This Week

This week, the week of the Paris Air Show! For all the airplane nuts (real WING-NUTS) this is the week that was for them. I went to it with Ted and Kelly back in 2003 just as the canicule was beginning to rear it's ugly head. We were hot, damned hot and stayed that way through many grueling hours on trains, buses and taxis getting TO Le Bourget in NE Paris and it was even hotter coming back! We did it in ONE day, not recommended folks...too much to see and too much travel involved in each days attendance to make that make sense...but we did it nonetheless. Was it fun? Did we see a shitload of aircraft on the ground and in the air doing their thing? YES we did but not without gallons of sweat and enough basic discomfort to make the whole day a real bust. This year would be fine as the weather is mild and slightly overcast pretty much everywhere including Paris suburbs. Go if you can, worth it! Really worth it!

Off to Bordeaux this weekend for a few days exploring that little known region (to us), with it's beaches and vineyards and castles it will be a great break from the work here at Maison Blanche. Kelly has been sanding the gate we bought back in 2009 and painting it a lovely shade of gloss black. There are literally 100's of feet of surface in all these curly-q's and spiky things. She has the patience and determination to get it done.
I'm still perplexed and dismayed at my lack of progress in repairing the @#$$@#! electrical failure. We now are functioning on a string of heavy duty extension cords and need to pay attention to everything we do electrically as we could blow fuses or worse. Frankly, that shock I got back in the summer of 2009 in my kitchen did me for another fine electrocution scenario. These circuits are divided by PHASE, not just one coming in and getting divided as in the US...but 3 phase power at the box with no real color code or written wiring diagram to go by for any part of the house. Not good! One very well could find HIMSELF across 2 phases at once if HE weren't extremely careful. That's ME I'm talking about!

Too, I've tried and tried to put up my Donkey Fair movies on YouTube and no can do...all fail either to have sound that is correct or they fail in the upload stage. Hmmmm this USED to work just fine. Such is progress.

Liz finally got the fine SFR 2G slow-speed sometimes connection to work from her dinner table. A bloody miracle I tell you! And she is not prepared for the trials and tribulations of the internet either I fear.
Many, too many pitfalls for all of us, especially with this lousy slow SFR connection! 2G sucks! No video for us! What a lie they told. So you say...well why didn't you just get the fine DSL connection from France Telecom poozie? It's fast and it works. Sure it does then you get the bills for the line you are actually USING and another for one you never had as well as one you cancelled months before when you sold your other house....and THEN POOZIE...you TRY to straighten out the mess why still being billed each month for services you don't have and haven't ever had OR used...and this goes on for months and months! Then they say they have an English telephone help service. Really? Is that what you call being passed on from one side of the @####@!@ FT house to the other enumerable times? That's all that resulted from that little interaction poozie, that's all. Is that enough reason to abandon good ol' France Telecom? You bet it is....at least this works and they bill correctly even if it runs in slo-mo 2G mode 80% of the time and not at all the other 20%! A better deal. AS better deal. Damn France Telecom anyway and SFR too while you're at it! A POX on their telephone circuits!
Ohhhhh NOT that poozie, not that! It's a bitch I tell you, a B-I-T-C-H!

Rant over for now....it certainly doesn't take me long to get going on that subject, does it? So we ventured to the Descheterie this morning to dispose of some massive amounts of clippings I had stuffed and stomped into a Poo-Bell (garbage can). They don't pick up GREEN matter here with the garbage. No they don't. So one has to either bag it (ce normale) or, like I did, cram it into a rather large plastic garbage can and place it ever so gently in the trunk of the car with the lid fastened down by 6 bungie cords and take the mess to the Descheterie (spelling issue here) (read as DUMP) outside of Lignieres about 2 miles along the road to Chateauef Sur Cher. So we did that, came back, picked up my pill bottles for my low supply levothroid pills and went off to the Pharmacy and got it filled...30 day supply for...Ta Da...Euro 2.50! Would have been $20 at Kaiser! Grrrrr.
Filled in and out in 5 minutes flat we went on to the Tire company by the Carefour store in St. Amand Montrond about 20 miles from here. We had our car thru the bi-annual inspection, yes it's mandatory! It failed on one point...the rear tires were square in spots. Not just a little bit either.
A LOT! So a pair of fine Michelin tires and a wheel alignment as well, plus, I'll do this one myself, a change of oil and the Glace'....Anti-Freeze. Oh, the tires weren't available today...tomorrow at 2:30pm they will be there...so we went for only an appointment. That...when deisel costs about 6 USD a gallon! Nice. I love France, I really do. The people are wonderful, the systems in place are complex and, at times, un-understandable. But I dearly love the place. It's beautiful too!

3G Stands For? Golly, Goofy, Garbage!

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Saturday night rolled around and we turned to FR1 to see Johnny Halliday's BIG SHOW at the Paris Stadium. Music, fireworks and 600,000 people all yelling and jumping up and down, in a riot of sing along rock and roll. Amazing! Amidst this show we were, of course, merrily sufing along taking in the Inet news, emails etc. as is our habit in the evenings when blip! The light went out on the not so trusty SFR 3G Dongle in Kelly's laptop. The measly little 2G signal we get is our "broadband" and at 236Kb/sec it is painfully slow. But this was more than slow...this was forever and it would not connect no matter what I did. I plugged it in the lil' ASUS netbook to no avail, removed and reinserted the sim card in the dongle, nothing. So we watched Johnny while I continued to diddle with this failure of a key device of our sanity. Asleep at midnight...I woke at 6am and went back to the Dang Dongle and tried everything I could think of including removing the software and reinstalling it from the SFR 3G Dongle itself. All to no avail. It was Sunday, Brocante Day and the day before the Donkey Fair in Lignieres. Then our friends S & D dropped by with a pile of books for Kelly to read and an invite to go with them to Rezay to the brocante being held there. So why not! No internet and an invite, terrific opportunity to buy stuff we neither want nor need. I had 2.50 Euros in my pocket. Cool. So off we went BUT...I DID bring the lil' ASUS with us with the Dongle of our demise inserted in one of the USB slots ready-to-go! About 5 miles out of town along the way I turned the ASUS on and l'viola! A lite on the dongle signalled a signal received and I was able to go to our email and cnn for a news read. So it wasn't the dongle afterall? Well...hold on for MORE! After the brocante where we bought nothing, nothing, nothing. Children's clothing and piles of rusted tools and junk galore with retail prices throughout, what's to buy? Back to S&D's for a leisurely lunch in the garden and a bit of wine to wash it all down with, a nice way to end the day's outdoor activities. Home about 4 and to the @$$%##@ 3G connection once again. Same results as before, nothing, no connection, closed port, etc. ad nauseum. Useless. Watch a bit of French Guess-The-News and play with my images in Picassa, to bed, to read.
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Up at 6am, tried 3G again, same results. None.
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Outside the Donkey Fair was well underway, donkeys arriving in trucks, in trailers, being ridden, drawing carts and people everywhere setting up their stalls and tents. Cheeses, sausages, leather goods for donkeyss, hats, T-shirts, cotton candy, everything one would expect on Donkey Day in Lignieres! As 8am rolled around many cars started showing up and the already crowded streets just got more crowded. We decided then that we weren't going to move Theresa and try the 3G until late in the afternoon when quite possibly the crowd would begin to thin and we would stand a chance at getting a connexion by driving south a bit. I grabbed the camera and we went to the Champ Du Foire to see the donkey's and the madding crowd.
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Later we wanderred to La Chatre and parked at the Super U grocery store and struck up a LIVE connection on the 3G, this is starting to look like a real honest-to-goodness cell tower deficiency for once instead of an intermittant dongle. Kelly did whatever magic she does online to sort out our finances and we read emails stacked up since Saturday evening when this whole dismal chapter began. We struck out for home leaving the dongle pluged in and online until after a few miles north towards Lignieres the connection grew tired and stopped entirely. The light stayed on until we clicked disconnect and then no connection. Once home I fooled with the #@$$$@ dongle again and again while Kelly finished her sewing room;s door paint job in 4 colors of yellow. Very pretty and very, very French indeed! About 8 after dinner I tried the connection again and on the 4th attempt got a connection light and we were online through the night! Tower back on? Who knows but it did work and we captured all 135 emails that had been left standing since Saturday. After I got up in the morning the connection grew increasingly slow and finally gave up the ghost about 8am. I tried reconnecting and it worked! It's been on since and I'm typing my blog as a good little blogger should do. So what is it? The tower, the dongle, the sunspot cycle (don't laugh!), weather? Who knows but I bet there's more to come on this boondoggle yet.
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Too this morning we ventured off to the Notaire's office to begin the process of selling Dix. We met the nice, english speaking notaire himself and introduced ourselves to him. He explained the process and we scheduled a meeting with him at Dix next Monday at 10am. They will set a price and we will sign a contract with him to do the marketting for us as well as begin to set up a web page about the house, maybe one of YOU will buy it from us and become our neighbors! How cool would that be?!