will WE play in Peoria?

While I was vacuuming this evening (yes, I vacuum) Bill rushed downstairs yelling that the doorbell rang. It was way too late in the day for the poste lady to be delivering a box, and hours too early for our dinner guest. Honestly, I may not have answered the door if it were up to me. But Bill answered it.

I hung out in the living room, eavesdropping. When I couldn’t stand letting him stand there struggling to speak French, I walked over. As if I could help. That’s what cracks me up about myself… I’m such a know-it-all that I think I know-it-all in a language I don’t even speak. (The other night at dinner… I caught myself correcting another American on her French. Correcting it! That took nerve. But she said the meal was “tres bien”… basic lesson is that when you are speaking of food, you say “tres bon.”)

So back to the door: There were to teenage boys standing there asking for directions. I think they wanted to know how to get from where they were standing in our driveway to town. As if I could answer, I tried to explain to them there’s a bike path at the top of the street. Then they acted like that wasn’t what they were after. Even though they were standing there with their bikes. And that bike path is the only one I know of.

Bill started pointing up and down the street and telling me in English that there are two ways down… down the path or down the street. Which seemed amazingly obvious in any language.

We finally gave up. By we, I mean all of us… Bill and I and the bike kids.

After they left, I thought of all sorts of things I could have said to make myself sound more intelligent while still not supplying directions.

Next time, I’ll just keep vacuuming.

I think I’m being discriminated against by Royal Carribean Cruises.

Today Bill and I started looking at the shore excursions we can chose from during our April Mediterranean cruise. One in Croatia looks really fun… a bike ride through the countryside going past vineyards. Oh, there’s a catch. You have to be 63 inches tall to participate. I am 60 inches tall.

I know I’m short. I get that. I can’t reach stuff on the top shelf at the grocery store. And now that they’ve moved the milk, I have to practically climb the portable refrigerator unit it’s in just to reach what I want, even though it is right next to the information desk. (the ladies there are prize-winning ignorers)

I don’t expect prize-winning service at Carrefour. But on a cruise…. well, I think that they could accommodate a not tall adult. I guess it doesn’t even matter… you also have to be 18 years old to go. Which makes me wonder… why do they have a child’s price for it?

I don’t want to say we picked the wrong year to buy season passes for Chamrousse. I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of mine. (Bill has managed to use his twice. So far, that’s not a lot of bang for the buck… or Euro as the case may be.)

But now I can read just enough French to be able to conjugate enough verb tenses to be able to read the long-term forecast on the web for Chamrousse. Without using Google Translate. And, well, I’d have been better off not being able to understand it. Basically, it says we’ll enjoy warm, mild weather through the weekend. And there’s a chance that the snow will return Wednesday. But that’s days from now. Let’s be honest. Meteorologists are just guessing when they forecast past this evening.

Kaitlyn is signed up for ski school all week. They should be able to make snow… although only if it cools off. It’s 12 degrees Celsius up there right now. That’s about 54 degrees Fahrenheit. (yes, yes, that I did calculate with Google. Give me a break, I’m learning French do I have to learn to convert temperatures too?) Too warm for February in the Alps (Wow. I just got smacked again with the realization that I live in the Alps It’s just hard to complain about the weather when you look at it that way. Not that I’m complaining. I don’t like snow… except on the pistes where I ski.)

Well, I’ll ski all week. If Kaitlyn gets over this cold she’s gotten. She was up at 4am… burning up and wide awake. Who knew, fevers apparently make you alert? She’s napping now. If she’s too sick to go skiing…. it’s just another gamble we took with the mountain this year and lost. At least all our losing gambles only involved money and no broken bones.

I just had one of the best cups of tea ever. I made it with water heated in my tea kettle on my new stove. Woo!

The installation guys from France’s scaled-down version of Best Buy arrived promptly at the end of lunch. They called this morning to narrow their window of opportunity from between noon and 7 to between 12:30 and 3:30. But it was silly, because I’m sure they weren’t working between noon and 1:30. That is lunch time.

Anyway, they arrived, and fairly quickly had the old stove out and the new stove in. I fumbled through asking them to put the old stove in the basement (the homeowner wants to try to fix it when he gets back). And when he asked me to cut the power to the stove, I flipped the breaker in the garage with a little picture of a stove above it, then hoped it actually did control the stove. Really, there’s no telling. He didn’t get shocked, so it must have been the right one.

(Bill is home sick from work and managed to conveniently finally doze off right before they got here.. so I got to handle it all alone. Which is what I’d expected anyway… but he missed all the fun.)

They left and I heated up water… a first in weeks. I can finally return the hot plate to my friend who kindly lent it to me! Ironically, I have dinner plans tonight and am going to make a lasagna for Bill and Kaitlyn to eat. Don’t even need the stove. I’ve gotten quite used to not using it.

I am working really hard at listening to the radio and actually understanding what they are saying. And not just when they are saying the names of songs by American bands. That, I get. No, I want to be able to really REALLY understand.

I understand when they give the date and time. (Sounds easy, but they don’t say “today is Tuesday the 19th of February.” oh, no, that would be too easy. They say, literally, “we are the 19 February.”) I understand when there is a traffic jam on the interstate, even if I’m not exactly sure where it is.

I know that one station gives recipes each morning. Today it was for some sort of fish… with sauce.. I didn’t get much past putting the fillet in a hot pan.

I know another station with the requisite moronic morning dj team (my apologies, Todd) plays stupid quiz games with callers. They sing the questions to a tune that I don’t know but I also hear on a commercial for I’m not sure what… that makes it hard to understand. When they do actually just speak, I can normally figure out what the question is.

I’m also trying to listen to the news. Today I heard a story about paintings and a parked car in Zürich! I’m not saying I got everything about the story (which I later looked up online in English) but I got part of it.. they recovered two of the stolen paintings!

Now if only I could understand people who call me on the phone.

Everyone is driving much slower than usual around here. It isn’t just my imagination. It’s the pollution.

When there are high pollution days, or high risk that there will be pollution days, or something of that sort, the speed limit on the interstate drops… by 20 kilometers an hour. Drivers who normally will go screaming past you if you dare to go the posted 90 km/hr crawl along at the new limit of 70. That’s about 45 miles an hour… on the interstate. It’s unnatural to drive that slow on a road like that. What’s just as bizarre is that the police or the air police or someone goes around and actually changes all the speed limit signs. I cannot wait for the sign fairy to go around and change them all back. 70 is just too slow.

I sent an e-mail to the owner of our house this afternoon, letting him know that it’s been nearly a week since the repairman came and did nothing at the house and I’ve heard nothing. He copied me on an e-mail he then sent to his management company, asking what’s going on. (Or something to that effect. It was in French.)

Turns out, they’d apparently not gotten around to letting him know that the estimate to repair his stove is higher than the cost of replacing the thing.

He called us tonight. He’s decided that if he waits for the property management company to do something, his baby will be in college when it’s handled. So his wife is searching the website for the big appliance store in France, looking for a new stove. Hopefully it will be installed before.. oh, I don’t know… summer.

I always get nervous when I know I need to make a phone call to a business here. Even if I know that the person on the other end speaks English. Because it seems rude to dial them up and instantly speak English. So I fret and wring my hands for a while before finally dialing, then I try to stumble through the conversation in French until the person on the other end tells me (or begs me) to go ahead and speak English.

I’ve been silently pacing back and forth (mentally) all day because I knew I faced just such a call today. We chose an absolutely lovely looking bed and breakfast for our Easter weekend in Provence. The woman who owns it sent me an email explaining some crazy secret code she uses for emailing my credit card number for the deposit. But I couldn’t make sense of it (a frequent problem when someone attempts to explain something in a language that isn’t their first… I know because I’m usually on the delivering end). So I knew I needed to call her in order to make sure the room didn’t go to someone else. And family-sized rooms in Provence seem hard to come by.

Finally, I had to admit to myself that I do know how to dial another place in France… Kaitlyn and her friend who is over playing are plenty busy… I’m out of excuses. So I called. The woman was very nice. She put up with my French until we got to the actual reading off of my credit card number. (Well, I actually did say “credit card” in English because I drew a blank on what to say in French.) She told me to read her the number in English. It was probably the one part of the whole conversation I stood the best chance of being able to do in French.

That’s ok. She was so very nice about it. I think she’s going to be an excellent hostess. I’m really looking forward to our trip. We’ve only lived less than 2 hours from Provence for nearly a year and a half now. It’s about time we went to see what all the fuss is about.

I couldn’t wait to talk to Bill after my French lesson today. I was so excited to tell him that I’ve been given the intermediate books… and bumped up two levels. Yes, I know that the levels are completely made up by the people who teach our classes. Doesn’t matter. It still made me feel like I’d accomplished something. Like I may actually one day be able to speak French. Oh, and it reminded me how I am completely kicking Bill’s ass at learning the language. (His two months in the UK helped me leap ahead.) Bill was entirely not impressed. He says that during his French lesson this afternoon, he didn’t even mention to the teacher that he’s depressed to be lagging so far behind me.

So all pumped up with my French ability, I hit a couple of stores. First, the fruit and veggie store where just last week the woman who works there actually struck up a conversation with me. And I managed to answer. Made me feel like I’m really starting to fit in. She wasn’t there today. The woman there was busy striking up conversations with every other customer in the store. Oh, well.

Then I went to IKEA. (It’s replaced Target as my all-too-regular shopping stop. And it’s no where near as practical as Target.) As I was wondering how on earth I (or anyone) was supposed to reach the boxes on the top shelf, a woman walked up and asked me a question. All I could do was stare. And after a few seconds when I realized that was bizarre, I told her I don’t speak French. That sure deflated my ego.

Ok, so maybe I won’t master the language. But it would be nice to be able to actually answer a question once in a while.

This afternoon the invitation came out for the annual winter ISE dinner. And it puts me in something of a pickle.

I am supposed to plan next year’s dinner. I have been included basically zero in the planning of this year’s dinner. So it’s not like I will be taking over with any insight. But I still feel like I am supposed to go to this year’s dinner. Expected to do so. To at least provide me some clue for next year.

Obviously, no one asked my opinion about the food. Looking at the menu… there is nothing I want to eat at this year’s dinner. So, I don’t want to go. I have zero interest in spending nearly 90 Euros on gizzards and quail or goat cheese with fruit de mer over fish. (fish alone is ok, but fish with squid and crap on it, well, no thank you) Those are our menu choices. At least, the best I can figure, those are our choices. Some of the words don’t even translate. Even dessert doesn’t offer something Bill would want.

I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe I’ll go alone, so at least we don’t have to pay for two nasty meals.