Weather update.....

We interrupt our previously scheduled event for an important weather announcement...

It FINALLY snowed in Vermont!

Yeah ha... let's go play!

In learning a language, talking comes first. It’s how babies learn.  Soon, though you feel foolish being a forty-something baby and you want grow up a little.  One turns to trying to read French.

Tom’s choice was to dive into murder mysteries by Simenon (the famous Maigret series of nearly one hundred books) and Fred Vargas. Susan dipped her toes into The Petit Nicolas and Martine. Both of these book series are tales of young  French children. Our fledgling conversations with our french friends were certainly quite humorous. Tom carried on about unsavory characters, sex and intrigue. 

Then at one point Tom was reading some 18th century French and no one in our century understood him. 

Susan veered towards the barn yard, forest animals and seaside vacations. She managed to use in conversation the name of an animal very few (if any) French people have ever seen-- “wapiti”-- “moose”.  And that is not even a French word-- its American Indian. 

Adventuring into worlds that we were interested in gave us the foundation to venture into harder literature.  All the while keeping our French friends utterly confused.

French Lessons

F un to laugh at oneself

R oll those rrs

E ars full of rocks

N ouns with a sex

"C an o’ beer" La Canebiere

H umbling tenses

L ovely, patient Anne Marie

E legance of a french voice

S ongs of love and Harley Davidsons

S ounds a southern tongue has never made

Ok, that subjunctive is simply a pain

N otice the nuances

S peak your heart and others will figure it out

We now have complete sympathy for President Obama and his turmoil with health care/insurance. (I can never figure out which is the topic or the problem.) But, I am very clear on what the problem is if one wants to leave the USA for France. France will only give us an extended stay visa if we have health insurance. That insurance must be from a source outside of their system. The medical care will come from them, just not the payment. Fair enough, we have done nothing to pay into their system. The problem is how does one choose from the multitude of ExPat insurance companies? Everyone of them has a different cost, different coverage, different things listed to be covered, different things left off..... and what about the quality of their web-sites? Does presentation count for anything? And what the hey is ‘URC’. The small print says ‘Usual, Reasonable and Customary’. Can you just imagine that language being used in a document put before the Congress or Senate. My idea of ‘reasonable’ is certainly very different from an awful lot of my friends and family. But how far out on the limb do we crawl before even our ‘usual’ tolerance is proven naive? So President Obama, we too are going to have to take a crap shoot and hope we have made the right choices that will keep us in our ‘customary’ state of health.

We each have categories to focus on for this move. I have visa, insurance, house sale, airline tickets, scheduling family visits. Do you really want me to go on.....

Tom has the cargo container.   

The container that Tom seems to have settled on will be 40 feet long. That is 4 feet longer than our house here. Since no furniture is going into this container you wonder what could be in there?

Here is a list of what is planned for it so far:

a Kubota tractor with a back hoe attachment

several lawnmowers

two Harley Davidson motorcycles

one Vespa

a wood stove

a self composting toilet

several boxes of clothes

maybe six press back chairs

an Orient and Flume vase we bought as an engagement present to each other

Have I mentioned that we do not have a yard in France? 

Our Vermont yard sale will be August 20th, so come on by.