johnny hallyday

Flamingo

Flamingo in flight.

Flowers

It was a beautiful day and I was just itching to take a picture. These are flowers (irises I think) that are growing in our side yard.

Hello Donkey

This is a donkey that lives near us. His fenced in area is right along side the road and we pass him every time we go to work or shopping. In the realm of donkeys he strikes me as a handsome example. I noticed him from the beginning and had taken to saying "hello donkey" every time we went by. My wife just ignored me at first but after awhile she started saying it as well. Now we both look for him and worry when he's not out.
We went shopping in the little town of Sommieres last weekend. My Wife and her friend went into a little gift store while I waited outside. When they came out, she said she had bought me a gift. When I got home and unwrapped it it was . .a little statue of a donkey. It now sits on my desk. These are things that memory's are made of.

Trip home (you had to be there.)

This is a shot from the plane window. Photographs taken from the windows of jumbo jets are kind of like funny stories you tell and nobody laughs. After an awkward silence you say "well, I guess you had to be there." This shot is probably no exception, but I was on my way home on a flight from Montpellier to Paris and the beautiful Alps loomed in the distance. I was euphoric as I snapped photo after photo. This picture does little justice of what I saw out that window but try to imagine. . . . .ok, I guess you had to be there.

A cheval! A cheval! My kingdom for a cheval!

Why the long face? There are these whites horses along the road in our town. I stopped with my camera and they came right over to me. We had a pleasant chat.

Roofing in France

There are a lot of carpenters in my family. This one is for them. I have been intrigued with the tile roofs since I got here so when they were roofing on the lot next to my house I had to take advantage. They don't seem to leak and they're very sturdy.

Annoying Habits

I collect things. I have to bring something back from all my vacations. When I was first married it was little statues. I brought back tiki statues from Hawaii , Inca statues from Mexico etc. etc. I had them on my shelf in my den. My wife is not a big fan of bric-a-brac but she tolerated this character flaw. One day I realized I had too many statues when I was trying get the dust off them ("they're your statues, you dust them.") So I shifted to baseball caps. This too became cumbersome by the sheer volume of it. ("you have so many damn hats there's no place to hang my coat.") When I came to France I realized that before I started down any path I had better think it through. What I came up with is town stickers. Every town we went to has these coat of arms town stickers. They're actually post cards but the coat of arms peals off. This is great. I can scan them and post them before my pictures in my blog and even if we visit 500 towns in two years I can bring them home in a Kleenex box. Problem solved!

And then the lights went out.

Ok, we went to Paris. We had a great time and I took a lot of pictures.
I will post them. But when we came back we had problems. We came home from work on a Friday night, I opened the mailbox and there was a slip in there. It was a from the electric company and it was marked up like a lazy student’s test paper. I had a feeling it was not a good sign. The power was out. This is what happened. Our real estate agent did her job and faxed a contract to EDF (Électricité de France.) They lost the fax, apparently. We have been living off the previous tenant’s electricity. They found this out and cut our power. This pissess EDF off because they realize they just got screwed out of 3 months of power money. Ok , this is Friday. We call a colleague for help and he jumps in to help us. EDF says Wednesday of the next week. We had many people call to fix this but Wednesday was carved in stone and Wednesday it would be. We lasted 5 days with no power.
The EDF guy showed up today (Wednesday). . ..he walked over to the little white box on the curb outside my street and inserted his key and opened the door and threw a switch. Wa-la we had power. Five days we took cold showers and sat around candles at night. We were being punished for their fault.
Good things that happened: Everybody at work tried to help us. They felt bad for us and generally had bad things to say about EDF. . ..it’s a monopoly.
A guy at work took all our freezer food and put it in his freezer.
The same guy insisted we come over for dinner and we did and had great time with him and his wife and two kids.
We got three months of free french electricity.
I made my my first French joke .. . EDF stands for Electricity Doesn’t Freakinwork.
It got a few laughs at work. La vie a belle (life is good.)

The Circus is coming to town.

The Circus (or Cirque) is coming to town. They have these signs all over the town. I've been annoying my wife by saying "ZAVATTA!" every time we pass one. It's fun to say, try it.
Za-Vatta! . . .See?

Soccer ball tree

It was a busy weekend but I feel guilty for not posting.










I have a tree in my yard that grows soccer balls. Soccer is called football in France so I'll honor that. So I was out doing yard work this weekend and noticed my football tree. The mower makes a heck of a racket when you hit one of these footballs.

A few initial observations about south France

We were there for a couple weeks to get settled into work and look for a house. Here's few things I noticed

1.The Streets are very narrow.















It would be physically impossible to drive an SUV on these streets. Even with the tiny cars that they drive you have to sometimes allow another driver to exit a street before you enter. Tiny cars are good because gas prices are astronomical.

2. There are beautiful trees (sycamores, I think) that line the streets.














I'm told. . And I can't verify if its true. Napoleon had them planted so his troops had shade.
Now there's a leader. Maybe they had no shade trees in Belgium (Waterloo.) Maybe the poor guy lost his final battle because the sun was in his eyes.

3. They had neat little old cars.















This is a Citroen, I have no idea what year. I saw a number of them while I was over there.
I thought they were the neatest looking vehicle. I kept telling my wife I was going to buy one and have it shipped home. She laughed the first time I said it and then less so as I continued to repeat it. Now I think she's scared that I'm not kidding. I am.