will WE play in Peoria?

Kaitlyn is taking this whole lice thing better than I expected. Heck, she’s taking it better than I am. I barely slept last night; I kept dreaming that my own hair was filled with crawling lice. In the middle of the night, Kaitlyn called for me to go lay down with her. Bill offered to go instead (he told me this morning he’d figured his shaved head wouldn’t be too attractive to the little buggers), but I went. I don’t want her to think I have a problem with her just because of the lice. But I refused to lay down. I sat up and rubbed her back.

She woke up eager to get rid of the bugs. We went to the pharmacy and chose some lice shampoo. The woman offered me the choice of that or a cream. I’d read online that the creams work better than the shampoos.. but you have to leave that cream on the head for 8 hours. I don’t like the idea of rubbing a pesticide on Kaitlyn’s head then putting her to bed that way. So we went the shampoo route.

You put this stuff on dry hair… which means you’re guaranteed to knot and mat it down…. which makes the subsequent combing with the special comb nearly impossible. Bill came home from work in between meetings to help. He knew that I was completely freaked out at the idea of picking bugs out of anything, let alone out of our daughter’s hair. So I washed her hair (which involved making her sit for 15 minutes with the stuff on her head, doing it’s job.) and got her ready for the combing. Then Bill sat with her and dug in. He immediately pulled a dead louse out. Kaitlyn made me go get her magnifying glass… she wanted an up-close look at what had been making her so itchy. She looked up close at each thing he pulled out. I tried not to squirm and say “gross” every time, but it was hard.

I have to say, her hair looks better than it’s possibly ever looked… so very thoroughly washed and combed. (She generally has a great aversion to having her head touched in any way and brushes and combs are pretty much off-limits.)

I’m nearly done with all the washing. I do miss my giant washing machine today! I still have to re-vacuum everything. (I stayed up till midnight vacuuming last night.) I have to vacuum my car, too. It probably all needed done anyway.

Then I’m packing a suitcase. We’re still spending our weekend away.

Now Bill is in the bathroom shaving his head.

I swear I feel something crawling on my head.

I wonder if the vacuum will wake Kaitlyn up? I mean… I won’t vacuum in her room…. yet…

Argh…. and she crawled into bed with us last night and I let her sleep on the couch the night before.

YICK!

It’s a common problem in France that I’ve been a wee bit too smug about avoiding…. until now. Kaitlyn won’t be going to school tomorrow. We’ll be going to the pharmacy and buying whatever it is you need for lice.

Honestly, I can’t think of anything grosser that I want to deal with any less. It’s a mix of many of the things I detest most. The idea of combing through Kaitlyn’s hair purposely hunting bugs and their eggs…. makes me shudder. And she’s so not good at letting us comb her hair; it isn’t going to help.

I remember when I was about Kaitlyn’s age, there was a case of lice at my school. My mom told me she had to check my head for bugs and I don’t remember my exact reaction but I’m going to guess it was something close to unglued. From that moment forward I thought there could be nothing more skin-crawling. Except maybe bed bugs. Blech.

I feel rather guilty; she’s been complaining for days of having an itchy head. I’ve been looking for the buggers since they’re a constant problem at school… but haven’t seen a thing. Then tonight, Bill found one. Not the eggs, like people told me we’d find. A big, brown, fast, nasty bug who’s been feasting on my little girl’s neck. Gross.

And now my head is itchy.

Forget French lessons.

Just keep inviting Kaitlyn’s little French friend home for lunch.

What an exercise in my ability to speak French. Or inability as the case may be…. I only followed about half of what she said and the half I followed was generally when she was answering a direct question.

Kaitlyn sprinkled the occasional French word in conversation. For instance, when we got in the car she pointed at a piece of bread sitting on the seat (yes… bread… we were a little crunched for time this morning and Kaitlyn took her breakfast in the car) and said “don’t eat ca.”

Toward the end of lunch and this poor child’s frustration with things like me constantly saying “je ne comprends pas” (I don’t understand) and Kaitlyn’s “don’t eat ca” I decided she could give me the best possible answer about Kaitlyn’s French. I asked her if Kaitlyn speaks French at school. She made me repeat the question… like it was so odd. Then she said “oui… beaucoup.” I’ll assume then that “don’t eat ca” was simply a token for my benefit.

This morning instead of a regular French lesson conjugating verbs in tenses I can’t figure out when I’m supposed to use or reading lists of vocabulary words… we discussed politics. American politics.

My French teacher said he’d found a quiz on a French news website. It’s called basically “What kind of American would you be?” It’s made up of 14 questions about the 14 biggest issues facing the United States right now…. according to the French news organization that put this quiz together. He asked if I’d be willing to discuss politics and take the quiz. (In his experience, Americans don’t like to talk about politics.)

The quiz sounded infinitely more interesting than grammar, so I agreed. And I have no problem discussing politics with a French person. It’s far more difficult to do so with an American. He’s right… we don’t like to talk about it… what he doesn’t understand is it’s just a problem we have with each other. (Which may explain a lot about the state our government is currently in)

The questions covered everything: Iraq, Iran, terrorism, immigration, trade, health care, retirement, pollution, gas prices, the sub-prime lending fiasco, abortion, gay marriage, gun rights and oh I forget the last one. Many were issues Americans won’t even consider while voting. My opinion is that most people will focus on one issue… whichever is most important to themselves… and vote based on that and that alone.

At the end, this quiz told me who I should vote for and why. Honestly, I wasn’t very surprised at the result. My French teacher told me that every French person he’s had take the quiz… including himself… has come up with a vote for Ralph Nader. He’d never even heard of Ralph Nader. I shared the story with an American friend here who had a similar reaction. (Really? There’s a third person running?)

If you’re interested, check out the quiz for yourself. Yes, it’s in French but Google translate can help: http://tf1.lci.fr/infos/elections-usa/quiz-election/

I am spending a lot of this week trapped in the house tending to getting things ready for winter. Friday, the pool guys are coming to close the pool for winter. Tomorrow, the heating oil delivery. Today, it’s the chimney cleaner. My appointment is at 1:30. A French teacher made it for me months ago. I had that done after I learned that you have to have your chimney cleaned for your homeowners insurance to pay out if there’s a fire at your house. Even if the fire is caused by trying to roast marshmallows in the over too close to the heat source and has nothing at all to do with your chimney. Like a lot of things here, I’m baffled because I can actually see the logic…

Kaitlyn and I were home puttering around getting ready to make lunch when the doorbell rang. The chimney cleaner arrived an hour early…. during lunch time.

I’m fairly certain that’s a sign of the apocolypse.

Kaitlyn has been begging me to videotape her during gymnastics class. She wants those who cannot attend to see her in action. So today I took the camera along.

The class was using a corner of a giant gym that’s on the lower level of the town’s rec building. The set-up is pretty good for taping, because from two sides you can look down from the upper floor onto the action. So I was sitting up there recording when the teacher looked up and asked if a mom could help one of the little gymnasts to the bathroom. There was another woman sitting nearby, but she had a really little kid with her and I figured it would be a real hassle for her. So I agreed to go.

On my way to the stairs, a woman who works in the rec building told me where the closest toilettes are. Good thing she did a lot of pointing. I figured between her pointing and a sign on the door I’d probably find it.

The teacher handed off to me a little boy. Great. It’s not enough that I have to do this in French. It’s even more unfamiliar territory.

I managed to find the bathrooms and took him in to go. He was not happy I’d hauled him into the ladies room and promptly walked across the hall to the men’s room explaining I’d made a mistake.

In France, men go into the ladies rooms all the time if their daughters have to go. Or if they are cleaning up. Or I think just if they want to. I know women go into men’s rooms to clean (my brother refused to pee in a men’s room in a train station in Paris because the female attendant was attending to it). That doesn’t mean I go into men’s rooms. But I didn’t have a choice. And luckily no one else was around so I guess it really didn’t matter very much.

Then was the next problem. The boy is probably 4 or 5 years old. Too short to reach the urinal. But determined to use it. He expected me to pick him up so he could go. Wanting the whole ordeal to just be over, I did to try to expedite things. As he washed his hands he told me all about how when he went on vacation the urinals flushed automatically. Later when I shared the story of my ordeal over dinner, Kaitlyn agreed that sounded like a good quality for a vacation. She asked me what country he’d gone to. When I told her I didn’t know, she instructed me to learn how to ask during my next French lesson then go ask the boy so we could appropriately plan our next trip.

My French lesson today had to include one very important thing: calling to order a delivery of heating oil to the house. Our fuel tank is encased in a cinder-block box…. making it impossible to tell how much oil you have once it falls below about ¾ full. I’m not anxious to run out while we’re visiting the U.S. and with snow in the forecast for the mountains (1200 meters… we live just below 800 meters) I’m not willing to wait and not be able to get it delivered before we leave.

Normally, I just ask my teacher to make the call for me. He dials, he talks, and voila it’s done. I knew before I got there today that it wasn’t going to happen that way. Today I had the teacher who has you make the call. Sure, it may be better that way in the long run but it’s horribly stressful and I’m willing to sacrifice the gain for the easy way out.

We went over the words and phrases I’d likely need to perform this task. He was sure to have me practice the overly polite ways one properly asks for something in France. It’s apparently not only the best way to get what you need… it’s often the only way to get it. Which means it probably should be one of the lessons in the first few months you’re here.

Once I felt ok-ish with what I had to say, we made the call. The first two tries it was busy. Once we finally got through, we reached a voice mail system. The recording says something about if you know the department you want, say it now. My receipt from last time says to dial the number then say “fuel.” The teacher didn’t read that he just told me to say “Carrefuel. “ (The home heating oil division of the conglomerate Carrefour.) So, I followed his instructions. He’s French, he should know how this works. He even told me I said it perfectly. The voice mail system didn’t care. It sent me to regular Carrefour. We hung up and dialed back like 5 times. By the end, the French person was yelling “FUEL!” into the phone. He said they used to make fun of how we had these phone trees in the U.S. Who’s laughing now? Anyway, once we got to the Carrefuel side of the phone tree Hell, we were met by a series of recordings telling us to press one or two if we wanted this or that. I had no clue what this or that was. The teacher would just hold up one or two fingers so I’d know how to respond. It made me wonder: if we were in the U.S. would I be the one wielding the power of comprehension? Oh, probably not.

At long last we reached an actual human being. Once we got that far, I could pretty much handle it. I had the cheat sheet we’d made of the proper polite phrases to use. I scheduled the delivery. Thursday… between 8 and 1. Just like home.

I went to the bank this morning to pick up my new Carte Bleu…. my debit card. You need it to do just about everything here. I’d gotten a notice from the bank that my new one was in, but yesterday I looked and realized that what’s in my wallet is a card that is no good at midnight tonight.

So I got Kaitlyn to school a bit early and endured morning traffic to get downtown. You have to pick up your card in person for security reasons. I’d told the banker I’d be there at 9 when they open to pick up my card… because I have a French lesson 15 minutes away at 9:30. And the rest of my day is booked up so I really had to squeeze this task in.

I got to the bank at 9. Parked the car and walked to the door at about 9:03. You have to get buzzed in to the bank. The woman who answered my buzz was still taking off her coat and her purse was obviously freshly set down on her desk. She let me in, got my card and had me signing the papers swearing I picked it up when my normal banker arrived. So that made it about 9:08. She looked at me in disbelief: “Wow. When you say 9, you mean 9!” I realize Bill may question my ability to be prompt, but the intention is nearly always there. I can’t believe a business that opens at 9 actually opens “somewhere around 9-ish or whenever we actually get here depending on traffic.”

This afternoon, I hosted a little debate-watching party. Well, party is a strong word for it. Get-together. Since we have the Slingbox, I figured I should do it. It’s important. Especially here where we aren’t bombarded with ads and phone calls and the like. Although if the Obama campaign calls me again at 2am, I’m going to have to smack someone.

I was a little worried… I have not shared my political views with the others here since I’m clearly more liberal than any of them. But I figured I have a background of at least trying to maintain some impartiality…

There were no political fist fights. Small debates but nothing heated. I don’t think I managed to keep my opinion to myself. Oh, well.

I offered to record and host showings of each of the debates. When we see how they all turn out…. I’ll get back to ya.