Sunny!

According to the weather reports, it is supposed to be precipitating every single day for at least the next 10 days.  I've actually seen the sun twice, though, to my surprise.  Once the day I arrived and this morning!  Here is the view from my window, up the street towards the Pont Neuf.  I had to lean out to take it.

I arrived on Saturday morning an hour early.  Normally this would be cause to celebrate, but since it added another hour to the time I had to wait until I could check in to my apartment I was not overly pleased.  My flights were fine.  The last one, from Dulles to Paris was great because I had upgraded to Economy Plus and while regular Economy was packed like a can of sardines, Econ Plus was only half full.  I had someone next to me, but the extra leg room added to the plethora of empty seats added a sense of spaciousness.  

I held of sleeping until my last flight in order to wait until it was really night-time in Paris. 

Mind you, I had gotten up at 3:30 am PST to get ready for my flight and landed in Paris at 8:45 pm PST.  So, I finally fell asleep on my last flight to be awakened after only an hour by the very loud burser yelling last call for duty free goods.  This scared the crap out of my sleeping self and left me awake for the rest of the flight.  Grrr.

I waited for a very long 6 hours and took the train into central Paris to my apartment.  I'm very glad I'm staying in the same place as last time, even though it's tiny, because I already know the neighborhood and I didn't have to wander around figuring out where to go.  Yay!  I got in the apartment and realized the circuit breaker had been turned off, so got everything going and was getting ready to take a shower.  Then I realized that I had also just turned on the water heater.  Went grocery shopping and got my French SIM card instead.  I came home and skyped with M before finally taking a 2 hours nap around 3:30 pm.  At that point, I had been awake for 27 hours with only 1 hour of sleep.  I tried to take a picture of the spectacular bags/black circles under my eyes, but no picture could do them justice.

Saturday night into Sunday morning, I slept for 13 hours.  Granted, I did wake up for a while at 2 am because there was something that sounded like a huge street party outside my window.  I looked out and the entire block was filled with a traffic jam.  It was noisy like when I was here two years ago for the Fête de la musique.  I still don't know what was going on.

Other than that, I went on a walk Sunday afternoon to Notre Dame and the Louvre.  On my way between the two, I stayed on the Right Bank and walked along the Quay looking over the Seine.  At one point, I was pretty much by myself when I heard someone walking behind me.  I turned my head to look at the person (with peripheral vision) and it was a guy coming up rather quickly.  Just after I turned my head, he stopped and started looking across the street.  Shortly thereafter, he was gone.  Weird.  At first I was all, I averted someone trying to steal something (he would have been in for an unpleasant surprise because I only had my umbrella and my keys), but I'm not so sure of that now.  Who knows?  (Note: I was planning on going to the Musée de l'Orangerie, which had been closed for 7 years, and that has been when I've visited Paris lo these many times, so I've never been.  But, waking up at 11:30 am and then slowly moving around, plus the heavy rain and winds made that plan go down the drain.)

Anywho, today is the day when I go to the Bib Nat and have my interview.  I'm tired and feeling a bit woozy, but am okay otherwise.  We'll see how it goes.

Yep, my time here is just filled with excitement.  People reading this are going to wonder why the hell they did.  :)  More boring stories another time!

Off to Paris

It's my turn to make a European research trip and I'm leaving tomorrow at 6 am.  I suppose in the interests of keeping this blog somewhat active that I shall go ahead and blog over the next 3 weeks about the travails and wonders of my time in Paris.  

Most everyone knows this, but I've had a particularly interesting 10 days since my laptop hard drive completely died and I was stupid enough to lose the chapter (the last of the body chapters!) that I had just finished drafting.  I still had a lot of work to do on it, but the bones were there.  Then there were no bones and I've spent my days (other than the 4 that I took off for Thanksgiving, dammit) madly trying to write it all down again.  I'm almost there.

My trip will not be all work and no play as my mom is going to be there for a week and we are going to the Marché Noël in Strasbourg for a couple days the first weekend of Advent.  It's going to be crowded and full of all the Christmas kitsch I could ever want.  The invited "country" guest this year is Quebec.  Last year it was Romania.  This kind of irritates me because I just went to Quebec and heard all these things about how 2008 is their 400th anniversary.  And the tourism minister of Quebec will be there!  You know, so he or she can help you plan your trip for next year.  Yay.  It is also weird because, as much as some people wish it so,  Quebec is not technically a country.  But, who are we to question?

I will need lots of luck on Monday when I attempt to access the administrative nightmare of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where I have to have an interview with a librarian about why I should be able to do research there.  I will be jet-lagged and having to speak in French--what fun!  It's not so much the speaking that's the major problem, it's the understanding the clipped Parisian accent.

I arrive on Saturday very early in the morning, when it is supposed to be raining, and have to kill 5 hours before I can check into my apartment at noon.  This too shall be interesting as I'll be schlepping my bags around and trying to buy a SIM card for my cell phone, while praying that the hundreds of euros in my pocket which will pay for the remainder of my rent will stay there until I can get to the 6ème.

Pray for me.

Quite the popular candidates

More Dissertation Avoidance

I have yet to read the book "No One Cares What You Had For Lunch" by Maggie over at Mighty Girl, but I've enjoyed reading her posts based on its prompts.

In a bid to procrastinate some more, I'm taking her prompt from page 49 (or so she and others say).

Making My Timeline

My First Decade + one year to make a prime number

Age 1: I am small for my age and my mother worries that I will be very short.

Age 2: My sister enters the world. 'nuff said.

Age 3: I memorize my favorite book, Sleeping Beauty, including when to turn the pages. My parents have a dinner party and a friend's 5-year-old daughter runs out of my room and proclaims in astonishment to everyone, "She knows how to read!"

Age 4: I want my mom to cut up an apple for me for a snack. She tells me to wait because she is trying to finish something. I keep asking. Finally, she tells me to stop asking for an apple or I would not get one at all. I return a minute later and ask for "that green thing on the counter."

Age 5: I learn to hate wearing dresses because Ryan S. keeps chasing me and trying to flip up my skirt. My mom never understood why I didn't like dresses after that.

Age 6: In first grade, my teacher does a shadow profile portrait of each kid in the class. I am offended that Dolly's profile portrait includes the outline of her eyelashes whereas mine did not. I wonder why my eyelashes are so short.

Age 7: I really want a Cabbage Patch Kid for Christmas. My parents don't have a lot of money--especially considering those dolls were something like $40 in mid-1980s money--so my mom makes me one by buying a head (that looked very similar to the real ones, btw) and sewing the body. I bring it to school, get made fun of, and abandon the doll at home, which means I played with it for maybe 2 weeks. Years later, I realize I had no comprehension of the amount of time, energy, and love my mom put into the project because she wanted to give me the best she and dad could, and how much it must have hurt to have that effort be so unappreciated.

Age 8: I am bored in my 3rd grade class, so I switch teachers. I help out the kids in my new class and a number of them tell me I should be a teacher when I grow up. And I got a perm. One of those kinky 1980s poodle mistakes.

Age 9: A boy named Jacob tells me in line outside of the classroom that I have "a fat butt and skinny arms." When playing dodge ball, I somehow end up the last kid in and all the boys throw the balls as hard as possible to hit me. I run to my teacher crying. I also start getting pimples. Goodbye self esteem!

Age 10: We come home from Christmas at grandma's house to find two feet of snow. I run to the backyard and see my sister's cat Cloudy dragging her entire hindquarters on the ground behind her. She was run over by a car while we were gone. She gets put to sleep at the vet's office. This is my first experience with the death of someone(? thing?) close to me. I realize that life is unfair.

Age 11: I learn to play basketball on my 6th grade team and have the best coach ever (Mr. Zeisler!). We had an "awards ceremony" at the end of the season, where he gave each of us a nickname. Because I was 5'6" at the age of 11 and therefore almost 4 inches taller than most everyone else in my year, my nickname was "The Tower."

Sicko

I saw Sicko a couple weeks ago, and while it did not contain any new information for me, it was still disturbing. There were things I felt could have been more fully explained--for example, I had some very long conversations with my host when I was in France about their healthcare system. She always complained about the high cost of their healthcare, via taxes, and how upset she was about the high level of fraud among illegal immigrants, the lack of security for their access cards, and how they were paying such high taxes to other people's advantage. Moore's film makes it look like the French healthcare system is all peaches and cream.

But, that's to be expected. And I'm okay with that, to some extent. When making a point, especially in a feature-length movie, sometimes we don't have time to comb through all the ins and outs of a system. I think a better stance would be to think of it as like a marriage. Each system has its problems. So, let's say these problems are a human being's "foibles". My husband's foibles, which I find irritating but can live with, are not the same foibles that my friends could live with. In fact, I'm sure some people wonder how I can stand to live with him at all! But, that's what marriage is about--finding the person who has the foibles that you are willing to deal with. Because, we've all got them, those foibles. Except for me. I'm perfect.

Seriously though, the hard part for our country over the next few years is going to be negotiating a healthcare system whose primary foibles we are willing to live with. And there will be foibles--a lot of them.

Anyway, while I was at work and had a slow moment, I was trying to catch up with my New Yorker reading and read Atul Gawande's take on the movie. In the penultimate paragraph, he brought up some points about government involvement and things like birth control, etc. This got me thinking...

I'm definitely a social liberal--I'm all for government programs that help people. AND, more importantly, I'm willing to pay more taxes for them. But, I don't trust our current government, specifically, the judicial branch in the form of our Supreme Court. If we give the government more control over our healthcare system, what's to stop them from limiting abortions, birth control, morning after pills, etc.? We're already seeing this with pharmacists and some doctors. We're seeing the attempts to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Or the recent partial-birth abortion ban that is really only used in this day and age if the pregnancy will eventually put the mother's life in peril. That ban says the procedure can only be done if the mother is in immediate danger. Aside from issues of body ownership and if a fetus has more rights than the vessel/mother, this has, for me, major implications for a universal healthcare system over which this particular court would have some semblance of control.

The big problem I have is that I do want more government involvement with healthcare, but only of a certain type. A type which I'm not sure our government can really fulfill, especially with many citizens' inability to separate their moral beliefs from the rights and choices that everyone should be able to have under the tenets of our government.

I don't expect a perfect solution, but I certainly do not want one which is yet another platform for religious conservatives, or anyone for that matter, to restrict our choices in healthcare. Can this be done?

Fire Season

Nice sunsets. Not nice air quality.

Explaining my Absence with Pics

I've been sort of busy lately what with birthdays and anniversaries, planning trips to other continents, planning trips to our friendly neighbors to the north, and planning trips to states with active volcanoes. Getting my computer fixed was also a big one as my optical drive died and I got my topcase replaced for discoloration (yay!). Oh, and of course, living the high life for one night here. (Pics to come another day for that last one).

Speaking of pics, we also bought a new camera! We've finally replaced our old 2 MP (yes, you read that right) digital that had full manual controls--the reason we've kept it for so long--and got a new ultra-compact one!


You must admit, however, that the old camera could take some nice pics:


Anywho, one of the awesome things about our new camera is that it has optical image stabilization, particularly helpful in macro and night shots. And it's not that digital IS crap that just changes the ISO making the shot really grainy.

So, I did a little test on my 5th wedding anniversary flowers:
New Camera:










Old Camera:
As you can see, the image stabilization makes a big difference because my hands were clearly shaking from the lack of martinis in my blood. Oh and the color is better too. I'll put up the cool Color Accent photos I took on flickr.







But most of all, I've been obsessing about my damned tomato plants. I bought 6 this year with the hopes that I'll get a fully ripe tomato from at least one plant, even if I kill the rest or those damned devil rabbits from Night of the Lepus eat our entire garden like they did last year (including my ripening tomatoes!). Oh, the destruction they caused.

I've watched as the first round of blossoms just fell off. I've only grown early variety tomatoes so this was a new thing for me and it freaked my shit out: was I watering them too much? was it getting too cold outside at night? WHY?!? Then, I noticed that the blossoms would open widely and then close, something that my early tomato varieties never did--the blossoms just stayed open and the little tomato grew out of that for everyone to see.

Just yesterday, we went to the garden to water it and I will share with you the marvels of our garden (because it is so utterly exciting).

The tomatoes are the newest thing:
Note that I didn't plant the seedlings until early June, so I'm a bit behind with the maturation of the garden.

But, can you see it??? There's a tomato there! Well, I learned that the non-early variety tomato blossoms do close back up (I assume to protect the fruit from the heat/sun) and then the little tomatoes eventually peep out. Meanwhile, I've had about 2 weeks of thinking I had a black thumb for tomatoes.

In case you don't believe me:


Yep! That there is a tiny baby tomato.






We also planted bell peppers:
A baby bell pepper. This is very exciting.








And lettuce, which likes it here:
And the arugula that bolted because it hasn't been as foggy as normal:








And finally, the cucumbers (well, just one in this photo):










I'm liking the new camera--especially how portable it is.