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Responsibility
26 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery
Tag Archives: Martizay
Wheels
19 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
I have been beating myself up for fourteen years for not having patented the wheel.
Cold!!
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.
Hibernation
21 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
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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.
A Little Guilt Trip
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.
Je Suis Charlie
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.
I Didn’t Know Whether to Cry or Sleep
07 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
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We are in our very French kitchen, having breakfast after a whirlwind orientation from the delightful John and Jackie Fisher, our British hosts who are bravely entrusting their house and critters to us.
Pitchforks and Wheelbarrows
05 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
We have arrived in the tiny town of Martizay, France. It’s a whirlwind of activity here, both for our hosts Jackie and John—who are preparing to depart tomorrow morning for the UK where they will stay until late March—and for us, as we unpack our bags, shed clothes we have been wearing for four days, and learn all there is to keep up the farm while it’s under our stewardship.
The Expat Almanac 