Category: Before leaving the US

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
Before leaving the US

That sinking feeling

Isn’t it funny how quickly we can adapt to things around the house that might bother us if we were buying it but they don’t seem so important when we’re already living there? There are those scuff marks on the baseboard, the dent in the garage door, the bedroom wall that really needs to be painted. Now that we’re getting the house ready to sell we’ve pretty much finished up on the inside and have turned our attention to the outdoors. Since curb appeal is vital to that first impression when a buyer drives up to the house, we want to make sure the front yard looks its best.

Looking a little depressed
Looking a little depressed

Today we’re achieving two objectives in one: filling in a sinking area of the yard and having less grass to mow. When it’s 90 degrees F here in Atlanta next summer I’m certain that the new owners will appreciate that second part very much. Here in this first photo you can see how much lower the ground is on one side of the tree. Continue reading “That sinking feeling”

Unknown's avatarBob