19 Friday Jun 2015
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The balcony today
Tom wrote in his last post about our difficult move to Expat Basecamp, the heart attack he suffered because of it, and his need to chill, which he did for about seven minutes.
09 Tuesday Jun 2015
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Our previous apartment on the morning before we moved
I never looked upon moving as a stressful situation. In the seven years we’ve lived together, Louise and I have moved six times, not counting the mini-moves we made during our year of travel. Excepting one, all those moves were exciting and optimistic, untroubled and confident. Excepting one. And that one put me in the hospital.
03 Sunday May 2015
Posted in Accommodations
That’s our balcony with the cathedral ceiling. The TV antennas are actually a half-mile away. We share real estate with them on top of Portland’s West Hills.
Yes, we’re back in Portland. No, there have been no medical emergencies. Yes, we’ve been busy. It’s that time of the year again. We’re moving.
26 Thursday Feb 2015
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19 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
I have been beating myself up for fourteen years for not having patented the wheel.
09 Monday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations
I’m adding them up in my head: thirteen, I think. Thirteen restaurants explored since we’ve arrived here in the French countryside, none with too much success. Some were too confusing (Louise mistakenly ordered redundant courses of sausage at one, and she speaks the language); some were too loud, or too unsavory, or too expensive. Many were all those things.
No, that’s not right. There is one, the most recent one, the one to which we’ve vowed to return.
29 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
It’s cold here. High-humidity cold. It seeps into your skin like a nicotine patch. It’s as persistent as a senate filibuster and as welcome as a letter from the IRS.
Today we were supposed to be under our favorite palapa in Puerto Vallarta, slurping margaritas and wiggling our toes in warm sand. You know the story. Instead, with hardly two weeks to adjust, we trundled off to live for three months in an eighty-year-old French farmhouse, constructed of solid masonry that retains cold like a numismatist collects stamps. Outside, a grousing heat pump tries to salvage heat from air that has none. Inside, eighty-year-old radiators, once bristling with steam from an oil-fired boiler, now circulate lukewarm water from the heat pump, warming the air with a whisper rather than the shout of ancient fire.
Thus, today we meet the second of five words that I’m using to describe our French experience: cold.
21 Wednesday Jan 2015
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After eight months of high society in Portland’s haute Pearl District, Louise and I now inhabit la France profonde, which is pretty much the Pearl’s opposite. We feel like pages ripped from a Fitzgerald novel, come to rest in deep France, where it’s quiet as a monastery and urban influences are as scarce as feathers on a frog.
19 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
L to R: Stephen, Kay, Tom, & Louise. Just look at those desserts!
Of our 821 regular readers, about 800 of you totally ignored my birthday Saturday. Regardless, being old and creaky has not diminished my interest in celebrations, although the actual number is irrelevant.
11 Sunday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Sentiments
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Look carefully and you’ll see the crowd outside the church
As I write this, sympathizers all over the Western world are holding gatherings in honor of the seventeen victims of last week’s terrorist attacks on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo and the ensuing carnage.
The Expat Almanac 