January 2008 Archives

Despite the fact that smoking has been forbidden in all public places here in France, we get a regular dose at around 10pm every night, when our neighbour lights up at his open kitchen window (so as not to bother his partner) and his cigarette smoke flies straight into our kitchen vent, which then inevitably drifts its way into the lounge room.

It's basically as if he walks into our aparment and starts smoking in our kitchen.

Every night, we unfailingly find ourselves scrunching up our noses and rolling our eyes at each other. Delightful.

You can't win all the time, I suppose.

The guy who is doing work on your building is sitting at a table in the entrance hall, at 12.30 on the dot, lunchbox open, a napkin and cutlery placed just so, and a half-empty bottle of wine in front of him on the table.

I cannot express how delighted I am that I am now able to spend an evening out in the restaurants and bars of this city and I can come home without stinking of cigarette smoke. No longer do I have to rip my clothes off as soon as I get home and stuff them in the laundry hamper and take a shower to get rid of the smell. No turning over in my sleep in the middle of the night to a noseful of smoky hair. No spending the next morning coughing up phlegm as my lungs attempt to clean themselves out.

A revolution indeed.

Oh, and you can hear more of our discussion of this revolution (amongst other things) on the podcast. ;)

Just for the record, these are the things that I shouldn't do when I am not well :
- watch scary movies. The dreams I have when I'm well after having watched a scary movie are bad enough. Combine that with a fever and, well, let's just say that Sylvain wasn't sleeping well either.
- anything remotely creative. This just results in bad decisions and unnecessary stress and a lot of wasted time.

And these are the things that I should do when I am not well :
- listen to what the doctor says and take the time off that he recommends I take off rather than arguing with him and saying, "oh no, I'm sure I'll be fine". He has more training in this field than me.
- rest. Rather than run around like a crazy thing, and going back to work too early. See previous point.

With all this in mind, I'm now a little worried about a rather big decision we made a couple of weeks ago, when I was in a fog of flu : the ordering of a new rug for the lounge room. Sylvain keeps reassuring me that he is quite confident of our decision, but we have not been able to agree on the matter for a year and a half and I find it rather suspicious that we were able to walk in and out of the rug shop in under 15 minutes, having made a decision together without one of us having to back down. I'm therefore a leetle bit nervous about what will turn up when they call to say it has arrived.

My sexy and husky voice that was my (rather pathetic, I'll admit) highlight in the middle of last week turned into something a lot less appealing by Friday.

And whilst acute bronchitis (made worse by my little encounter with whooping cough a couple of months ago; which could possibly turn into pneumonia if I'm not careful; which has my chest and throat feeling like they're burning; which has meant that I've drunk about five gallons of water this weekend (replete with straws, ice and lemon slices); which has left me coughing and spluttering every night for the last 4 nights; which has left me resorting to whispering rather than talking) is not much fun...

... at least Sylvain has had a quiet weekend.

Between me and pirate cat (imagine me, for the last two weeks, making up a whole bunch of little ditties like "Pirate Cat, Pirate Cat, Chases Other Cats When She Knows She Shouldn't", sung to the tune of "spider pig"), I suppose he needs a bit of a break.

Our holiday season was littered with the following :
- lots of food. Lots and lots and lots of food. And wine to go with it. Oh, and a few bottles of champagne. And a couple of bottles of my most recent favourite discovery, Clairette de Die. My delightful father-in-law continues to surprise me with new things to try.
- an emergency trip to the vet following a bad decision when Symphony decided to play with The Grey Cat (my in-laws cat, who has no other name), but The Grey Cat didn't want anything to do with the situation and there was a ball of cat rolling around on the floor and much hissing then quite a bit of shouting in English and in French by the Aussie Lass then rather a lot of blood. 2mm difference and Symphony would have lost her eye entirely. She is ok now, but it was touch and go there for awhile, and was a permanent and demure fixture on our laps for the few days after. Anyone who has met Symphony will know that demure is not one of her primary characteristics. It was somewhat traumatic for all parties. The worst thing is that the silly creature continued to try to play with The Grey Cat in the days that followed.
- a lot of time spent working on some mysterious and exciting projects that will shortly be unveiled.
- long afternoons of the most fascinating and frustrating of card games, Tarot. As a young initiate of this classic French card game, it's quite different from other games I'm used to, but I can see why it becomes incredibly addictive. I also began to see a different side of my husband - I'd suspected as much when he started being cheeky at Canasta, but in his own realm, he's a lethal card player. Yet another thing I love about him. Except when he does sneaky things to me.
- playing lego with my nephews, and "shop" with my neice. Always entertaining.
- phone calls, emails and twitters from the other side of the world. It's always hard being so far away at this time of the year, especially because traditionally this is when summer really sets in, everyone starts slowing down, and the days are long and lazy. But the internet makes the distance just a little less drastic. The best bit was the call from Australia on Christmas Day. After a couple of minutes of chatting to everyone down under (in English, obviously), I turned around to see my 4 year old neice sitting beside me on the couch, staring at me with wide eyes and grinning from ear to ear. I can only imagine that, because she couldn't understand a word I was saying, she thought I was talking the same sort of gobbledygook that I'd heard her speaking with her dolls.
- a return to work, surrounded by a fog of flu, culminating in a visit to the doctor and five days of being sick, including New Years Eve, forcing us to cancel all our plans and hibernate. I'm now struggling with the damn cold sitting in my chest (already fragile in the aftermath of the whooping cough episode), but at least my croaky voice is gleaning sympathy from the people around me. And it's a wee bit sexier than dripping snot all over the keyboard like I was last week.
So begins 2008.