Without Wi-fi

This morning I woke up bright and early, grabbed a cup of fresh coffee, sat down at my coffeet table, and opened my laptop to find that my Internet service wasn't working. At all.

I disconnected everything; reconnected everything. I counted to 10 Mississippi. Nothing. I let Windows try and find the problem. It didn't. I thought maybe my wi-fi card got surged in the last storm. I booted. I re-installed drivers. I gave up but held on to hope that the Internet connection would be restored. I thought of a hundred things I would have done if I had Internet connection - blog, check email, look up whether or not there has ever been a study to show women have better memories than men - I needed to check ingredients for marinara sauce but couldn't, so I made another type of red sauce altogether not suitable for these warmer months. I couldn't make cookies because I forgot how much sugar I needed to use. IT WAS A DISASTER.

So at about 1 am I decided before going to bed I'd give it one last shot. Success! Then I needed to make certain it was working...by blogging.

It terrifies me that the Internet is such an important part of my life and the reality is I didn't miss much. Sure there were a free emails and Facebook status updates, but they could have waited a day or two.

My goal is to not spend tomorrow on Facebook. I have a recipe for green beans to think of, laundry, house cleaning, and well in lieu of the Internet I did seriously get my old school geek on. I've been playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a PC game that probably came out in 1999 that I loved and might be one of my favourite PC games of all time. Sid Meier/Firaxis Games are (some) of the brains behind Civilization, which is another one of my favourite PC games. (I just want to state for the record despite my geekiness I don't play Warcraft anymore and I have never played Second Life for example. I'm determined to beat my old high score. I can't let this get in the way of getting the house a bit cleaned up and preparing a yummy dinner (which will include an Oreo cheesecake) for Donald who is coming to visit while he's in France before heading off to China to trek around for the rest of the summer.

I've never lived all year round in a "country" setting, but it does have its glitches where it sorts of ruins the whole solitude and idyllic setting. I can deal with the hiccups and have been for the past year, but there's also another sort of odd thing I realised today about the rhythm. When spring came I prepared the house for spring. Not just putting away my winter threads and the usual ménage de printemps (spring cleaning), but I planted and started using the garden almost as an extra room. I started organising more and wanting to fix little things about the house. Now that I'm thinking about the fall and winter I already have about a hundred household chores I have planned to make the house as cosy and warm as possible (thus avoiding all the mistakes I made last year like not putting curtains up!) in case it's another oddly freezing winter Mother Nature has in store for us.

So that's what this week is going to be about. Home improvement. I'll be posting pictures so show you what I manage to accomplish - especially since the big Emmaus sale is this weekend.

I think I might even turn the Internet off. God only knows what I'd manage to get done!

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I think my dog can spell...

I think my dog can spell. I already cancelled a v-e-t appointment because we had a massive thunderstorm the morning of and Chienne Maisonette isn't so fond of thunder, but now there is no excuse to delay (other than the fact I can't find the folder with all her papers in it). She has to go to the v-e-t.

Chienne Maisonette is the first dog ever in my life and learning how to care for one's pet is a continually process. Since the "cancer scare" that turned out to be nothing more than just her thyroid needing some help, I'm now extra cautious about making sure I have a good v-e-t who knows what the hell they're doing. Last time around it took 2 v-e-ts and 1 specialist (costing about 800 euros for fancy scans) to realise what she had was actually nothing more serious than what any dog over 7 years old can get, which is thyroid defiency. It caused paralysis on one side of her face so the symptoms seemed very severe and worrying. Now, almost a year later on thyroid replacement pills she's not only her old self, but maybe a slightly more energetic version. The v-e-t warned me that the thyroid replacement would make her like a puppy again, but honestly after the scare that I might lose her she can act like a puppy all she wants.

People laugh when before they meet the "Hound" as many refer to her that I'm obviously so in love with her, but then those are the same people that end up traveling from across the world (or from Paris) just to see the "Hound". She has a long list of people who would gladly throw me under a train in order to inherit her too. My neighbour's son and his friends knock on my door just to play with her and even her v-e-t didn't want to give her back to me after her last check-up.

So this morning I spell out the v-e-t and she starts making grunting noises of disapproval almost immediately. This is why I now think she can spell. Ever since the word has been mentioned I can't get her to come anywhere near me. I'll be spending the rest of my afternoon coaxing her towards the forest for a little walk, at the end of which we will arrive at the v-e-t.

But even though she can spell, she still doesn't seem to understand once she's gone she's off the hook for another 6 months and plus I have lots of treats...



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Thank You Mayor Bloomberg!

In light of recent claims that Bloomberg bought the votes of New York Senators who would support gay marriage - something I have mixed feelings about because I support marriage equality for everyone, but I don't support political kickbacks or corruption - Mayor Bloomberg has made me rather happy today by working with the NYPL system to find $83 million to keep the libraries running in New York City.

In light of the economy there are plenty of things one could spend $83 million on, but in light of a underfunded and flailing education system, unemployment, and the community I think the library is a better choice than most people realise. Thankfully Mayor Bloomberg saw the light.

So one thumb up for rescuing the NYPL and well, let's see what comes out about the other thing because perhaps sadly today is not a two thumbs up day for the Mayor, though considering the amount of money spent by other individuals and organisations (all claiming non-profit status despite making insane amounts of money off their followers) to stop marriage equality (the Church of Latter Day Saints spent apparently $40 million fighting Prop 8 in California), a couple thousand doesn't seem so bad (and that in itself should be enough to revoke their non-profit status).

The big winner today of course are the people of New York and it's not so often that the people win anything, is it?

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14 of My Favourite French Books (pour le 14 juillet)

1. Le Comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

I am not embarassed to say it's my favourite book in any language and one of the books I've read most often. Yes I know how it ends, but my fascination with Edmund Dantes that started with reading Dumas' masterpiece under the covers with a flashlight continues. It's a powerful book disguised as a sort of adventure story. The count is one of the greatest characters to ever grace the printed page.

2. La Dame aux Camélias, Alexandre Dumas (Fils)
Written by the son of the writer Alexandre Dumas (see above), it was good enough of a story that Verdi turned it into an opera the world now knows as La Traviata (the second most performed opera in the world). Based on that information it's obviously a drama and quite a romantic one. Dumas (Fils) really knew how to write about love. Marguerite was based on Dumas' real life lover Marie Duplessis, a famous courtesan who hosted a popular salon. Dumas was dumped for Franz Liszt, and Duplessis died young of tuberculosis with two counts at her side (one from Sweden, the other French). La Dame aux Camélias is widely considered Dumas' best work and has been turned not only into an opera, but there are nearly a dozen films as well.

3. Quatrevingt-treize, Victor Hugo
I am a massive fan of Victor Hugo. He is the only writer that I went so far as to acquire a portrait of (I have his funeral announcement from the newspaper that has been in the frame since the day he died) and I have a massive multi-volume collection of everything he ever did (he was much more than just a writer). Still after all of that Quatrevingt-treize remains my favourite of his works. It was the last book Hugo wrote and in it many of his prior convictions have obviously changed. He is no longer a Royalist. He is obviously on the side of he people and he showed this change in politics by writing a brilliant book. If you want to know the facts about France during this time you can read plenty of books, but if you want to know the heart and soul of the people then you read this book.

4. Les liasons dangereuses, Pierre-Ambroise Francois Choderlos Laclos
Someone I know and who's opinion I trust once told me he thought this was the best example of French literature for its style and form. I didn't have the heart to tell him I loved this book because it was scandalous and quite easy to read even those it's a book of "letters". I've since given it a look and agree the writing alone is reason to read the book, but I prefer my reasons for adoring this masterpiece of French literature.

5. Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal
The first volume's epigraph "La vérité, l’âpre vérité" is in itself fiction. Julian Sorel enters into the Church after realising that under the Bourbon Restoration one can't advance one's prospects by pursuing a career in the military. He doesn't care much for religion beyond appearances and eventually through a few protectors he meets along the way does almost get what he most desires, but of course it ends badly.

6. Chéri, Colette
Any one who knows me Colette is in my eyes, perhaps the greatest female writer France has ever known. Not only did she write beautifully, but she achieved what any writer should strive for - to write simply but with great detail. This is in my opinion her real masterpiece. Colette wrote for men about women really and there is no better example than Chéri.

7. - 10. The Poets

Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Romances sans paroles, Paul Verlaine
Le bateau ivre, Arthur Rimbaud

If you want to read the best poetry France has to offer, you wouldn't be remiss in starting with Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. I would have included Mallarmé on my list, but he is notoriously difficult to translate and is best read in French (although poetry and its translation are subjects well worth debating). I could have as easily swapped Le bateau ivre for Une Saison en Enfer and Verlaine's Romances sans paroles is a must read for any fan of Rimbaud's - but for me personally Les Fleurs du Mal is the great volume of poems ever published. The first poem I remember falling in love with was by Mallarmé, but even he was inspired by Baudelaire. When I told my father of this new poet he immediately pulled down some Baudelaire and from that day no other poet has ousted Baudelaire from his lofty perch in my esteem.

11. Les Fables de la Fontaine
If you want to understand a lot of French jokes and perhaps the soul of the French people, you have to read Les Fables de la Fontaine. As a child I knew it before I barely remember anything else. Read it in poetic form though, Fontaine was a genius.

Now you know that part in the feux d'artifices (fireworks) where the sky lits up like crazy, the finale? Well because I can no longer list books and separate the ones I most love from the ones I truly love here is a finale en livres:

L'etranger/The Stranger, Albert Camus
La vie de Gargantua et Pantagruel/The Life of Gargantua and Pantragruel, Rabelais
Moravagine, Blaise Cendrars (a favourite of Henry Miller & Borges')
La vie de mode emploi/Life a User's Manual, George Perec
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
La Ventre de Paris/The Belly of Paris, Zola
L'amant/The Lover, Marguerite Duras
A la recherche du temps perdu/In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
Voyage au bout de la nuit/Journey to the End of the Night, Celine
Fin du Chéri, Colette
Les Enfants terribles, Jean Cocteau
Rene, Chateaubriand
Les Contes de Charles Perrault
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Contes du jour et de la nuit, Guy de Maupassant

I could keep going, but I have to prepare a nice meal to celebrate le 14 juillet. I've decided to go with some country cooking to keep with the spirit of the day so I'll be preparing a simple feast of crispy skinned roasted chicken rubbed with thyme, old bread stuffing, and some courgettes au gratin with good white wine from Alsace and fondant au chocolat.

Thanks to the brave Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who stormed the Bastille the rights of every French person were born. Joyeux quatorze juillet a tous!

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Lush Cosmetics Week 2

So for months I've been walking past the Lush store on rue du Renard (Paris 4e, Hotel de Ville) and been bombarded by the scent coming out of the boutique. I live in France where people go to buy perfume and walking into a Sephora after 11 am means subjecting your nose to an olfactory torture, so I tend to avoid any stores with a particular smell. But after many days of seeing the girls that came out of Lush with nice skin, I decided to buckle.

Now I've read reviews about the pushy staff, but the girl who helped me wasn't so pushy. They were out of what I really wanted to start my Lush experience with, the Balançoire face mask (called Love Lettuce in the UK and seems to be not available according to the Lush US website? Maybe someone in the US can comment to say whether or not Lush offers the same amount of fresh face masks?). So I went for the Matin et Soir (95 g - 7,50 euros, also known as 9 to 5) and the Herbalism (100 g - 9,50 euros).

After two weeks I can honestly say I really like the Matin et Soir/9 to 5 lotion cleanser. It's a pain in the butt because I have to keep my Lush products in the fridge, but I've worked it out by keeping cotton pads downstairs in the kitchen, putting on the amount of products I'm going to use that night or morning on one, and then bringing it upstairs. What I like is I can actually see the dirt coming out of my pores, my skin feels clean and soft all day long and the next morning when I wake up, and my pores seem to be less obvious (which is my major problem with my skin at the moment my pores are just out of control).

Now I have mixed feelings in regards to the exfoliating scrub Herbalisme. It seems really difficult to get it to sort of soften up so I can spread it on my face and a lot of little bits end up in my sink, which seems wasteful. I get the feeling that I'm still using the product incorrectly because my results aren't consistent. The girl at the Lush shop told me to use the exfoliating scrub twice a week, but I think it's gentle enough that I exfoliate about every 2 days and also use it on my hands, elbows, knees, and a little on my legs and feet. It does make my face and the other places I use it seem softer, but I still feel like I haven't gotten off the dull layer of skin I want to slough off.

And this is where my problem with Lush begins. Since the products all have an expiration date, I know I'm going to end up throwing away a lot of product because there is just no way I'll use up everything by then. I wish Lush offered small sizes because I'd be a lot more willing to use more of their products. I'm thinking about taking the Herbalisme back and asking to exchange it for something else. I'm not sure how good their customer service is, but in my defense their salesperson recommended it and it's not doing anything for my skin. It has tonight and Sunday night to impress me or it's gone.

There are a few products of Lush's that get good reviews such as the Coalface soap, so I think if I do bring back the scrub and decide to get one of their masks, I'll ask for something that does what the Coalface does, but I won't be changing my cleanser any time soon. For the price (even with the wasteful aspect because of the expiration date) it's pretty good stuff, though a part of me worries that like Kiehl's, Lush might be skincare for a *cough* younger woman. At my age I might need something more hardcore.

So to the other 30-somethings who might read my blog what do you use to keep your skin looking and feeling great? And if you're 30-something or otherwise and do use Lush, what are your favourite products?

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Today's "(Im)practical" Adventure

You might have read my earlier post about trying to get to Emmaus and how doing so (without a car) would involve taking a bus and then taking a train. That bit worked out fine. The train was even cute in a granny's sitting room kind of way.

I arrived at La Grande Paroisse in record time thanks to the timing just working out perfectly somehow. I followed the signs near the train station towards what I thought was town. I was wrong. So after a painful climb up a steep road named rue Achille Pierre that I swore was named Achille's Heel it was so steep a climn, I encountered this bizarre series of steps that led up the cliff hillside that led up to nothing except a sort in progress housing development site.

Realising I was going the wrong way I followed the bus signs, but couldn't wait around for the bus since there wasn't another one for three and a half hours. So eventually I get to the Emmaus...

I'm just going to post my FB update status because I couldn't find a better way to say this than I already have:

took a bus & a train to go to the Emmaus to scour for thrifty furniture only to be yelled at by one of their workers who was already sort of screaming at some mentally handicapped people pulling old toilet parts out of the back of a rusted van. Seriously, life is stranger than any fiction

So the Emmaus is closed until the weekend of the 23rd where they're having some kind of massive end of summer sale. Obviously I'm going to be there, so I will finally blog about Emmaus and what goodies I find there. It just means I'll have to cancel cooking for my neighbour's 50th birthday party and going to a 3 star Michellin restaurant. But I'm feeling like I need to nest a bit. I want to make La Maisonette even more of a little odd home with some simple home improvement projects. This winter I want the house organised and cosy and last time I checked four courses of decadent gastronomie doesn't burn calories.

The coolest things I saw today where these ornate little sculpted shutter stoppers and this mural of Lisa Simpson.

Here are some other photos I took today including some of La Grande Paroisse herself. The parish is completely closed off and looks almost like an ancient ruin.

Must run now. It's le 14 juillet almost and the fireworks have already started. Joyeux Quatorze Juillet a tous!

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Today's "Practical" Adventure

Tomorrow is our biggest national holiday le quatorze juillet, the 14th of July also known abroad as Bastille Day. We don't call it Bastille Day, but when I lived in New York for some reason the French community did.

So naturally I've decided to celebrate France's abolishing feudalism by going furniture hunting. I'm a big supporter of what we call associations in French. An association is usually a charity run by regular people (sometimes by executives depending on the association's wealth and status), that somehow reaches out to the community to raise money for their cause. Emmaus is probably one of my favourites.

Emmaus was started by the Abbé Pierre in 1949. Abbé Pierre was pretty bad ass. He was a member of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris and ran an underground that smuggled Jewish people into Switzerland after learning how to make fake papers and passports just for his new cause.

After the war Abbé Pierre went into politics, but his real accomplishment is Emmaus. Named for the village where Jesus appeared to two men who gave him shelter and hospitality after the resurrection in the Bible, Emmaus' goal was to raise money to construct housing for the homeless by selling used goods donated by the public.

"Emmaus, it's a little like the wheelbarrow, the shovels and the pickaxes coming before the banners. A sort of social fuel derived from salvaging defeating men.

Realising he'd need funds to start his association, Abbé Pierre went on a then popular game show and won 256,000 francs (about 40,000 euros if directly converted into today's money). It was because of his winnings that when the deadly winter of 1954 hit and the homeless were dying in the streets, Abbé Pierre appealed to the people in a famous speech. And the French heard him to the tune of 500 million francs in donations (Charlie Chaplin gave 2 million).

I always tell people to check out Emmaus even if they're on France on vacation before heading to the flea markets. Not only can you find the one off thing you might not find elsewhere (brainwave reading machine anyone? 10 euros), you can always find things that flea markets will sell but at a fraction of the cost. I've found real silverware, Limogues tea sets, and lots of high-quality furniture.

Most of the people who work at Emmaus are people who have been helped by the association and are paid by the association for their skills either selling, repairing, stocking, or doing administrative work. So all your money goes to help locals. And that is what an association is supposed to be about.

There's a great new boutique for Emmaus at the 104 art space in the 18e, a massive warehouse of an Emmaus at Metro Pierre et Marie Curie in Ivry, and one that is nearby La Maisonette, except that it's not exactly easy to get there.

So I'll be taking a bus and a train that ends in Grenoble to make it to the Emmaus 13 km from where I live. I need a few things for the house and since I've started boycotting IKEA for the damage it does to the environment, I need cheap furniture that has some life to it. I'm going for nice wood armoirs for my clothes and a bed frame.

But first I have to get there....so let's see how this goes. I'll update you on how my adventure turned out later.

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The Weekend Update

I had to take a few days off from blogging, but now I am officially back. I'm not sure if there is some formula to how long it takes to get back into the swing of things after you have guests, but for me I guess it's about two days. Mostly because the kitchen is a disaster.

I cooked, but not as much as I originally planned to because the gumbo just seemed to never run out! Thankfully it was one of my best batches ever. I also took David on his last day to Moret-sur-Loing a little 13th century village just a short train ride from where I live. He bought us some interesting (and delicious) homemade ice cream at the famous 1000 and 1 flavours parlour in Moret-sur-Loing.

Here's a few photos from the weekend.

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