careers with something called the baccalaureate (bad for short). For now, we'll just say that it's a huge test, spanning multiple weeks, that effectively shuts down all of the high schools a full month before the actual end of the school year. I'll write more about it some other day. It's also a very important test, because a student's performance on it determines whether or not that student receives a high school diploma. In fact, the bac is the diploma, more or less. In any case, the bac exam is the same for every student across France (again, not exactly, because it's determined by their filière, or path that they take through high school) and in order to pass, a student needs to earn half of the points available. Higher percentages result in diplomas given with honors, high honors, and highest honors. Clear as mud? In any case, it's possible to bump your score somewhat with certain types of extras: if you speak English fluently, for example, or some other (non French) language; if you studied Latin or Ancient Greek; if you are an actor or musician or athlete or a handful of other things you can take, essentially, a proficiency exam in your specialty and that score gets added to your total bac score. So, Sapphire's school has theater club to allow interested students to develop the skills (and knowledge) that they need to be able to take the proficiency exam in theater.
So, since the middle of October a group of around 15 students, one teacher, and a professional actress (who was doing this mostly on a volunteer basis) have been meeting for two hours every Wednesday afternoon to put together their performance of À Plates Coutures (Carole Thibaut). And so every Wednesday, instead of finishing at 3:00, Sapphire has been sitting in on the terminale's (12th graders) physics-chemie class for two hours (which I'm still not sure how she got permission to do) and then going to theater rehearsal until 7:00.
Last week Monday, the theater kids all spent the day at a high school in a different town, first performing their play for a group of judges, and then waiting while the kids who were taking the theater bac spent an hour answering questions about anything the judges could think of to ask.
This evening, they put on the play for everyone else at the town theater. The good news is that they took a very modern play, written two years ago and inspired by the battle of French female garment workers against the movement of their factories to Tunisia, and, with minimal costumes and virtually no props or scenery, hmm, pulled it off? Did a superb job? Made us all think that we ought to go out on strike? Convinced us to buy only French-made underwear? Anyway, I was impressed, even though I confess that I only understood about 75% of the script. The bad news is that my camera didn't like the contrast between the light of the stage and the dark of the audience, and so I have no decent pictures. I have high hopes that someone else may have decent video though, and that I might be able to get hold of it, because I could see several people in front of me filming. (And unlike mine, their cell phone screens didn't look like there was a supernova on the middle of the screen.)
The reason that I waited until this evening to post, is that Sapphire (it feels so, so, so wrong to call her that, but I suppose I'll get used to it) is a member of her lycée's club de théâtre. Mostly, it exists because high school students finish their high school careers with something called the baccalaureate (bad for short). For now, we'll just say that it's a huge test, spanning multiple weeks, that effectively shuts down all of the high schools a full month before the actual end of the school year. I'll write more about it some other day. It's also a very important test, because a student's performance on it determines whether or not that student receives a high school diploma. In fact, the bac is the diploma, more or less. In any case, the bac exam is the same for every student across France (again, not exactly, because it's determined by their filière, or path that they take through high school) and in order to pass, a student needs to earn half of the points available. Higher percentages result in diplomas given with honors, high honors, and highest honors. Clear as mud? In any case, it's possible to bump your score somewhat with certain types of extras: if you speak English fluently, for example, or some other (non French) language; if you studied Latin or Ancient Greek; if you are an actor or musician or athlete or a handful of other things you can take, essentially, a proficiency exam in your specialty and that score gets added to your total bac score. So, Sapphire's school has theater club to allow interested students to develop the skills (and knowledge) that they need to be able to take the proficiency exam in theater.
So, since the middle of October a group of around 15 students, one teacher, and a professional actress (who was doing this mostly on a volunteer basis) have been meeting for two hours every Wednesday afternoon to put together their performance of À Plates Coutures (Carole Thibaut). And so every Wednesday, instead of finishing at 3:00, Sapphire has been sitting in on the terminale's (12th graders) physics-chemie class for two hours (which I'm still not sure how she got permission to do) and then going to theater rehearsal until 7:00.
Last week Monday, the theater kids all spent the day at a high school in a different town, first performing their play for a group of judges, and then waiting while the kids who were taking the theater bac spent an hour answering questions about anything the judges could think of to ask.
This evening, they put on the play for everyone else at the town theater. The good news is that they took a very modern play, written two years ago and inspired by the battle of French female garment workers against the movement of their factories to Tunisia, and, with minimal costumes and virtually no props or scenery, hmm, pulled it off? Did a superb job? Made us all think that we ought to go out on strike? Convinced us to buy only French-made underwear? Anyway, I was impressed, even though I confess that I only understood about 75% of the script. The bad news is that my camera didn't like the contrast between the light of the stage and the dark of the audience, and so I have no decent pictures. I have high hopes that someone else may have decent video though, and that I might be able to get hold of it, because I could see several people in front of me filming. (And unlike mine, their cell phone screens didn't look like there was a supernova on the middle of the screen.)
Thursday, June 2, 2016
In which a little bit of my childhood dies
Way up at the tippy top of the upper peninsula of Michigan there's a little thumb that juts out into Lake Superior. And on that thumb, back 150 years ago or so, there were mines. Copper mines. Lots and lots of copper mines, each with its own town. Some of them were successful, some less so, but they were there, and for a time that little thumb jutting out into Lake Superior had some of the richest men in the United States, because copper was valuable, and the copper there came out of the ground nearly pure and ready to be worked. It also brought immigrants from all over Europe, who founded their own churches and societies and brought with them their own languages and foods and traditions. The last of the Keweenaw copper mines had closed by the end of 1968 and the Keweenaw had to change, to become dependent on the tourists that it could attract in its short summer season.
Back before I was born, before my parents had met each other, my father went to the Keweenaw each summer with his father. Not his mom. Not his brothers. Just my dad and his dad. Some of the mines were still operating then, and my grandpa would visit with the locals while my dad climbed around on tailing piles looking for chunks of copper and silver to bring home. My parents honeymooned up there, almost 50 years ago, and they've continued to go up every summer since then,* renting the same cottage from the same woman for the last 35 of them. This will be the last summer that they go up though. The woman, Dorothy, from whom they have rented "their" cottage for the last 35 years passed away on Monday, and with her went a little bit of my connection to childhood.
I feel like I should write more here. I should talk about how I had sour cream and onion potato chips for the first time while we we on a picnic on the beach with Dorothy and her husband. I should talk about how we had free reign to explore the whole outdoors of their extensive property with lots of lake frontage, and how we would watch the hummingbirds sipping at the red feeders that dotted the yard. How we would watch Don, all covered up to protect him from the chemicals, walk around outside to spray the property and (hopefully) keep the mosquitos and black flies and noseeums at bay. How we would clamber along the rocky front of the property and along the lake to the neighbors', wondering whether there was really anyone there behind the shuttered windows and closed doors. We never saw anyone. Never saw any sign of life, and so expanded our explorations to their properties, looking for wild roses, for wild strawberries, for thimbleberries. How we would climb up to the big ridge behind the houses where the summerhouse used to be, back before they moved it down to be more convenient to the big house.
I should say that they told us about how you could go to the Eagle Harbor dump any old evening in the summer, and sit until dusk and you could see the bears come out of the woods and tear open the bags of garbage, looking for something tasty to eat. They usually found it too, and there would always be lots of cars parked there. Full of people, just watching what was going on.
I should talk about how when we went hiking down in the Eagle River gorge with them, back when I was much smaller, and we disturbed a nest of yellow jackets in an old beer can, that Don got stuck a half dozen times trying to stop them from stinging my little sister, and Dorothy provided the baking soda afterward to lessen the sting.
I should talk about how, when we visited, they treated us kids like extra grandchildren, even though they had lots of their own. How they took us exploring in their 4WD truck to places that we never would have been able to go in our Chevy Celebrity. How (I now know) they kept an eye on us out the window when we played down by the lake, throwing endless stones into the water to watch them splash and walking as far out into the lake on the big rocks as we could without getting our feet wet.
How the cottage was magical. Someplace that it seemed quite likely that there might be fairies, or elves, or a portal to some other world. Someplace where you just might, if you were quick enough and quiet enough, find a magic creature behind a tree or under a stone. Someplace where, once, a bear came in through the front door in search of the smoked salmon that we'd had for dinner.
I should talk about how, when I joined my parents there for the last time two summers ago, Dorothy (who was 93 at the time) was still spending summers up there independently. How she greeted me, and my kids. How we worried when we couldn't get hold of her by phone, before discovering that her phone line had been damaged by passing trucks. (And making her use our cell phones to call her children and let them know that she was fine.)
The dump is gone now. You have to bring your trash on the right days and they load it into trucks to bring to a proper landfill. You can't go a watch the bears at night any more. The Shoreline Resort where we used to go and get ice cream most nights, and pick up something to read from the lending library outside the door is still there, but it's different. The family that ran it and lived above it for more than 30 years is gone now, and it's no longer a meeting place for all the locals. We didn't get ice-cream there once that last time we went up. The gift shop on top of Brockway Mountain where we'd spend hours agonizing over which flavor of stick candy we wanted? That's gone too, not just closed but pulled down completely. Just a grassy spot on top of the hill now. And the Eagle Harbor General Store, open before Lincoln was president? It's a private house now, and has been for years.
This summer, at the request of Dorothy's children, my parents will go up one last time and visit all the special places. I won't be able to join them, but I hope that they'll take lots of pictures. And I hope that, just maybe, my sisters will be able to join them up there one last time. Because my kids had the opportunity to experience just a little bit of my childhood, and I'd wish that for my nephews as well.
* With the exception of the summer that my sister was supposed to be born early (she was late, just like the rest of us), the summer that she spent most of in the hospital, and the summer that we all lived in Seattle for 2 months.
Back before I was born, before my parents had met each other, my father went to the Keweenaw each summer with his father. Not his mom. Not his brothers. Just my dad and his dad. Some of the mines were still operating then, and my grandpa would visit with the locals while my dad climbed around on tailing piles looking for chunks of copper and silver to bring home. My parents honeymooned up there, almost 50 years ago, and they've continued to go up every summer since then,* renting the same cottage from the same woman for the last 35 of them. This will be the last summer that they go up though. The woman, Dorothy, from whom they have rented "their" cottage for the last 35 years passed away on Monday, and with her went a little bit of my connection to childhood.
I feel like I should write more here. I should talk about how I had sour cream and onion potato chips for the first time while we we on a picnic on the beach with Dorothy and her husband. I should talk about how we had free reign to explore the whole outdoors of their extensive property with lots of lake frontage, and how we would watch the hummingbirds sipping at the red feeders that dotted the yard. How we would watch Don, all covered up to protect him from the chemicals, walk around outside to spray the property and (hopefully) keep the mosquitos and black flies and noseeums at bay. How we would clamber along the rocky front of the property and along the lake to the neighbors', wondering whether there was really anyone there behind the shuttered windows and closed doors. We never saw anyone. Never saw any sign of life, and so expanded our explorations to their properties, looking for wild roses, for wild strawberries, for thimbleberries. How we would climb up to the big ridge behind the houses where the summerhouse used to be, back before they moved it down to be more convenient to the big house.
I should say that they told us about how you could go to the Eagle Harbor dump any old evening in the summer, and sit until dusk and you could see the bears come out of the woods and tear open the bags of garbage, looking for something tasty to eat. They usually found it too, and there would always be lots of cars parked there. Full of people, just watching what was going on.
I should talk about how when we went hiking down in the Eagle River gorge with them, back when I was much smaller, and we disturbed a nest of yellow jackets in an old beer can, that Don got stuck a half dozen times trying to stop them from stinging my little sister, and Dorothy provided the baking soda afterward to lessen the sting.
I should talk about how, when we visited, they treated us kids like extra grandchildren, even though they had lots of their own. How they took us exploring in their 4WD truck to places that we never would have been able to go in our Chevy Celebrity. How (I now know) they kept an eye on us out the window when we played down by the lake, throwing endless stones into the water to watch them splash and walking as far out into the lake on the big rocks as we could without getting our feet wet.
How the cottage was magical. Someplace that it seemed quite likely that there might be fairies, or elves, or a portal to some other world. Someplace where you just might, if you were quick enough and quiet enough, find a magic creature behind a tree or under a stone. Someplace where, once, a bear came in through the front door in search of the smoked salmon that we'd had for dinner.
I should talk about how, when I joined my parents there for the last time two summers ago, Dorothy (who was 93 at the time) was still spending summers up there independently. How she greeted me, and my kids. How we worried when we couldn't get hold of her by phone, before discovering that her phone line had been damaged by passing trucks. (And making her use our cell phones to call her children and let them know that she was fine.)
The dump is gone now. You have to bring your trash on the right days and they load it into trucks to bring to a proper landfill. You can't go a watch the bears at night any more. The Shoreline Resort where we used to go and get ice cream most nights, and pick up something to read from the lending library outside the door is still there, but it's different. The family that ran it and lived above it for more than 30 years is gone now, and it's no longer a meeting place for all the locals. We didn't get ice-cream there once that last time we went up. The gift shop on top of Brockway Mountain where we'd spend hours agonizing over which flavor of stick candy we wanted? That's gone too, not just closed but pulled down completely. Just a grassy spot on top of the hill now. And the Eagle Harbor General Store, open before Lincoln was president? It's a private house now, and has been for years.
This summer, at the request of Dorothy's children, my parents will go up one last time and visit all the special places. I won't be able to join them, but I hope that they'll take lots of pictures. And I hope that, just maybe, my sisters will be able to join them up there one last time. Because my kids had the opportunity to experience just a little bit of my childhood, and I'd wish that for my nephews as well.
* With the exception of the summer that my sister was supposed to be born early (she was late, just like the rest of us), the summer that she spent most of in the hospital, and the summer that we all lived in Seattle for 2 months.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
In which the kids choose their names
I said yesterday that my kids were going to get pseudonyms for this blog, since it's public and I'd rather limit how easy it is to identify them. Obviously, if someone were sufficiently determined they could probably figure it out, but at any rate they can be safe from future significant others, bosses, etc randomly coming across the blog and figuring it out.
So yesterday at dinner I asked the kids what they wanted their pseudonyms to be. (Keep in mind that these (well, at least the older two) are the same kids who wanted to name their younger siblings stop sign, lamp post, and stop light, "so that they would have to stay outside." We don't have any sibling rivalry in this family. Nope. None at all.) In any case, I assumed that they would have moved past their two year old desire to name people after objects. Or at any rate, that this desire wouldn't apply to names that they were choosing for themselves. I mean, I would have chosen "Jessica" or maybe "Melissa" or even "Jennifer". (Can you tell what decade I'm from?) I figured that I'd get an Emily or a Julia, a Matthew or a Noah. Needless to say, I didn't. Instead I have, for the time being at least, Sapphire, Ezio, and Cherry.
Might I observe that all of Cherry's dolls have normal names: Sabrina, Samantha, Jamie, Mathilda. So do most of the characters in the novel that Sapphire is writing (although, come to think of it, I think one of them might be named Sapphire). (Also, if you actually know us, and you refer to her novel in any way, shape, or form, she may never speak to me again. Just so you know.) So my daughters are capable of coming up with more standard names. And Ezio is the main character in Assassin's Creed 2, so that explains my son's choice.
So, for the foreseeable future, my children are Cherry (an almost 10 year old girl), Ezio (a 13 year old boy), and Sapphire (an almost 16 year old girl). Now we just have to see how long it takes before I yell at one of them to stop doing something using their pseudonym instead of their real name.
So yesterday at dinner I asked the kids what they wanted their pseudonyms to be. (Keep in mind that these (well, at least the older two) are the same kids who wanted to name their younger siblings stop sign, lamp post, and stop light, "so that they would have to stay outside." We don't have any sibling rivalry in this family. Nope. None at all.) In any case, I assumed that they would have moved past their two year old desire to name people after objects. Or at any rate, that this desire wouldn't apply to names that they were choosing for themselves. I mean, I would have chosen "Jessica" or maybe "Melissa" or even "Jennifer". (Can you tell what decade I'm from?) I figured that I'd get an Emily or a Julia, a Matthew or a Noah. Needless to say, I didn't. Instead I have, for the time being at least, Sapphire, Ezio, and Cherry.
Might I observe that all of Cherry's dolls have normal names: Sabrina, Samantha, Jamie, Mathilda. So do most of the characters in the novel that Sapphire is writing (although, come to think of it, I think one of them might be named Sapphire). (Also, if you actually know us, and you refer to her novel in any way, shape, or form, she may never speak to me again. Just so you know.) So my daughters are capable of coming up with more standard names. And Ezio is the main character in Assassin's Creed 2, so that explains my son's choice.
So, for the foreseeable future, my children are Cherry (an almost 10 year old girl), Ezio (a 13 year old boy), and Sapphire (an almost 16 year old girl). Now we just have to see how long it takes before I yell at one of them to stop doing something using their pseudonym instead of their real name.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
In which it rains and rains, and rains, and (did I mention) rains.
It's currently around 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon, and it's been raining, more or less nonstop, since Saturday afternoon. Not storming, mind you, at least not after the beginning, but raining steadily. Our local streams (there are three of them that flow through the town) normally look something like this:
As you can see, they're pretty calm. Not a lot of water. Lots of ducks.
Right now, they look like this:
Of course you can't tell from the photos how fast the water is going. That tree in the water in the middle photo? It's normally high and dry on the bank of the stream. And that little outcropping of rocks with the ducks in the top row of pictures? It's just beyond the red brick wall on the right hand picture on the bottom row. As you can see, it's completely underwater, as is the bridge that child number one is walking across on the top row.
On the plus side, we don't seem to be having any actually flooding here. The stream beds are deep enough so that even though the water is 3-4 feet above normal (which is maybe 6-9 inches), it isn't coming out of its banks. A lot of the towns around here are having actual flooding, and earlier our train line to Paris was cut because water was over the tracks, rendering the train signals unusable. There are also a number of roads (mostly regional but some national routes) that are also currently closed because of flooding.
The current forecast is for rain, more or less, until next Tuesday, at which point I'm looking forward to drying out my soggy shoes.
Introducing... The blog!
I have absolutely no idea what will be happening with this blog, but I finally have a computer that's actually (mostly) mine, and so I can blog without attempting to type everything on a phone. In the past, I've mostly ended up writing about our daily lives in France, but then, in the past, everything has always been a little bit new and a little bit exciting. And now, things are a little bit less new, and a little bit less exciting. Also, I'm out of the habit of writing about them. So I guess I'll just try committing to writing something most days and see what happens.
So, what kind of background should I give. I'm a forty something American living in a medieval town in France with my husband and my three kids who we will call, for the purposes of this blog, well, I have no idea. Maybe I'll ask them what they wish they'd been named when they get home from school today. In any case, they're almost 10, 13, and almost 16, and they're all pretty much bilingual in French and English. I, unfortunately, am not. At least, not yet, but I have high hopes that I might manage to be something like bilingual by the end of the year. Assuming of course that I put enough time and energy into it. And probably find someone or ones that wants to help me practice speaking French. In any case, I'm working on it. And I'll try to regularly update with my language triumphs, such as they are.
In my previous life, back in the States, I was a mathematician, or at least a teacher of mathematics at the university level. Here, I'm a femme au foyer, in other words, a housewife, at least until I manage to find a proper job. I wish that I could say that I was, at least, a stellar housewife, but alas I think that I'm better at a lot of other things than that.
So, what kind of background should I give. I'm a forty something American living in a medieval town in France with my husband and my three kids who we will call, for the purposes of this blog, well, I have no idea. Maybe I'll ask them what they wish they'd been named when they get home from school today. In any case, they're almost 10, 13, and almost 16, and they're all pretty much bilingual in French and English. I, unfortunately, am not. At least, not yet, but I have high hopes that I might manage to be something like bilingual by the end of the year. Assuming of course that I put enough time and energy into it. And probably find someone or ones that wants to help me practice speaking French. In any case, I'm working on it. And I'll try to regularly update with my language triumphs, such as they are.
In my previous life, back in the States, I was a mathematician, or at least a teacher of mathematics at the university level. Here, I'm a femme au foyer, in other words, a housewife, at least until I manage to find a proper job. I wish that I could say that I was, at least, a stellar housewife, but alas I think that I'm better at a lot of other things than that.
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