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.