Life

There is an article in the Globe and mail today about my neighbourhood.

Canal cool in Paris

Apparently, i live in the coolest area in Paris. Of course, i already knew that, but fun to read about in "foreign" press.

I want to move. Not only can you get gluten free beer, but everyone seems to understand exactly what “intolerente al glutine” means. Now i even know how to pronounce it right.

Ok, so it seems a bit weird to walk into the pharmacy and buy beer, but that is where all gluten free products are sold. In addition to a few bottles, i also bought home some yummy sundried tomato and oregano bread and some frozen fresh ravioli. I can’t remember the last time i had stuffed pasta, and this stuff was great!

As for restaurants, the first night we were in Pisa, we went to a place called “spaghetteria” - usually the type of place i would avoid entirely! When i explained that “sono intolerente al glutine”, and started listing “no pizza, no pasta, no pane, no inpanare…” the server cut me off and said “si, si, si…” then he pointed out immediately what could and couldn’t have.

We went to a restaurant off the beaten track in Florence that was recommended by our guide book. But it was so far off the beaten track that the menu wasn’t translated into English and the owner was a bit surprised to have tourists. When i went into my little speech in Italian, he also understood right away and told me that all the pasta sauces are gluten free and that he had gluten free pasta that he could make separately for me and i could choose the sauce i wanted.

My perfect al dente pasta was so good that Arnaud said that he couldn’t tell the difference between that and wheat pasta. I also ordered a second course that i didn’t know was normally served on bread – vegetarian carpaccio with cheese and walnuts. It was brought to me on rice cakes. He said that most of the deserts were gluten free as well, but i didn’t let him get much further down the list than the chocolate mousse!

All that with a bottle of chianti, it was a great meal!

More about the rest of our trip later....

Even if you are not planning on travelling any time soon, make sure you know that your passport is there and valid from time to time. I had a horrible experience recently that i would never want anyone to have to live through.

I have dual nationality, irish-canadian. I use my canadian passport when travelling to north america and my european passport when travelling in europe. It is very convenient to have both!! My irish passport is also my only official document that says that I have the right to live and work in france or anywhere in europe for that matter so when I need some kind of official ID, it is what i use.

I know i used it at the end of may one day, and i discovered two weeks before we were leaving for our trip to italy last week that my passport never made it back into the passport drawer. I turned the entire apartment upside down for a few days searching for it and resigned myself to the fact that i needed a new one. I could get on the plane from paris to pisa with my canadian passport and my return ticket out of italy. But they wouldn’t have let me back into france as a canadian without a ticket to leave france within 3 months.

With 8 days to go before we left for italy, i called the irish embassy. To get a new passport, i needed my original long form birth certificate, my mother’s original long form birth certificate (she’s the one born in ireland) and my parents’ original marriage certificate. These documents were of course all in Toronto.

My parents mailed them to me express, and what should have taken 2 business days, took a full week because of a french national holiday and a completely incompetent courier company (that will have to be another post)

We were leaving france on Wednesday evening and i was finally at the embassy with my documents and passport application on the Tuesday morning around 11am. They told me that i could pick it up around the same time the next day – but they didn’t tell me that they needed an OK from the irish embassy in ottawa since that is where my first irish passport was issued. Of course, with 6 hours time difference, getting this fax from ottawa wasn’t as easy as it might have been.

This is getting long, so I will just finish by saying that our flight was at 6:50 pm on wednesday. I was waiting at the embassy here for that fax to come in. My passport was ready, but they couldn’t hand it over. It finally came at 5:15pm and i RAN to the train to get to the airport. Arnaud was waiting for me half way there and we actually made it on time!

I never want to repeat that experience. I have no idea what happened to my other passport, but from now on, I am going to keep a regular check to make sure both my passports are where they are supposed to be and I am going to get the french government to give me an official document that says i am allowed to live here.

Ok, so i did my 2 and a half months at work doing the work of 3 people. I now have a new colleague and we have an assistant and i'm starting to work normal hours again. I finally fixed a lost passport situation. We went to Arnaud's parents' place for 4 days and Italy for 5. AND I've finished Harry Potter.

Now i can come back to blog land. I promise some entries about recent happenings.

I don't often forward emails, but this is one that i just had to share...

These are actual ads from the Personal columns of the Dublin News. One question: how can you tell the arse end of Roscommon from the rest of it?

Heavy drinker, 35, Cork area. Seeks gorgeous sex addict interested in a man who loves his pints, cigarettes, Glasgow Celtic Football Club and has been known to start fights on Patrick Street at three o'clock in the morning.

Bitter, disillusioned Dublin man, lately rejected by long time fiancée, seeks decent, honest, reliable woman, if such a thing still exists in this cruel world of hatchet-faced bitches.

Ginger haired Galway man, a troublemaker, gets slit-eyed and shirty after a few scoops, seeks attractive, wealthy lady for bail purposes, maybe more.

Bad tempered, foul-mouthed old bastard, living in a damp cottage in the arse end of Roscommon, seeks attractive 21 year old blonde lady, with a lovely chest.

Limerick man, 27, medium build, brown hair, blue eyes, seeks alibi for the night of February 27 between 8 PM and 11:30 PM.

Optimistic Mayo man, 35, seeks a blonde 20 year old double-jointed supermodel, who owns her own brewery, and has an open-minded twin sister.

There is a silver lining in every cloud, right? Or is that a cloud in every silver lining?

We have a hole in our bathtub. We didn't notice that the rust had eaten right through because we are both blind and don't wear our glasses while taking a shower. Although we never noticed while cleaning either. The hole is the same colour as the rust.

So the problem is that water has been leaking under the tub for probably months now. We had noticed water in the bottom of the closet in the living room (on the other side of the wall from the tub), but thought it couldn't be the shower since the pipes are at the other end of the tub. Oops. I'm surprised the downstairs neighbours' ceiling hasn't caved in yet!

Conclusion - new bathtub needed. At first this seemed like a great idea and even better when the plumber said that since we will never find tiles to match the putrid salmon pink ones and since the current tiles don't go high enough anyway, we'll just have to replace all the tiles. Yey!

Then reality set in - they are going to wreck the paint job. Why did we paint in february?

Oh well, here is the silver lining in this cloud: our landlord has to foot the bill, not us.

It's official, Arnaud and i are getting married on the 22nd of July 2006! The "Haras de la Potardière" is a french estate dating back to the 12 century or so. The current "chateau" was entirely redone around 1850 and the farm is on over 25 acres of land. It is 10 km from Arnaud's parents' house, which means we can hopefully get married in the cute little church in their village, and about a 2 hour drive south west of paris.

I promise more details as we figure it all out...

Ok, so i am neglecting my blog again. This isn't easy! It is still a question of time. At work, i am still alone doing the work of 3 and I have big deadlines this week and a couple more throughout the month of may. So i am putting in 12 hour days almost every day now. I get home at 8:30 or 9, eat and go to bed. No time for blogging!

And the little time i spend doing fun stuff outside of work means that i still don't have time to blog. Two weekends ago was Oliver and Marie-Claire's wedding. A chilly april day, but it rained all day friday and sunday so we were happy for the wind on saturday (even though it was cold) since it chased the clouds away.

The wedding was beautiful, simple, lost in the middle of the french countryside. The food was great, though i don't think you would ever see veal served at a canadian wedding with no vegetarian option available!! The wine was perfect. And the speaches were all fun. Speaches at weddings in france are not quite the same as what i had been used to before. People put on performances, show videos or slide shows of the bride and/or groom and pretty much anyone who wants to get up and talk can do so.

We made a video that was a spin off of Starwars, starring Oliv'Han Solo and the Princess Maria-Cara. A friend of ours is a film editor and he put it together with clips from the films and photos and stories from all of us.

The next wedding on the list is next week in Copenhagen! I can't wait for a long weekend away!

Oh, boy, i am getting good at this! So here is the bathroom with the new light fixtures and the towel rack and hooks.

new bathroom pics

The picture was taken just after i got my hair cut, but downloading it from the camera and figuring out how to post it (i am not a pro of Linux yet) took a little longer than expected...

I am now really liking my new do. When i posted the message the night i got it cut, i was just not psychologically ready to have short hair.

As most of you know, i am not a coffee drinker at all. But Arnaud found this site and figured that some of my friends would be most interested...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonx/sets/48921/

(If there are any of you left!) When i started this blog, i thought i would have trouble coming up with interesting things to write about. Then i decided (with a little advice from angie) that i didn't need to dazzle you all with my eloquent prose and that simply updating my life would be sufficient.

The challenge has turned out to be time. Work has been so busy that i hardly have time to blink in the day. Our assistant got a promotion and left us to work for our executive director and my colleague with whom i share an office and all my work, quit. Now i have to do the work of 3. And i am either out in the evening or so tired that the last thing i want to do is sit down in front of the computer.

Ok so that was my apology. Now my update. Easter weekend was at Arnaud's parents. It wasn't as restful as it might have been for a 3 day weekend because they were both sick and cranky. But i have taken more good advice from angie and brought my knitting. While everyone around me bickered, i knitted. I got half a baby sweater done! Would have been more but i got so carried away at one point that i made the back 3 inches too long and and to rip out a buch of rows.

We still haven't gotten very far with wedding planning. We visited one hall this past weekend and it looks great (and not too expensive!), but the issue that seems to be the same everywhere is finding accomodation for everyone that is not too far away. We're still looking. As soon as we find a place we will confirm the date, but we are still shooting for july 2006.

she took me at my word.

Is it a prerequisite to being a hairdresser that you must also be deaf? I told her that i wanted her to do what she did last time - that is, mid to lower neck length, fairly square but with a few little layers especially in the front. How did she understand that i wanted short hair?

Ok, it doesn't look that bad and i suppose i will get used to it but it is NOT what i asked for. I should have known when she attacked from the start with the straight blade! I had a hard day at work and i was hoping a trip to the hairdresser would cheer me up.

I'll post a picure when my stress levels go down a bit so that i'll be less afraid of breaking the camera!

Arnaud has been reading the book "Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity" by David Allen. He is now obsessed with being organized. This is a good thing, especially when you live in 42m2 (around 460 square feet). So this afternoon we bought a few archive boxes and.... a Brother P touch 1250.

If my old colleagues from the CDA are reading this, you will understand my excitement. We can now label anything and everything - i started by labeling Arnaud. Our next visitors won't recognize the place!

Ok, so i am not very talented with all this blogging stuff yet, but here goes. We repainted the bathroom a few weeks ago. The "before" pictures were taken with a 35mm and they aren't scanned, so here are the "after" pictures. There will be more complete "after" pictures soon because we have changed the light fixtures too.

Pictures