Year: 2015

Before leaving the US

Any excuse for a party

Rockport MA beach
Rockport MA beach

When was the last time you had a really good time at a wedding? For us it was just a week ago and the party started two days before the ceremony and continued on through brunch the following day. My guess is that no one had any trouble falling asleep on Sunday night. We were in Rockport, MA where our guesthouse was right across from the beach you see here at sunset. Elaine and Fred, parents of the bride, were the first to stop by to enjoy a glass of champagne on our front porch and to take in the view. Later we saw Lynn, then Lucy, met up with Pam, Al, and a delightful group of new friends including folks from France and Germany. Continue reading “Any excuse for a party”

Unknown's avatarBob4 Comments
Before leaving the US

The bouquet list

Curtis Island, Camden, ME
Curtis Island, Camden, ME

If you’ve watched the British television comedy Keeping Up Appearances you’ll be familiar with the lead character Hyacinth Bucket who prefers to put a French spin on the pronunciation of her last name. It would seem appropriate, therefore, that we should have a bouquet list of things we wanted to do before leaving the US. Since we won’t have a big oven in our French house, Bill’s been baking all kinds of bread, and besides, we’ll be walking to the boulangerie every morning for our daily baguette and maybe even a pastry or two. From our pantry we’ve already had our fill of tapioca and gelatin (yum?) so it’s time to see what else is on the list. Continue reading “The bouquet list”

Unknown's avatarBob1 Comment
Before leaving the US

Things that go clunk in the night

“Clunk” is not a sound that you ever want to hear coming from your computer yet that’s exactly what happened last week. Bill and I each have two computers (or more, but this is not Truth or Dare) and his large laptop emitted that ominous noise indicating an eminent hard drive crash. He started looking online and several times found what appeared to be exactly what we were looking for except for all of the terrible reviews it received or the fact that it didn’t have a DVD drive, or it wasn’t touchscreen. Continue reading “Things that go clunk in the night”

Unknown's avatarBob
Before leaving the US

Here, you need this

Bill bought me a Fitbit®. Do you think that he was trying to tell me something? Actually we’d been talking about wanting some way to track our activity, or lack of, since we anticipate walking a whole lot more than we do now once we move to Carcassonne. Considering that we won’t have a car it should be a relatively easy goal to achieve of the recommended 10,000 steps a day.

But just how far is that? It’s about 5 miles. I read that a sedentary person takes between 1,000 and 3,000 steps a day so you really do have to make a conscious effort to get up to make it up to the much higher level. If we make daily trips to the bakery, cafe, market, etc., and long walks along the Aude river and the Canal-du-Midi with Heather then we shouldn’t have any problem. Continue reading “Here, you need this”

Unknown's avatarBob