All news analysis should be so insightful.

It is my dream that coverage of press conferences could always carry a little running stream at the bottom that told the actual facts pertaining to the over-edited words that are coming out of the speaker’s mouth. This is close enough.

POTUS press conference coverage.

Yes, I’m Still Alive

I have been bad about writing lately, but I have actually been fairly busy in all my moments of computer access on WORK.  I am leaving for Germany in a week, so I need to know how to work with all of the computer modelling programs we use before I go.  So I have been cramming. 

I will give you a small piece of my current France experience.  Here is my question that I have been pondering all day:  I am starting a training program for a running race and today is the first day.  But it is raining and the winds are 30 mph (sustained, not gusts), and the weather is not supposed to improve until tomorrow afternoon.  Am I a slacker if I skip the very first day of training, or does 30 mph winds justify cancelling a run?

I’m back…

And I’m tired.  You will have to wait a bit to learn about my trip to and return from North Carolina.  And for the long-awaited photo-uploading.  But it was great to see my friends in North Carolina, hear English all around me, and (eek) use a car again.  I am still waiting for my luggage, although only because I had volunteered to give up my seat in return for a free international ticket when they figured out last minute that they could “squeeze me in on the flight, as long as I didn’t mind flying business class…” so I had a comfy flight AND get my luggage delivered to my door (I hope).

Sunny weekend! Icy Monday morning.

This weekend was great–I did a nice two hour bike ride on Saturday, and a 90 minute run on Sunday.  Both under sunny clear skies!  My only complaint is that the bike map again was misleading, in that what it described as a ‘road with wide shoulder’ was in fact a rutted, rocky dirt road through farmfields.  I checked and rechecked the map, but this was the road it meant.  The street signs at either end corresponded to the map road name.  Had I crashed out there, only carrion birds would have noticed. 

Now I am off on a 47-hour odyssey starting tomorrow morning at 7.  I will take the train to Rennes for a meeting for work, then catch the train from Rennes to Paris at 5:30.  I’m looking forward to a night in a 3-star hotel and restaurant dinner, after two months on a lumpy mattress and cooking for myself!  If it is sunny, Thursday morning I will walk around Luxembourg gardens.  Then off the airport–I’m going to spend 9 days in North Carolina!  Looking forward to it, as lots of friends have doctoral defenses, major birthdays, engagements and new babies to celebrate.  When I get back, I’ll probably only have two weeks more in France before heading off to Germany.

Random blogs, not always good

So, WordPress (the group that runs this blog site) has this feature where you can click on an arrow and you go to a random post from any of the however many blogs there are on wordpress.  I have never done this before, so I clicked it and the entry I got was from this Philadelphia working mom, and she seemed like a cool person and had a good post for the day.  Then I clicked again, and got some page in Russian about quilting.  Clicked one more time, and got this weird vampire-and-sex obsessed woman’s page, which included some odd sexually suggestive pictures and the chapters of her latest vampire romance/werewolf story.  I think I might not use the random click arrow anymore.

Tourists…the pros and cons

So, apparently as of 1 April it is tourist season here.  This means lots of people meandering along the already crowded sidewalks and making it even harder for people to get to the bus in a timely manner (probably my biggest pet peeve about the La Rochellians thus far…bad sidewalk traffic habits).  Lots of people constantly asking me for directions (always the French people, never the English).  More waiting in line at shops. 

But the big benefit of having tourists around is that now I don’t seem like quite a freak to shop-owners.  In February and March, when there were NO tourists and the assumption is that if you are in La Rochelle, you live in La Rochelle, people were appalled that I didn’t speak French.  They would look at me with pity, and I could tell most of them were thinking that I was some dumb American who moved here and just thought everyone should accommodate ME in MY language.  And while I acknowledge that it is good to speak the language where one lives, I was hired for this job because I was the most qualified, and beat out Europeans who DO speak french, and I also am trying to learn the language and I always speak (horrible) French in the stores unless someone offers to speak English.  So I don’t like the pitiful, somewhat resentful attitude.  [Note:  There are some shopowners who have been quitehelpful, and the shopowners in my little town all are excited to practice their English with me, even if I talk to them in French.  But these are exceptions to the normal reaction.]  BUT, now that there are tourists, when I am browsing in a shop and someone says something more to me than “Bon jour, madame,” and I stare at them in utter confusion, they just say, “Ah…no french.”  Then they will pantomime things or speak super slowly, which helps me a lot.  So, it is mildly insulting to get immediately labelled as a tourist, but that is better than the reaction before.  I can finally stop being embarrassed about not speaking French.  It probably sounds odd, but it is a huge relief. 

Sunny Day, Spent in Office

It is finally sunny here, although we continue to have 20 mph winds that sort of reduce the pleasure of being outside in the sun.  Beautiful, though.  Not much to report out of the last 24 hours, except that I finally finished reading the autobiography of Eleanor of Aquitane.  The book didn’t talk much about La Rochelle until the very end, but it did remind me of a lot of European history that I’d forgotten.  There were also sex scandals in the Middle Ages, apparently, which we did not really learn about in European History at Catholic girls’ school.  Also, Eleanor died on 1 April, so I suppose it was sort of fitting that I finished reading about her on 1 April.  Now I am reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. ..much more entertaining reading.

Happy April (Fools)

Well, it was finally sunny on a Saturday so I took advantage and went on a nice long bike ride through the French countryside.  Not at Lance speeds, but I can dream.  (Lance also doesn’t have to ride a GIRL bike.)  I biked through a bunch of small towns connected by huge fields (around here they are called ‘fiefs de Angleterre,’ or English fields/fiefs) so I heard lots of birds and saw some neat old houses.  Part of the reason I chose the trail I did was that it passed by a cool old chateau, but apparently I was too intent on biking to notice the chateau and I will have to repeat the trip being a little more observant.

Sunday through today it has been rainy again, but warmer.  I’ve walked home from work the last two days, since it has been down to a light drizzle by then.  Its about a 5.5 mile walk, but through a park, then a neat old neighborhood, then a short time along the highway (not too pretty), and then through fields. 

Sunday we changed to daylight savings time, which means now sunrise is at 7:30 (for someone who has to wake up at 7 but HATES getting up in the morning, this is bad news) and the sun doesn’t set until 8:30.  By June, that means it will be light until almost 11 pm, which seems slightly excessive.  Also on the topic of time, I replaced my broken alarm clock and suffered major sticker shock–a small, battery-powered alarm clock (didn’t even come with a battery) is $27!  At the cheap-o department store.  I’m quite sure I bought my last alarm clock in America for about $9 at K-Mart, and it wasn’t even the cheapest one.  At least it did manage to wake me up.