Wordless Wednesday 64

I just get home, and then I leave again...

"I just get home, and then I leave again,
It's long ago and far away..."

("Departure Bay," Elvis Costello and Diana Krall)

Tomorrow I turn the calendar to June -- and panic strikes. Where did the school year go? What happened to all of those home projects I had promised I would get done this year, to the vows to see friends more often, to my New Year's Resolutions, to my eldest daughter's last year of high school?

Time has happened. And, as usual, I'm facing June with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Excitement because it's a fun time of year in France -- lots of social events, concerts, generally nice weather, late light. All the ingredients are there to make it a kicking time.

But at the end of this whirl of gaiety is a plane ticket for the USA, July 7th to August 20th. Of course that's wonderful news. I'll be seeing my family, and, most importantly, I'll be seeing my youngest daughter for the first time in over 10 months, which will be a great joy.

Yet, so much remains to be done. My oldest daughter is taking her Baccalaureate exam, her driving exam, and looking for an apartment in Rodez for her studies next year. Correction: I will be looking for the apartment.

At this time of year, I start to feel like I'm being squeezed through an hourglass.

The song lyrics above used to remind me of going "home" to Olympia, but this year, they could just as well apply to coming "home" to Aveyron. It seems like I just got back, and it's time to leave again.

Wordless Wednesday 63

(Photo courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau.)

Tooting my own horn

Angela in Europe recently bestowed the above blogging award to me. I might quarrel a bit with the deformation of the word "awesome," but I'll take any award I can get at this time of flagging participation in the blogosphere!

In fact, I could perhaps even pontificate about the word itself, which my USA daughter probably now utters in every other sentence, peppered with at least two "like"s. But be that as it may.

These are the rules, which I obviously will not follow to the letter, or even to the sentence:

List 7 Things That Make You Awe-Summm!
Pass It On To 7 Bloggers Who Are Awe-Summm!
Be Sure To Tag Your Awe-Summm Bloggers To Let Them Know!
Then Link Back To The Queen That Tagged You

There's certainly no shortage of exclamation points in those directions! Let's go!

Angela interpreted the first point as referring to blogging only, but since I have been a pretty lame blogger of late, I'm taking it to be just about ME (or HER, in her case.) I'm feeling good so I should be able to find 7 things that make me awe...some, although I would have trouble doing as much about my blog!

1. I have two absolutely fabulous daughters, and I can safely say that their teenage years have been a joy.

2. I adjusted well to life in France -- in the pre-Internet age when I didn't have many fellow expats to vent and gripe to.

3. I turned away from any number of extremely lucrative career paths in order to follow my professional vocation, and I'm still following it.

4. I do some professional writing practically every weekday evening. I don't talk much about it here, but it's quite a feat of organization.

5. I know quite a bit about a lot of different types of music, although my tastes are too eclectic to be an expert in any one genre.

6. I get angry in French only.

7. I stay in touch with a lot of people from my past, and did even before the digital age.

I'm not going to tag anybody, but if you don't know what to blog about this week, try writing some positive things about yourself. My experience in France has been that not that many other people are going to say these things to you!

Wordless Wednesday 62

(Photo courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau)

The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting

I am getting so used to writing in spurts that getting up a real blog post seems like a major operation. Devolution or evolution? We'll see.

Wordless Wednesday 61

Spring, finally, in many senses

(All photos courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau)

After wailing and moaning about our awful spring weather, both on this blog and any other available online platforms, I am happy to announce to you that spring appears to have finally arrived in Aveyron. So I'm done complaining now. Thanks for listening.

Of course, it's officially been spring here, like everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, for...so long it's depressing, so let's not go back there. But in a meteorological sense, this is the week when I stopped wearing a coat to work, when we started to sleep with the windows open, and when the yard became a nice place to spend time, rather than a pit of weed-infested despair.

I've noticed, however, that in a botanical sense, spring always seems to come late to our village and somehow even later to our house. Lilacs and iris have been blooming like crazy all over our neighbors' yards, but ours have just come out.

And trees definitely take their time around here too. The photo below was taken in our village last year on May 1st, and you can see that the leaves are not quite out on a lot of the trees. As I write, some of the trees in our yard are just filling out, too.

In a psychological sense, I think perhaps I don't get my spring burst of energy until the days start to get significantly longer. It isn't getting dark now until past 9:00pm, and suddenly I need less sleep and am able to stay up later. That in itself makes life cheerier.

And in a professional sense, I am finished with grading papers and my classload is quite a bit lighter.

Finally, in a family sense, it's only two months now until I see her, but I do have to help get her through the strenuous Baccalaureate exam. But that will have to be a subject for another post. Let's keep this one upbeat! Especially since things have clouded over since I started writing it...

Wordless Wednesday 60

My typical morning -- and is there anything French about it?

The best place to find ideas for posts these days seems to be other people's blogs, so when Marjorie of Interior Designs and My Inner French Girl posted about her typical day, I took the bait.

In fact, I think I can go one step beyond and milk three posts from this concept. Of course, her post got me thinking about my typical day, but also whether there was very much French about it. So let's see about that, starting with the morning:

6:00: Alarm rings; I hop out of bed, get the coffee running and do a few quick household tasks.

6:10: Computer time. I check my emails, then log into MSN to chat with my daughter in the USA.

6:40: I wake my other daughter up (this action is often repeated at least twice, but I won't bore you with the details) and get her breakfast table prepared.

6:45-7:25: A chaotic combination of continuing MSN exchanges with USA daughter, getting ready for work, and checking out the day's organizational plan with the other family members. I continue to drag my coffee cup around with me until the last possible minute.

7:25: Leave the house with my daughter, whom I drop off at her lycée on the way to work

7:45: Post some snail mail and/or deliver a few administrative papers for my husband

7:55: Arrive at work and head to my office

8:00: Start my working morning, which could include anywhere from one to four hours of class, or no class at all -- in the latter case, it's just office work and class preparation and correction.

10:15-10:30: If I have a full morning of class, this is break time, which may consist of drinking coffee with a colleague, but also might be spent answering emails, making phone calls, or photocopying for work

10:45: If I don't have a full morning of class, this is coffee break time -- which has inexplicably gotten later and later -- in my school's staff room. I always keep some crème liquide in the work fridge so I can "have it my way." I also try to avoid snarfing down the almost daily spread of cakes and pastries.

After the coffee break: Back to work until lunchtime -- but that will have to wait until next week's post.

Looking over this morning routine, it seems to me quite similar to my former morning routine as a high school teacher in the USA, except for then I got up more like 5am and got to work by 7am. There's definitely no café au lait or croissants in my French morning, unless some of the latter show up in the staff room -- in fact, I just added that photo to keep you reading!

I've kept my "drink several coffees, drag them around the house, occasionally lose the mug" habit from my American life. And leaving myself a little computer time in the morning doesn't seem French at all -- none of my colleagues seem to look at the period before work as a time to get anything done, except, well, getting ready for work.

The fact that I drive my daughter about 10 miles to go to school is, however, while not exactly "typically French," at least a result of the French school transportation system.

School buses are subsidized but not free, and the many stops they make combined with the long French school day (8am-5pm/6pm for my daughter) contributed to our decision to provide our own transportation to school. I wouldn't do it if I didn't work in the same town as my daughter's high school, and it has proven to be a nice time to communicate...and listen to music together!

Tune in next week for my typical afternoon!

Wordless Wednesday 59

Very brief break

I'm "recovering" from a couple of weeks of overwork, and won't be doing my usual post for FP this weekend -- unless this one counts!

Bon dimanche à tous!

Wordless Wednesday 58

Enough already!

(The world from my window, April 20, 2009, 9:00 am)

Bitching and moaning about the weather are not among my priorities for this blog. But the weather-related blues have hit a critical point here in Aveyron.

It's not just me. I've seen my colleagues grit their teeth every morning as they say, "Oui, ça va, à peu près..."

Last night I went to one of my favorite restaurants and since I was the first in my party to arrive, I chatted with the owner for a few minutes about, what else? The lousy, depressing weather. The place has a lovely outdoor terrace that they can't wait to open...someday...

The minimum temperature in Rodez tonight is supposed to be not quite 34° Fahrenheit -- that's one meager degree Celsius, which may well mean freezing here where we live.

This is not simple complaining about April showers that will bring May flowers. Let's look at the facts. We got our first snowfall in late October this year, and it snowed again early this week, not only on the Aubrac plateau, but in some of the outlying areas of Rodez.

I was happy to move here to Aveyron, to an area with "real seasons." But half a year of winter wasn't in my meteorological plans.

Enough already!

Wordless Wednesday 57

(Click on photo to enlarge -- it's worth it!)

A Grand Getaway

Beautiful blues everywhere

As the rain beats down on Aveyron, I'm fondly thinking about my somewhat sunny three days spent with a friend and fellow blogger in the Minervois. This major wine-growing area is less than a three-hour drive from here, yet I have never really visited it.

My partner in crime -- notice the Perrier. So don't go thinking we were drinking it up or anything!

An interesting aspect of this type of weekend is that both the guest and the host feel like tourists. I of course was getting to know the region, while my friend got to "play the tourist" and visit some places she had never been, such as the stunning Abbaye de Fontfroide:

Columns fashioned out of local marble in the cloisters of the Abbaye de Fontfroide

I enjoyed checking out Narbonne, a medium-sized town that is the sous-préfecture of the Aude department. I guess it's about as big as Rodez -- but the resemblance ends there:

Colors abound in Narbonne

I also fell in love -- no, nothing that exciting. Let's just say I really took to the village of Bages (also the locale of my last Wordless Wednesday post.)

The charming village of Bages

There's so much I could say --I loved this much-needed getaway: three days filled with intriguing visits, great conversation, delicious food, and nice wines (okay, so we didn't just drink Perrier)

My stay ended after lunch at a wonderful crêperie (La Table Bretonne) near the cathedral in Béziers, a fascinating but somewhat decrepit city that is one of the stranger places I've visited in France:

Creepy shutters above a large, thriving bookstore in Béziers

Béziers has plenty of crumbling architecture and bizarre storefronts -- call it my kind of town!

Wordless Wednesday 56

The one who stayed behind

Ok, that's not France. That's Neil's Yard in London, but, especially, it's a picture of my eldest daughter: the one who is studying like a fiend to pass her Baccalaureate exam, the one who shares the ride into work/school in Rodez every day with me, the one...who is here.

I haven't wanted to post a lot of family photos on this blog, but since I have written a few times about our younger daughter who is living in the USA this year, I thought I should at least introduce you to the one who stayed behind.

She's in Spain right now, on a school chorus trip, and my husband has gone along as a chaperone and orchestra member. So I have had the strange experience of starting my own one-week vacation alone.

I think it is the first time I have been on my own in France for a night since this daughter was born. I've had a quiet day...but that will change soon as I am going off on a little adventure of my own!

I'll keep you posted!

Wordless Wednesday 55

A tribute to three true friends I've made through blogging

Two weeks ago I posted about a blogging award that had been given to me, and in the comments that very day, I got another one. Tina of Life in the slow lane at Squirrel Head Manor sent me the above award with this definition:

These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more..."

I'm very flattered that Tina, whom I've never really had much contact with, has been quietly following my blog and chose me as part of this category.

But, as usual, to pass the award on I'm changing the rules a bit. No, make that a lot. I'm going to recognize the three bloggers that I feel I have become true friends with, in every sense of the word.

I don't want to be exclusive -- there are plenty of you out there who are best blogging buddies, that I would love to meet one day, and that I've known for quite a while now. You have all become part of my life.

But there are three special gals who end up being the object of phrases that roll off my tongue in everyday conversation: "I have a friend who..." "One of my girlfriends..." and "Yeah, I was talking to a friend about that the other day..."

These are three great bloggers who also grace my email box, my Facebook page, and my Twitter page -- okay, except for one on the Twitter page, but maybe I'll convince her.

I guess, even though it sounds a little corny, I'm writing this to thank them for being my friends.

Wordless Wednesday 54

What's so funny 'bout peace, smiles and understanding?

A recent post over at Chez Loulou has gotten me thinking about the role of smiling in French culture and American culture.

Loulou just got back from a stay in the States, and writes:

First, there's the smile.
Wow! I guess I've always been aware of how often Americans smile, but it had somehow slipped my mind. I mean, everyone smiles. At seemingly everything.

Her take on it is neutral, but she has clearly become accustomed to the more reserved French facial expressions.

I, on the other hand, truly miss the American smile. And reading Loulou's post, entitled Not So Subtle Differences Between America and France, made me remember my own rather painful experience with adjusting my personality and behavior to fit into French standards.

I used to be a big smiler. But somewhere along the line in France, I figured out that big smilers were sometimes taken for big idiots. And over the years, I have definitely changed my smiling habits.

Part of the change was in reaction to remarks from my husband, who just can't stand the American tradition of "smiling big" for photos. A few other smile-related comments came up in our relationship, but I'm not going to splay them all over this blog. It was all very unsettling to me -- I had never imagined that smiling could be subject to criticism.

Starting to teach college-age students in 1995 also modified my smile quotient -- the constant cheery and "up" attitude that I had used teaching in the USA seemed to confuse and bemuse them. I learned that to be taken seriously, I had to act at least somewhat serious.

But mainly, my smile subsided as a gradual part of fitting in, of acting like the people around me.

And this all makes me feel rather sad.

Wordless Wednesday 53

(Photo courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau)

Award time

My blog hasn't received any awards in a while, but Le laquet from Chez le laquet was kind enough to bestow this one upon me. I like the French look and wish I could be a bit more chic like that, mais sans le petit chien.

Spring has finally sprung here, so I spent some of the day gardening -- and actually enjoying it. But now that evening has fallen, I feel way too lazy to pass the award on.

I may do so at a later date, when I get back in good blog-following habits.

Life has been oh-so-busy, and I'm looking forward to the burst of energy that the arrival of spring, as well as an upcoming visit to see one of my favorite bloggers, are promising to give me.

But I'm not quite there...yet...

Wordless Wednesday 52

In a fowl mood

Between exciting football victories, griping about winter, thoughts of getaways, and more griping about winter, I haven't brought you much true France Profonde rurality of late.

We have been getting an occasional sunlit afternoon, and last week my husband was lucky enough to catch these hens and roosters basking in the warmth of a farmhouse yard.

I wonder why this guy would be so curious about what was going on inside the house when it was such a fine day outside?

The grand king of the courtyard definitely appeared to rule the roost, and seemed to know it too:

He was persistent in his curiosity about the other side of the window:

Maybe he was jealous of another creature's creature comforts?

(All photos courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau.)

Wordless Wednesday 51

Wordless Wednesday Trickiness

For my fiftieth Wordless Wednesday, I had a little fun. Or let's say that London blogging buddy Tinsie and I had a little fun.

You see, somewhere along the line, we figured out that we were Wordless Wednesday-ing at exactly the same pace. At one point, she got a little behind -- but at my urging she posted a few extras to catch up.

The idea was to do something special for our 50th.

Well, neither of us came up with any extravaganza of an idea, but this is what ended up happening:

I scoured Tinsie's WWs for a photo that I especially liked -- in this case, it was one that quite literally called out my name -- and posted it as mine.

Of course, she did the same. And no one noticed a thing.

If you have a few minutes, do check out Tinsie's blog "Thoughts in a Nutshell" -- especially "Slaving Away?" her brilliant recent post about being laid off. She is a true eternal optimist.

PS: As I post this, the hyperlinks to Tinsie's blog don't seem to be working right. I'm not sure why. If you access the blog through my own blog And So Forth, (in the sidebar under "Friends From Afar") though, everything works well. I hope this problem is cleared up by the time anyone reads this!

Wordless Wednesday 50

Holiday in Waikiki

My "USA" daughter got to take her short February break in Hawaii.

My "France" daughter got to take the regional bus down to Montpellier to spend a weekend with friends. All right, Palavas in February is nice enough, but it's not Waikiki!

I had no days off and neither did mon mari.

Jealous? Are we jealous?

Wordless Wednesday 49

(Photo courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau, who would do well to read my previous post!)

Happy Valentine's Day...

...to all of my readers, or course, but especially to a certain "reader" who mainly likes to look at the pictures -- when they're his own!

We actually started celebrating on Friday the 13th because our favorite local restaurant, or at least the one we felt most like going to, is open only one evening a week.

Clearly, we are not superstitious!

Wordless Wednesday 48

Guessing Game: My Top Five Getaways

Getaway Number 1

My daughter is on two-week winter break already, and she's only been back at school for five weeks since Christmas. It's a pity I don't have any time off, because I'm feeling cabin-feverish.

If the weather cooperates next weekend, though, we hope to pull a little getaway. I'm looking for a new place, and have a nice idea thanks to Loulou.

In the meantime, here are some photos of my top five getaways. My ranking combined two criteria: how much I like a place, and how often I manage to get there.

Getaway Number 2

So this is not exactly a list of "my favorite places to go" or "the most beautiful sites I've ever visited." They're just places I get to on a somewhat regular basis, for various reasons, and that always perk me up and give me the feeling I've had a nice break from the everyday routine.

Getaway Number 3

Most of these locales are not that far-flung. My/our stays there range from day trips to weekends to short holidays. One is a city I go to for work, and I always come back rejuvenated and more aware of the world outside Aveyron.

Getaway Number 4

Convenience is a major factor in these getaway destinations. I always chuckle when friends back in the States tell me "oh, living in France, you must just go to Italy all the time!" or "I looked on the map and I see you're just a hop, skip and a jump from Provence!"

Getaway Number 5

They are always shocked when I tell them that I have never been to Italy, and that while Provence is within reach, it's a little out of my driving comfort zone considering the limited time I have available to travel around France.

Do you recognize any of my getaways?

Wordless Wednesday 47

(Photo courtesy of Thierry Jouanneteau)

February, or it's been a long winter

This is the view from my home office window this morning, the first day of February.

I made no attempt to take a good picture, nor crop it, or even take it again. And no effort will be made to write a perky post today either.

That's just how February makes me feel. The best thing I can say about this month is that it's blissfully short.