Saturday, April 11, 2009

A Very Merry Easter

Easter,Rain and More Rain, a Friday made lazy by drops from the heavens. Up and at the online situation to further explore the 3G vs 2G question. You see Lignieres is serviced by only 2G equipment, thus the slower speed. 3G is better, many times better infact and while not yet at DSL speeds it will serve us better. The little Eee PC is a gem though, easy to use though the keyboard is in the French Layout it has an array of built in features that make it easy and fun to use. It's operating system is Linux which means it has good integration with the operations of the os itself when functioning as a word processor or a browser or any other function you care to build a program to do. Nice.

Then outside during a dry period to prune and saw the over grown and ivy wrapped lilac tree back into a tree-like shape. It is an old one, remembered by a local lady who lived here during WW2. Tearing away at the vines came first to show us what was there and to uncover the rot wherever it would be. Kelly labored long and hard at it and some 2 hours later the real lilac was revealed. Then came the removal of several large badly positioned branches followed by removal of some smaller ones. Soon the lilac looked better, more upright and more tree-like than before. Ted and I finished the deal by chopping up the removed branches into stove sized pieces for future heating exploits. Ted loves building fires.

I made my normal wheat bread today and have pulled it from the oven. It was baked in a dutch oven which has become a favorite method of mine as of late. The crust becomes more moist and tender and the evenness of baking is self evident as the crust is equally brown all over.

A&R came over for dinner, we had an old fashioned Sunday dinner in mid-usa circa 1957...
fried chicken, mashed potatoes and chicken gravy, green beans and bacon, apple pue with vanilla ice cream. All made by Kelly and I with Teds help. It was delicious if I say so myself, very satisfying and filling. 2nds were had by all. A success. The dinner broke up earlier than we expected as R was falling asleep and the rest of us were responding with yawns. Tomorrow is BROCANTE day, off to junk sales everywhere, be it Easter or not. Not many Christian celebrators hereabouts I guess. 95% unattending Catholics. 5% everything else.
Oh well, maybe an easter egg hunt here or there for the remembrance sake but little else I'm afraid.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

The Blessing

well here i am typing on an asus pceee netbook being held in one hand while i peck away with the other on the &��&'( French keyboord, so fun. How did we get to this point, you might ask. Well France Telecom cut us off boopie, cold of them, no? I thought so too but given we ran out of money in our account that they draw their payment from, no wonder. The problem was less that they cancelled us exactly 10 days after the 10 day warning but that they told us that we could not even apply to have new service for 2 to 3 weeks! What? And poopsie, 96 Euros had to change hands before that would happen. They wouldn't let us pay right then even. So that was that. We paid up our past due amount and accepted our lowly status as France Telecom deadbeats and thought of that far off day when we could get connected again to the universe.

A day or two later upon going to our friends A&R,s place, A asked if I knew anything about the telephoney dongle things. Huh? Nope...what is it? She gave me a quick rundown and my mind, busy with the recent France Telecom debacle, perked right up! We vowed to sort this out for ourselves and find out what else might be possible in the line of broadband connections in our dear France.

The next day we were off to Bourges to shop the dongle department in good, ol' Darty. The salesman, techie showed us the 3G SFR and Orange dongles for using cell phone suppliers signals as broadband access. We were stoked! How much? Well... at first the deals sounded poorly, any more than what we had paid at FT was deemed to be too much but soon the figure of 50 Euros a month unlimitted came to light and Ted said he'd cover it! That seemed overly generous so we told him we'd split it with him. Then an astounding announcement came from the salesman, it was a package deal with an ASUS PC Eee netbook thrown in the deal for an additional 130 Euros! Further, it was with SFR, another carrier and the monthly unlimitted deal was only 32 Euros! Wow! After a visit to the nice lady who wrote everything down on her computer and we were delivered the tiny laptop that isn't we were off to home, dinner and a session on the internet as fast as I could unwrap the dongle from it's impossible packaging, plug it in and do the first timers dance with technology that we all go thru time and time again. This was particularly EASY, as the software was contained in the dongle itself and soon it began to blink in good dongle fashion
and l'viola! we were ON! Amazing...and s-l-o-w as molasses in January but at least we can get our emails, surf the net and decide on some other way to watch movies or tv shows as this speed will not allow those activities. It is hardly BROADBAND, more like NARROWBAND-AID but at least it's NOT France @#$#@#@! Telecom the bane of our existance online and of our bank account! A Blessing indeed!