Our Lignieres Arrival

Blog entry 22 March, 2008.
Brrrr, the temp inside this room where we run the computer and watch TV (when it works) is now 52.8 degrees f! Outside of this room there are many other rooms including our bedroom in which we were nicely ensconced until we awoke from our jet-lagged stupor at about 6am, that room was 43.4 degrees f, as are the others. It IS a huge refrigerator at beer temperature and we float about like so many ice cubes looking for a bit of heat to melt the chills away. No luck. I have plugged in one of the little oil-filled convection heaters in this room to assist the shivers a bit and it has successfully raised the temp to it's present toasty 52.8 within the relatively short period of an hour. Hallelujah! More to come I hope. I carried the larger oil-filled heater upstairs last night and plugged it in in our bedroom, nice idea that, it blew the mains circuit breaker and crated a house-wide blackout. Unplugged the unit, went downstairs with my frozen flashlight in hand and reset the breaker. Brrrrr it sure is cold down there. Heat does rise. There's no heat down there though. Damn.
The United flight was fine, filled with a small group of happy adults taking a large group of sullen, mostly female 16 year olds to tour Paris' finest museums and sights. Oh joy. Good for them. The 7:55 flight itself was supposed to leave at 7:55AM to Dulles in Wash DC but for some reason, no pilots, no plane, no gas, no chance...we were routed onto a following flight into Chicago at 8:10...not much of a delay but a delay and oh, what about that nice tight Dulles 1.5 hr connection? Did they duplicate THAT at Chicago? Not a chance. That connection going on to Paris didn't happen until 6:30PM. That meant we had a thrilling 5+ hours on the ground in Chicagos O'Hare Airport as our flight crew knocked off 30 minutes of flight time, oh joy. At least the luggage was booked through...wasn't it?! YES, YES, it was. I had a nice little pizza and Kelly had some Chinese food from the purveyors on the mall-like strip in the C-Wing. We read, ate our food, had a cup of ice cream and people watched to while away the time. The weather outside was cool, in the 50's but sunny and the sun beams on us felt especially good as I now remember. Temp now at 7:20am Easter Sunday 53.6 and climbing! Whoopee!
About that luggage, the worst load we have ever hauled aboard a small car to take to an airport. The following items were carried. 2 Cat Carriers with Two Cats, one medium sized backpack, one small suitcase, one humongous cloth dufflebag with wheels, One huge Samsonite wheeled suitcase, one medium Samsonite wheeled suitcase and one 18” cube cardboard box stuffed with linens, computer parts to update this ancient beast, a Pfaff serger with all accessories and miscellaneous clothing items for summer wear. Let's talk about the box shall we? It weighed 77.5lbs. Yes, that's OVER the 50 lb no charge limit, further it weighed 7.5 lbs more than the $50 dollar charge for the over 50lb fellas...so I charged the 381 USD against my Visa card and thanked myself for that little oversight. They waived the 50USD charge for the 55.5lb large suitcase at least and only charged us 340USD for the two cats round trip. We were upgraded to Economy Plus however so we had nice knee room on which to lay our heads and cry. Temp at 7:40AM Easter Sunday in the room now = 54.3 degrees f.
Currently the DSL is dead as a doornail, it worked Friday night but Sat nite it was out and now it is similarly inert. Electrons probably frozen. We left sunny, warm (70 degrees f), dry California for this?! What the hell were we thinking? Coming thru the gate into the courtyard we parked the rental car (a dandy Toyota Corolla Verso 4 dr small diesel SUV) and proceeded to unpack from our 7 + Hr journey south from CDG Paris. Oh what traffic there was on the Periferique (ring road around Paris), trucks by the hundreds, cars, motorcycles, everybody going somewhere else for Easter weekend, lemmings! Grrrr. The ride took 7 hrs as we had to stop for breaks every half hour or so as we were so jet lagged, terrible! We'd cat nap with the cats for 15 – 20 minutes then startup and take another run at it. Gads, awful. I kept thinking of that extra 5 hours we spent in Chicago thanks to United's screwup, not nice United, not nice. At 7:47AM Easter Morning it is now 54.6 degrees! Terrific. It poured rain, sleet and snow here yesterday just after we arrived so I guess we aren't past the last freeze of the year yet are we?