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Ella and I went over to my parents’ retirement community for dinner tonight, leaving straight from school after the weekly staff meeting. We arrived just after 6pm and hustled down to the dining room where, among the many choices, I selected corned beef and cabbage. I can’t remember the last time I ate corned beef and cabbage. It was delicious, the meat especially lean.

After dinner we all spent some time chatting in their apartment. Among the conversation topics included how to fold my nice clothes to fit into a carry-on suitcase with a minimum of wrinkles. What are mothers for? She even got out one my dad’s suits to demonstrate. After that, she retrieved her charm bracelet, thinking she might wear it soon, and proceeded to tell Ella about all the charms on it. My favorite is the one of rose-colored glasses given to her by friends of her grandparents (Ella’s great great grandparents) because my mother was always seeing the bright side of life.

I snapped this picture after the corn beef eating and suit folding demonstration, and during the charm bracelet showing.

Oh, this photo does my heart a world of good. We received it and a couple of others on Sunday from Frédérique and Laurent. Of course, it’s Manon and Romain and it comes from early October and a nice, nice day in Nantes. Not only was it sunny and warm, it was the day Romain’s 19th birthday was celebrated!

Me, I see these two and I think of many things, all of them happy, including the English lessons Melinda and I were providing them last year. Each Monday Romain came over for lunch and conversation. And a few hours later, after school, Manon came by for a goûter and conversation.

For another view of Manon and Romain, take a look at Day 25 of the sabbatical. This is just a couple of days before we moved into our house in Nantes and is from our trip to Pornichet. The photo always makes me smile.

Anyone remember that short-lived American TV show from the early 70s called “Bridget Loves Bernie?” You don’t? Well, shame on you. I do. It starred Meredith Baxter and David Birney and surrounded the travails of a young couple, one of whom was Catholic (Bridget) and the other of whom was Jewish (Bernie). Laughs galore, especially at how their parents would fight over everything.

Well, today’s photo made me think of that show! See, that’s French-born Bérnard (Bernie) on the left and American-born Christine (Chrissie) on the right. See the connection? They sent the picture to Melinda and me last week under the subject line “tchin tchin,” words used in France for a toast. The email arrived mid-morning and included this line, “It might not be a good time for you to have a drink, you people have weird kind of hours…”

We do have weird hours here in Seattle. They take place 9 hours after things in France. So by the time Melinda and I are ready to toast Chrissie and Bernie, they are fast asleep!

Ah, our French friends. We miss them. I am pleased to say that we received photos from Bérnard and Christine last week, including this one, and photos from Frédérique and Laurent yesterday. Expect to see one of those here very soon.

Meanwhile, I’m off to bone up on my American TV show knowledge. See ya!

Don’t blame me! That’s the subject line Melinda and/or Nina used when they sent me this picture a few minutes ago. You see, I asked Melinda to email me a photo, and I admit that when she said they had just gotten out of the hot tub and had a couple of pictures of them in it that I said one of those would be perfect. But I didn’t say anything about how to describe the photo.

Makes me wonder, though, considering they each are having a glass of wine, if they meant to write Chicks in Hot Tub. Perhaps I should ask.

Hmmm… Another thought just occurred to me, this one related to my spam post from a few days ago. Do you think this entry will get a few more “hits” given its title? I bet it does, meaning it might generate a bit more spam, too. I’ll keep an eye out.

In other news, I had a Skype chat with Chloe this afternoon. She was working on a 7 page paper due on Friday and chatting with her floormates about a community dinner that was being planned in their dorm. They’re making salmon. Wow! We also talked about the two friends Chloe will be bringing home for Thanksgiving weekend in a couple of weeks.

Speaking of that weekend, on November 27th I’ll be running the half marathon portion of the Seattle Marathon, 13.1 miles. I’m all registered. In preparation, this morning I ran for two hours. Without stopping.

Wish I had a hot tub for my tired legs…

Melinda made me get up at 4am today. Why? To take her to the airport. Why? She flew out this morning to spend the next week with her best childhood friend, Nina and Nina’s family (husband and 3 kids). Where does Nina live? In Wyoming. Where’s Wyoming? That way (pointing east).

So, yes, we kicked Melinda out of the house for a week. With Chloe away at college, that leaves just Ella and me, reminding me of last January when Melinda and Chloe left Ella and me in Nantes. Except then, both Ella and I were sick. This time we’re not. Well, we’re not in France, either. We’re just hanging out. I took some time this afternoon to watch the movie “Everything is Illuminated,” which I absolutely loved. Ella has been listening to music, country music in fact (I bet she’d like Wyoming!).

Melinda and I have been exchanging text messages over the last few minutes and I got her to send me one with a picture, this one of her with Nina fixing dinner. So here it is, a first on the blog: A picture from Wyoming!

Next Saturday Melinda and I need to get dressed up for a special occasion. And since I don’t spend a huge chunk of my time worrying about getting dressed up, Melinda has taken on the challenge for me. And what a challenge it is. Just listen.

Last weekend she had me trying on all of my fancy clothes. That took about 5 minutes, long enough to realize that they are much looser on me than they were before we left for France (see Tracking My Weight). This morning she came back from Brenda’s and Greg’s house with one of Greg’s suits. He’s bigger (read: more muscular) than I am so it didn’t really work, either. Now we’re back to the suit I’m wearing in today’s picture.

It was purchased for me by Melinda’s mother back in 1998 so I’d have something nice to wear as the officiant of Brenda’s & Greg’s wedding (or as I like to say, first I married Melinda, then I married her sister). Melinda dismissed it last weekend as being both too old and too baggy (and something negative about pleats, I think), but it may be winning out now. The other option left is renting one for 100+ dollars. I don’t think so.

Now she’s trying to decide if the purple shirt is a winner or a loser. After that, there’s still the tie to figure out. Apparently, a relevant consideration is whether or not the tie matches her dress. Not owning any ties, I put on the baseball cap and asked, “Does this hat go with your dress?”

That’s just how I am. Challenging.

See this? It’s duck confit and I really, really want some. I can almost taste it. I can almost feel the meat melting in my mouth. I can just about smell it. I can see it falling off the bone. It formed the basis of my favorite meal in France.

Before living in France, I don’t really recall having eaten duck. It’s possible, I suppose, perhaps when I was a kid. But the sense I had of duck was it being a dry, dark meat, nothing like duck confit.

I’ve been looking for it here in the US and found I can order it on Amazon. It’s just ridiculously expensive.

I was told I could special order it at Metropolitan Market. But it’s ridiculously expensive.

See this? It’s duck confit and I really, really want some.

This photo is from March of 2010, just over 3 months BEFORE we left for France. It was taken in San Francisco in front of the French Consulate, where we had to go to get our visas to live in France. Many aspects about this were either challenging or frustrating, the biggest of which was having to travel from Seattle to San Francisco to apply for visas. Another included the challenge of getting appointments. We had to make a specific appointment for each one of the four of us and due to the nature of the scheduling, one appointment was before lunch and three of them were after lunch. Fortunately, once we were there they processed all four of us during the first appointment.

Another, um, interesting thing was being told that we were applying about 5 days early for visas. Technically, no one is eligible for a visa more than 90 days ahead of their arrival date. Not knowing this, we had timed our trip to coincide with the spring break at PSCS, thus making it so Melinda and I wouldn’t miss any work and the girls wouldn’t miss any school. Given that, we could have been turned down and told to return, all four of us, a week later. Fortunately, we weren’t made to do that. But when our visas were granted and our passports returned, the visa expiration date stamped in them was a couple of weeks earlier than we requested. That showed us.

Speaking of this picture, I think it’s pretty awful of me but it’s one of my favorites of Melinda. I think she is absolutely gorgeous, just like in real life.

In one of Ella’s classes she is reading The Grapes of Wrath, which happens to be a book I love. Given this, I offered what I hoped would be, and what has turned out to be, a win-win situation. I asked if she’d let me read the book aloud to her. So on many evenings each week this fall, just like we did with ALL of the Harry Potter books, Ella crawls into bed and I read to her. Not bad when your kid is almost 15 years-old.

Another thing that makes this experience not just fun but even more intergenerational is the fact that the copy of the book we are using belonged to my mom [pause for effect] from before she was married. Inside the front cover in my mother’s recognizable handwriting is her maiden name. I think that’s pretty special. As you may have guessed, today’s photo is a picture of that copy.

So, yes, The Grapes of Wrath, the story of the Joad family. I think Ella’s favorite character is either Jim Casy or Ma Joad. Wait a second, those might be my favorite characters.

Rumor has it that the next book may be The Odyssey. Really? Am I going to try to read that aloud??

This may very well be the first picture I took in France. Yes, I doctored it up tonight with some serious contrast to make it kind of fun and different for tonight’s entry. But I still think it’s the first picture I took.

It was July 6, the day after we arrived, and Romain had come to meet us at his aunt’s apartment where we were staying for our first couple of weeks. A short walk from the apartment was Ella’s soon-to-be school so he walked us over to take a look. I snapped a handful of pictures, this one first and then, seconds later, the one I used for my blog post on July 7, 2010.

I mentioned recently that at times I get nostalgic. Tonight was one of those times. I get to looking at pictures or reading past entries and get all fuzzy inside. The whole sabbatical thing really happened, right?. Sitting in our Seattle house tonight, the darkness coming early and it being cold and damp, I was ready to return to our first week in Nantes and those 90 degree sunny, sunny days.