I don't know all of the readers of this blog personally. It may be that some of you live under a rock, at the bottom of the sea or perhaps deep in a cave where you live with a family of gentle, yet fierce and socially-isolated badgers.

And if any of the above scenarios apply to your personal situation, you may be one of the estimated 16 human beings on planet Earth who have not heard of "The Hunger Games"movie that came out on Wednesday.

But I'm just an average woman, living in a normal, badger-free house, so that means that my kids and I had been looking forward to the above-mentioned film for quite a while.
I'd read the trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins to my girls and we all loved it. (I'm a big fan of YA science fiction and I've had a great time over the years discovering great authors like Susan Beth Pfeffer and Carrie Ryan). So, you won't be surprised to learn that we went to see the film on Sunday.
We went to Geneva so that we could see it in English, rather than dubbed in French....

and we got there an hour early, in order to be sure to get good seats...

(Please don't ask me why Severin is making completely deranged facial expressions. I really cannot tell you.)

It was a great evening and a fun time was had by all...

BTW- Go see the film. It's really very excellent!

Reader’s Meme

(Courtesty of Oreneta )

The rules: Bold the ones you've read completely and italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. According to the BBC, if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.* My comments are in parenthesis.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (good book, but I like ‘Persuasion’ better)
2. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I spent my teen years reading moody gothic novels. Good fun!)
4. Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (for school. didn't think it was all THAT)
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (made me cry!)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (many, many times)
12. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk (Never heard of it or him. Is that bad?)
18. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (annoying)
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (one of my favorite books.)
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I never understood why kids were supposed to like this book. I found it SO annoying. Hated it!)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (A fun book to read outloud for your kids!)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (TBR)
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (TBR)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Why is this crummy book on this nice list?)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (« The Moonstone » is a better book, IMHO)
46. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery(The whole series!!!!)
47. Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (I love this book, but it's too sad to read it very often)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (ever read 'John Dollar'? Even creepier!)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (I love this book!! You should read it too!!) #
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Read it for a class and managed to completely erase nearly every detail of it from my mind afterwards. Good for me!)
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (What is this doing here?!)
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden -Frances Hodgson Burnett(Big FHB fan!!)
74. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (No! Never! Gah!)
76. The Inferno-Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola (My daughter is reading this for school right now-says it is very depressing and very long)
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - A.S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (I’ve only read « Never Let me Go »)
85. Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ( sooo good!!)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (so annoying!)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down -Richard Adams (One of my favorite books of all time. One of my « comfort reads »)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (I never like Roald Dahl as a kid, but I started to enjoy his stuff as I read it to my own kids. 'The BFG' is the best!)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My additions:

101. The Lamplighter- Maria Cummins

102. Endurance- Alfred Lansing

103. The Jungle- Upton Sinclair

104. Precious Bane- Mary Webb

105.Black Beauty- Anna Sewel

*Is this TRUE? It seems like a very low number to me....

# I've added my own twists to the meme:

a. red bold for all the books you really love and would recommend that other people read.

b. list five books that you think should have been on the list.

Also- isn't this list kind of strange? Why would crap like 'The DaVinci Code' and 'Bridget Jones' be on it? And why the obscure modern stuff? I'd never even heard of, say, "The Cloud Atlas" (though I looked it up and it seems to be pretty interesting). Still. Odd.

The Book: The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk- I’m not generally a big fan of non-fiction, but I make an exception for books about early polar exploration. I don’t know why , exactly. When my interest began, back in Burkina, I thought maybe it was because reading about people freezing to death made me feel less miserably hot. But that theory doesn’t seem to hold any (ice) water because I now live somewhere with very long, cold winters and I still love me some polar adventure. And this is a good one. Based on a mountain of diaries, newspaper accounts and some interviews, this account of a Canadian scientific voyage gone very, very wrong could have been very, very dry. But Jennifer Niven keeps the story engaging. It’s an amazing book!

The TV series: Dollhouse.
Joss Whedon-how do I love thee?
Let me count the ways…
( Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, Dr. Horrible and now, Dollhouse)
OK. Six.
I love thee six ways, baby.
(Apologies to E. Barrett Browning- but I figure she can take the damage)
Like everything Whedon has done, it's thought-provoking, creative, touching and funny. And, like the amazing and beloved Firefly, was cancelled by the networks after only a short run.

The Music Video: TikTok is THE song of the moment, I'm sorry to say. But, much as I'm not a fan, I’ve listened to it several times lately. I wanted to watch the cute video my cousin’s daughter made with a friend.
OK.
I’m not sure how appropriate it is. The cans of Mountain Dew labeled as Jack Daniels were kind of disturbing.
And the lyrics "Boys trying to touch my junk"? Well, maybe it refers to people rummaging through her box of old Barbies at a garage sale...
But it’s all in good fun. And she wants lots of people to watch it. And her mom is very sick right now with cancer.
So, cheer up Mikayla and watch her video. 'Favorite' it and star it up, even. She's a sweetie.


The Podcast: AV Talk - This is my go-to movie review place

The Home Improvement Project: That would be the new room being added to our house. And right now, as I write this, there are workers in it nailing on the interior wood paneling! Progress is being made!!

We were in the car by nine this morning, heading to the local thrift shop. Thrift shops aren't that common in France...in our region there's just one and it's always terribly crowded. The best thing to do is get there before opening time and wait in line.

This early crowd is full of old, only slightly seeding-looking, white Frenchmen. These are the brocantes- the guys that own antique/secondhand/junk shops. They make their living by getting in early and snapping up all the good stuff befor anyone else can buy it. Then it goes into their shops to be sold at a huge markup.

To be fair, the competition (aka the rest of the clientele), for the most part, is not looking for charming antiques that have been unwisely thrown out by people who didn't realise their value. Most of the folks are minority families -folks that probably weren't doing that great even before the current economic crise. They are quite often North Africans with quite a few kids in tow and looking for a sturdy bunk bed or a working stove.
There are only a few families that look like they might be a bit more like my own- relatively privileged, but still trying to keep within a sensible budget.

I was mainly looking for books. I'm a bit of a book addict and if I bought only new ones to feed my habit, we'd be broke in a few months. Luckily, my parents are great about sending books and I also have some friends in the village to exchange books with.
Then there's the "Livres en Anglais" shelves at the Emmaus.
Today I found a recent biography of Jane Austen by Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields. It was marked at 2 euros and the guy sold it to me for 1!
Win!
I also bought an AC/DC songbook that the kids wanted for their fledgling rock band. It's from the US and marked at $ 24.99 . But the Emmaus had it priced at 3 euros.... and sold it for 1. Another epic win!
We picked up a few other things, but those were the highlights.

After lunch, we walked up to the village (about a mile away) for Saint Maurice's Fair, which is held there every September. There were stands selling candy, clothes, baskets, chairs and just about anything else you can think of. There were also plenty of cattle being shown off in the competitions, sporting wide, heavily decorated leather collars and huge bells. Mallory was worried that they must be too heavy for the cows' necks. I, on the other hand, thought they looked rather proud of their fancy gear...

On Monday, my English students surprised me with a book of drawings that they'd all made for me. I have to admit that it made me a bit teary-eyed. It was all so darn cute.

The little boy who made this one is one of those kids that generally hates school and can't sit still. But he likes to learn English...with me!

This is the only one that included a portrayal of me. I love my Barbie doll waist and the rocking manga-style boots! I'm not sure why the students are so teeny, though.

This was from my top student (not counting my girls, of course).
He went to SO much trouble, printing out a pic of the White House at home. And check out all the English phrases! He's only eight!! Smart kid!

The twins each contributed, as well.

Alexa made me this:

Yes, she knows how many stars and stripes there should be. She's citing artistic license.
I like how she gave my home state a mega shout-out.

And Mallory made this:

This place is SO where I am going on vacation this year: A reading-lamp equipped canoe floating under a grove of book-bearing boaobab trees.

The books are are carefully inscribed with tiny titles.

They include: "The Hobbit", "Bad and Good" , "Hard Life"

and my personal faves-"Happy Life, Happy Wife" and

"Good Mom Hard to Find".

Also, if you zoom in, you will see that my boat has a handy little tray

that holds a can of Dr. Pepper.

Mal made me a custom-designed paradise!

Yesterday morning, Tya's class got out of school early. After only one hour of French class, they were back on the streets. So, I drove down and picked up my daughter and her best guy pal(or possible bf- the jury is out on this one.)
I had some errands to run, so I took them with me to a nearby shopping center. And in the supermarket there, I spotted this:

Tya positively squealed with delight. And even I made sounds of great suprise and delight.

Her friend thought we'd lost our minds.

It's not that we are 'into' junk food. We're definitely more of a brown rice and veggie burger household.

BUT

We hadn't seen a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup or a Dr. Pepper since August 2007. So, it WAS very entertaining and surprising.

When I left France about 10 years ago for Africa, it was very difficult to find any American products at all in our area. I could occasionally find peanut butter or pancake syrup at outlandish prices. That was about it.

But now I can easily get items like: Old El Paso taco shells, Skippy peanut butter and
Campbells Cream of Mushroom soup (essential for the occasional US-style casserole). Even Pepperidge Farm cookies have caught on.

Crazy!

We bought nine packs of candy (@ 1 euro each. splurge.) and the last two cans of soda on the shelf. Guess some other Americans got there before us. I have NO clue who they were. I never see/hear fellow USA folk around. The only anglophones I ever run into are Brits. Odd.

I'm not sure I'll be a frequent buyer of this stuff. We've gotten along without it pretty well until now. But it was kind of fun. If only they'd get Crisco (which I need for my cake decorating) and Diet Dr Pepper)

And now for something completely different-

We've done some more work in the house!

Now when I look down from my office stairway, instead of plain white walls, brown lino

and grey plywood doors, I see this:

Check it OUT!!! Turquoise/aquamarine walls, a new light fixture, pale yellow cement floor, new doors for the closet and powder room,

PLUS floor to ceiling bookshelves nearly two stories high!!!!!

Before he left on Monday (for one month in Ouaga) , JP got some of our African artwork hung up on the walls.

I have been really busy these past few days, getting (very heavy!) boxes of books from the garage and attic and putting them on the shelves.
The books are, of course, arranged by genre and then by alphabetical order.
If I had more non-fiction I'd definitely Dewey Decimal it :) but I've only got about two shelves full and it hardly seems worth it.

I LOVE this SO much!

Can a stairway count as the favorite room of your house?

(NB: The very top shelves will be easily reachable by a special ladder we are having custom-built. )

I meant to post yesterday, but I got caught up in another of our home improvement projects. It acted as a sort of black hole (as these things tend to do), sucking up every free minute of my day. I didn't even read a single page of New Scientist. That's bad. I usually find at least a few seconds every day to read a bit of something- even if it's just a couple of pages of a novel while I wait for the morning coffee to be ready. But yesterday?

Rien, nada and zip as far as reading goes.

JP had to leave on work trip for a couple of days . As he got out of the car, he asked me (and I quote): "If you have a two hours today, maybe you could finish painting the stairs?"

The italics are mine. They are Italics of Irony. If you are married, you are probably already aquainted with them.

As you may have guessed, the task took ...somewhat longer than two hours.

JP had already spent many, many hours on the project. It's a big staircase right in the middle of the house, with two flights and a big landing. He had to strip off the old vinyl, remove the thick layers of crusty old yellow glue, clean it with acid and then put on a coat of undercoat. And the fact that it's the only way up to the bedrooms and bathrooms made it even harder.

It's what you'd call a high-traffic area.

A couple of days ago, he finally got the point where he could start actually applying the paint. The paint can said "primrose yellow". Interestingly, this was NOT the color that my dear spouse and I had brought home from the paint store after about an hour of intense deliberation and negotiation. We had decided on and bought a sort of orangy color called "pottery".

That in mind, I was pretty...surprised when JP got out a can of pale yellow floor paint. Yes, even after 18 years of marriage, he can still surprise me. Unfortunately, the surprises do NOT ever seem to involve fine jewelery or dream vacations.

"I took back the other one" he told me.

In the interest of staying married another 18 years, I didn't say too much. Besides, if I killed him, I'd have to finish renovating the house all by myself.

So, completely unharmed, he opened up the paint and got started. I eventually wandered over to look at his handiwork in progress. It looked so ...white. Well, maybe a tad off-white, but certainly not primrose-colored. I know from primroses- I have a yard full of them. And the things are yellow, NOT white.

But the can of paint was open and we couldn't take it back, so JP kept painting. It looked better than grey cement, anyway. However, the job still wasn't nearly done when he had to leave for Switzerland, so he asked if I had two hours to put on the final coat and do the landing while he was gone for three days.

Yesterday I dropped him off and then came home ready to work. I reopened the can and stirred a bit. Streaks of yellow started appearing, which made me say "?????"

I stirred some more, just for fun, and all the paint started turning a nice shade of buttery yellow. Suddenly, the mystery of the "white" paint was solved.

Stirring takes care of that, apparently.

Newly armed with well-mixed paint, I started the first new and improved coat as Clio the Wonder Cat watched me carefully. The next thing she did, of course, was walk right across several newly-painted stairs and then leave primrose colored kitty pawmarks all across the wooden floors upstairs. I caught her and put her outside, only to turn around and see Mr. Darcy (cat 2) run up the stairs. I caught up with him in Tya's room, where he'd walked across the middle of her carpet and onto her bed...

After I got all that cleaned up and the cats out of the way, I made better progress. But it needed three coats and hours of drying time in between each.

The total time? Over three hours of painting and clean-up, plus the nine hours of drying time, during which kids and cats had to be kept out of the wet paint.

I'm still not quite sure what I think of the color. After struggling so hard to put it on, I'm sort of starting to like it. But maybe that's just a kind of decorating-type Stockholm-syndrome...

I just spent a long and virtuous morning cleaning out the garage.
Well, some of the garage.
But our garage is so big and so messy that cleaning even just the front half is quite an accomplishment. But I had to do it. Just yesterday, I wrote on Facebook that cleaning out the garage is my "least favorite household chore". So, to prove to myself that I'm not a shirker and all-around lazy whiner, I made myself get out there and have a go at it.

But you don't really want to hear all about my garage. Trust me. So, send your words of thanks to fellower blogger TeacherMommy, who has tagged me for a new meme.

While some may consider them a plague, I rather enjoy them. It's fun to read other people's answers and concoct my own. There seem to be three main styles of answering:
First of all, you have the bloogers from the Short and Sincere school. Their answers are succinct, factual and...maybe a teensy bit dull.
Then you have the Economically Witty people. The ones that can come up with a very funny twist in just a few well-chosen words. This is the hardest to achieve. I have occasionally aspired to it, but fallen short.

And finally, there are the Out of Control Ramblers. They's my peeps. We are the ones who tend to use each question as an excuse for a good two or three paragraphs of exposition.
Sounds good?
Great! Here we go:

1. What are your current obsessions? I just discovered Project Runway and am watching it on dvd. It's fabulously addictive, so I watch episode after episode after episode... It's out of control.
I'm also out in the yard an awful lot, doing the gardening thing. I don't know if I'm really 'obsessed' with, say, weeding the flower beds, but I seem to be doing a lot of it and no one is making me...so I must really like it.

2. Which item from your wardrobe do you wear the most often? Our lovely old house is cold inside all year long, from the height of summer to the depths of winter, even with the heat turned all the way up. I deal with this by wearing my favoite bright green fleece jacket. It is, quite possibly, the ugliest jacket in the entire world. But at least it allows me to get on with my day and not torment others with constant cries of "It's so COLD in here!" as some people do. "Some people" would be my beloved spouse, who stalks through the house looking fetching in black track pants and a black t-shirt, as though he's sauntering through the streets of Cannes on a sunny day.

3. What's for dinner? Dumplings and potatos in sour cream sauce, a dish that I can make in my sleep and blindfolded with both hands tied behind my back. It's a dish from my childhood, learned at the side of my Grandma Lillie and my mom, who probably had to learn to make it before my dad was allowed to marry her. My paternal great-grandparents were all Volga Germans that immigrated to Nebraska. So, in my family the ethnic foods were things like glace (the aforementioned dumpling dish), grebble (doughnut-type pastries) and runzas ( meat and cabbage in a bread pocket). The latter is such an institution in my home state that there is actually a Runza fast-food chain...and it's really good! Not as good as my Grandma Lillie makes, of course...

4. Last thing you bought? That would be three huge tubs of sour cream (creme fraiche, actually)purchased up in the village mini-mart in a frantic just-before-closing-time shopping trip. At 6:48 last night, I realized that the next day would be a holiday and all shops would be closed then. And I had to have creme fraiche for the next day's dinner (see #4)

5. What are you listening to? Right this moment I am listening to the twins bicker over their elaborate Playmobil scenario. As far as I can tell, Alexa seems to be hindering the expansion of Mallory's farm with her "big butt", which is right where the new goat pen is supposed to go.

6. If you were a god / goddess what would you be? I'd be the deity of books. Yes! Beth the Book Goddess...that works. NOT the goddess of literature, mind you. Too fancy-schmancy for me. Bring me your recipe books, airport novels, French-English dictionaries...whatever, and I'll bless them with showers of sparkly fairy dust for you. But you must bring me tribute. ..Yes! Much tribute! Cash would be good, but Crispy Creme doughnuts will also be accepted in lieu.


7. Favourite holiday spots? Paris, where else? I'd never want to live there (unless I suddenly became very, very wealthy and could afford a house there), but I love getting off the train, dropping off my bags at a friends' house in a lovely guest room and going off to enjoy the museums, monuments, movies and other things, some of which don't even start with the letter 'm'.

8. Reading right now? The Terror by Dan Simmons. It's a 936 page novel based on the real-life, doomed Franklin Expedition that set out to find the Northwest Passage. I am a fan (is it weird to say that?) of early polar exploration expeditions, so this caught my eye. It's long, but I'm finding it riveting...

9. Four words to describe you? blondish, bookish, brainy-ish and bloggish

10. Guilty pleasure? NA. If it makes me feel guilty, I don't get any pleasure out of it. On the other hand, there are some things that I like that I'm a bit ashamed of. But I don't feel guilty about them. Take LOL Cats. I love them. Srsly. I check the site nearly every day and always have a good laugh. But it's awfully embarrassing to admit that I'm crazy about pictures of spelling-impaired kitties. So, I mostly don't talk about it. Shhhhh....


11. Who or what makes you laugh? See #10. But mainly my family. Special faves are: Sev singing me Wierd Al Yankovic songs, Alexa doing her crazy African dances, Mallory talking in her Stitch voice, and Valentine snarking on whatever target comes within range . Good fun.


12. Favourite spring thing to do? This is my first real spring after nine years in Africa and I am finding it very beguiling. I tend to go out and wander in the yard, sniffing the hyacinths, admiring the bright, fluffy grass, inspecting the apple blossoms.... it's so beautiful and clean and amazing. Go spring!

13. Planning to travel next? No definite plans. But we do have an the use of a friend's house up in Brittany for the first two weeks in July. I'm thinking about it....And in the second half of July, our friend's Paris house is empty and available to us. Then in August, I can go to Germany and visit my cousin Mike....
No. No definite plans, but lots of possibilities.

14. Best thing you ate or drank lately? Lotus Speculoos spread!! It's Heaven in a Freaking Jar, people! Think spreadable cookie dough.

15. Last time you were tipsy? It's been so long that I can't even remember. Or does that mean that I'm drinking so much that my memory is going? I just don't KNOW!

16. Favourite ever film? Just one? Pretty tough. Today, I'll say Meet Me in St Louis, but The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz are equally adored.

17. Biggest life lesson you've learned from your kids? In Disney films, there is often a heartwarming lesson along the cloying lines of "Home is where the heart is" . It's unoriginal and trite because it's true, but I didn't know that until I had children and moved from Switzerland to France to Africa and then back to France. My kids like people outside their family, but don't need them. No matter where they are, they tend to stick together, circle the wagons and get with the cocooning. If they are with each other, they have everything they need (even the occasional stress-relieving bicker-fest).
I only had one brother, so I never knew the power of the pack. It's amazing.

18. Song you can't get out of your head? "Elle a des yeux revolver" Ignore the cheesy video (It's from 1985. What can you say?) Just close your eyes and listen.

19. Book that you absolutely love and want to encourage everyone else to read, too? Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing.

Now to pass it on: first off, I'll tag Tya, who REALLY needs to write in her blog. (Do you hear me young lady?)? I'll also tag Reb , Joy and Pardon My French , as well.
I'll leave it at that. Some of my blog pals hate these things, some don't have the time and some have private blogs, so I can't tag them.

(Rules of the meme: Respond and rework. Answer questions on your own blog. Replace one question. Add one question. Tag 8 people. )

I woke up this morning and learned that there's a holiday to celebrate: International Book Day. (Thanks, Oreneta!) It seems like it's a bigger deal in Latin American countries than elsewhere (as far as my quick internet search shows, anyway) but I hope that it will catch on all over.

So, everybody everywhere remember to hug a book today. And also go have a look on my right sidebar and click to take a peek at my very own new Amazon bookstore. I'm still choosing books and having lots of fun with it.

What else can we celebrate today? How about spring? I am loving it this year- it's my first in nine long years.

April back in Burkina means super-hot temperatures and frequent power cuts. It means dry dust and dripping sweat. It means just hanging in there until the rainy season finally begins in June.

I was talking on Skype yesterday with a friend in Ouaga and she handed her toddler son an M&M candy to distract him while we chatted.

"Don't squish it!" I heard her say. And then, "Oh no! He just squashed it in his hand and there's melted chocolate all over him now!!"

In our house in France, even a determined toddler could not squish a candy coated chocolate. they stay hard. No melty M&Ms- just one of the many things to enjoy about being back in the Alps.

Another thing is the fabulous spring flowers. I am loving going outside to admire all the wonderful flowers that we planted back in the fall: hyacinth, daffodils, jonquils, crocus, etc..

I have been gardening like crazy the last few days. On Wednesday, I was out for nearly five hours, mowing the lawn, whacking the weeds, planting flowers and shubberies (one that looks nice. And not too expensive.) and weeding the beds of spring flowers that are already blooming nicely.
As you can see, the lawn is no small affair:

There were also the planter boxes to fill. I have three like the the one below. They weren't weren't much trouble because the pansies were planted in the fall and they suvived all winter long! All I had to do was throw a few marigolds in the middle.

I also planted a couple of lilac bushes and some lavender- two of my absolute most favorite ever flowers.

Yesterday I was out in the yard with the twins. I was fussing over the flowers and the girls were hunting around the yard for small dandelions for a salad that night.

Alexa said "You like lavender, lilacs and lilies. You, know, you should have named us after them! Valentine could be Lily, I could be Lilac and Mallory could be Lavender." She thought it sounded like a great idea and that I had really let the side down by not giving my girls a set of matching flower names...

Well, there's an idea.

And I guess I could have called Sev Larkspur? Or if were's going with flowers I love, rather than by matching the first letter, maybe Hyacinth?

This afternoon I had some "free" time that I could have spent blogging (or more likely doing laundry and stripping wallpaper).
Instead, I ended up helping out at our tiny village library.

"It's for the children" gets me every time.

"Library" is really too grand a name. It's just one small room on the ground floor of the old rectory near the village church. For years it was open to the public on Saturday mornings and a couple of times a week for the school. And it was all run by volunteers. These days, however, volunteers are hard to come by. Most people now have jobs that keep them busy.
So, the village library is no longer open on Saturdays and they are even hard-pressed to find people to keep it open one afternoon a week for the schoolchildren.

That's where I come in.

The woman who has been running the library has had a change of work schedule and can only come about once a month now. The twins' teacher told me this last week, looking all sad and wistful. "Such a shame, really, if the children can't go to the library. They so look forward to it. I don't suppose...?
And what could I say?
I would go against everything I stand for to be even indirectly implicated in something that would deprive children of books.
So, I said "Oui". Not that I was all that happy to go when the time came. I had a million things to do at home and was a bit peeved at the idea of spending two and a half hours at the library full of French books.
I was in no mood.

Grumbling incoherently, I climbed into the car, drove to the post office, mailed a box of cheese to a shepherd (long story) and then went to the library. The other volunteer was there waiting to show me what to do. Then she left.

And suddenly, there I was: Queen of the Village Library!
And of course, I loved it. The kids were adorable and I had great fun chatting with them about the books they were checking in and out.

I even used my long-dormant knowledge of the Dewey decimal system to help small children find the books they wanted. My favorite of the day was Luna, a funny little thing with huge eyes, even huger black-rimmed glasses and mad-scientist hair. She was very intense as she asked me "Madame, Do you have any books about God?"

I LOVED being the Library Lady and will definitely be spending more Thursdays there.

I just came across a website that features only blogs that post daily and without fail. Maybe I'll try it next month...September is definitely out of the question. You'd all be treated to posts like:

"Wallpapered Valentine's bedroom until midnight. Woke up this morning at 5, cleaned the catbox and put in a load of laundry. Today's plan also includes grocery shopping and re-grouting the hallway tiles. BTW: roof still leaks, srsly."

It's probably best that you be spared that.

An innovation that I am going to initiate immediately though, is a booklist in the sidebar to note what I have read recently/am currently reading. It was impossible to do back when I blogged in Ouaga, as I read so much! I could get through a book in a couple of days. That was because I had the amazing luxury of a driver to take me around. I had plenty of time to read in the car.

Also, I spent scads of time waiting. I waited everywhere and for hours: the electric company, phone company, airline office, tax office, etc. Here in France, things just seem to get done differently. I'm not saying that I don't wait for things to happen. In fact, I will probably be waiting until l'enfer freezes over for the guy to come fix the roof. But at least I can regrout the tiles while I wait.

Right now I have to end this post. It's the first day of school for my older kids. The little ones started on Tuesday. Tomorrow I'll definitely post about their schools and the French rentrée in general.

This morning was spent at the electric company office in Dassasgho, again trying to close down our account. I had plenty of time to look around and count the fellow sufferers - I mean clients- waiting in line. Sixty two of us there were, crammed into a small waiting room served by six glacially slow Sonabel agents.
I had a book along to pass the time, but even counting people in line was more interesting. 'The Crimson Code' by Rachel Lee is touted on the cover as "a highly complex thriller". But it is actually a very simple soporific.
At one point during the wait, the power went off for quite a while.
That's right. The Sonabel can't even keep the power on in their offices.


But that's all over and done and now I'm busy getting the car (which I'd like to SELL now, please) repaired. Yesterday's exciting adventures in the bush knocked the muffler loose and it needs some work now. That trip was so great in so many ways.
Anyway, judging from the noise it makes now, you'd think my feeble little station wagon had a 747 engine under the hood.
The extreme racket, coupled with the green color of my car, did give me worries that people were going to mistake my car for a Taxi Vert. The cheap local taxis here are olive green and usually in very bad repair. I always fancied that my car was a nicer shade of green- more turquoise-ish, but I was probably kidding myself. Nobody has flagged me down yet, but it's just a matter of time. I hope I can get it properly fixed before tomorrow morning...

I am still haplessly emailess. My formerly lively internet existence has slowed down to a pathetic crawl- which is ok, because my life is doing a spastic sprint in all other directions.
We are throwing a big party here at home in less than two weeks. It's supposed to be a "Goodbye Party" celebrating the end of our nine years in Africa, but I think it refers to me saying goodbye to the last shreds of my sanity.
And I won't even mention how it's going trying to sell much of our stuff and get things organised for the move.


My mental state is certainly not helped by the fact that Blogspot is torturing me. Sometimes I'm completely blocked from blogging for hours. Or there are times like right now, when it viciously denies me the right to publish photos with my blog post. And I assure you that I have some very cool photos right now. I went pagne shopping this morning with a friend that owns a tailor's shop and I stumbled across the weirdest pagne design EVER!!! It must be seen to be believed. But you don't get to see it today, apparently. But trust me when I say that you will ENVY my freaky purchase!


On a happier note: today also brought word from, my lovely, bookish pal Ms.B asking in the blog comments section if I have ever read David Sedaris. The answer is: not until quite recently. It just so happens that Aussie Neighbor Tony wandered over today with some back issues of The New Yorker. And one of them happened to have a piece by Sedaris, an hommage to French spiders.
Quite a coincidence, non?
It was a very funny story and I wished, wished , wished to be him! I mean, I wished that I could write funny stories about expat life that are published in The New Yorker magazine. I don't actually want to be a gay man living a spider-infested house in Normandy.

JP arrived on the Air France flight last night. So, I have a husband again!
He was greeted at home by this very flashy poster masterminded by Mal. She and Al laboured over it for days. The animals are cut from cardboard and based on patterns from a craft book. The girls did a fabulous job. (I didn't help them at all with it.)


After two months in Geneva, JP seems pretty happy to be back home in Ouaga. This morning, he's wandering about the house and garden adjusting, moving, or throwing out assorted items. I guess it's his way of re-asserting his territory. If he were a dog, he'd be peeing on all the trees.
He has decided that the turtles would be happier over in the goat pen. I'd say they look a little confused, but not traumatized.
Hopefully he'll get tired out before he does anything too crazy.


Tonight is American Idol night for us! Every Sunday night, I get the tapes recorded by some friends that have sattelite TV. Then some other TV-less pals come over, we watch AI and eat pizza.
The thing is, as I mentioned in a previous post, we are several episodes behind. We are getting the show off an African channel. So, we are still at the final 10. We haven't even seen "Idol Gives Back', which was aired in the US on April 9 (I think). So, I have to keep very alert when online, so as not to stumble across any AI news. I try to stick to my customised iGoogle newspage. I have BBC, Reuters and NYTimes only...all pretty unlikely to put AI news in the headlines.


What am I reading lately? Classic Andre Norton sci fi!! Great stuff. She wrote 182 books in her life and quite a few of them are here in Ouagadougou. How weird is that? A few years back, someone donated her father's sci fi collection to the Rec Center library. Some of it is kind of valuable, as well as being a good read. One of the items is a first edition paperback of Norton's Sorceress of the Witch World from 1968. I just looked it up online and found other copies for sale from $20 to $45 US, depending on the condition!

Yet another electricity-free morning in sunny, stifling Ouagadougou. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was some sort of Person of Leisure who could spend her morning, say, at the pool or in fancy, air-conditioned shops. But I have stuff to DO! We are leaving Africa in about three months. Which is scary. So, I thought I’d better do something useful this morning. I ended up sitting on the cool tile floor of our back hallway, sorting out books to give away. It’s a bit dark, but it’s definitely the best spot in the house when the power is down. And it was a job that had to be tackled. I dusted, sorted and asked myself hard questions like: What woman needs TWO copies of every volume of the entire Tad Williams Otherworld series? I love me some science fiction, but enough is enough.

That was the exception, though- I mostly threw out forgettable mysteries that had found their way onto my shelves -plus a book on candle making and one small volume by a British lady that is all about drawing dogs, in an unhealthy, probably-can’t-interact-with-humans kind of way.

They aren't really being thrown away, of course. They are going to a new home over at the Rec Center library.

So, what is on that back hallway shelf that has been deemed worthy of being shipped back to France? Well, mostly it’s science fiction and fantasy. I keep it a bit hidden away on purpose so that I don’t frighten people. I like to let folks get to know me before they realize that I’m a complete an unredeemed geek.

But you all already know I’m a geek (the Star Trek film festivals were a dead giveaway, no doubt) I’ll confess that I own nearly everything written by: Greg Bear (Darwin's Radio I so recommend.) David Brin, George R. R. Martin, Brian Jacques, Sheri Tepper, Philip Kerr,Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan and Jean Auel.

My mom is definitely responsible for my bookwormy, geekish tendencies (Thanks, Mom! ) She started reading sci fi back in the day when no females read the stuff (at least not that they would admit) and if they wrote it, it was done quietly under a male pseudonym.
So, I was raised on Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein. I watched Star Trek when it first aired on television in the late sixties. I was a toddler, but I knew it was cool! And I eventually developed a mad crush on Mr. Spock, which is probably weird, but there you go. I just yesterday read a blog post where a fellow forty-something mom admitted to having the hots for Scotty. Scotty? Mr. “ Cap’in! The engines canna take nae more!” Scotty? Hotness quotient in the basement, srsly.

Hey- did you know that a NEW Star Trek film is coming out in May 2009????

The Sidwaya is a local paper that I tend to disdain. It is the official mouthpiece of the government here and as such, has little of interest to say. It's reasonably fair, but a bit boring. A copy only costs about 40 cents US, but even at that, they don’t sell many. Meanwhile, L’Evenement, at 500 fcfa (1$) sells like mad.
But amazingly, on Wednesday there was something REALLY interesting in the Sidwaya: a page and a half devoted to JP’s latest book! They printed a brilliant resumé of the main ideas- written by JP himself. There was also, as an added bonus, a huge picture of the author (taken by his wife out in their front yard last week.) Furthermore, it mentioned that the book would be officially “presented” at a conference on Friday afternoon. So, as you may guess, yesterday afternoon found me at the CIRD library at the research center where JP works. They had moved all the tables aside and set up chairs…not enough chairs, as it turned out! About 60 people showed up for the presentation, so people were standing and sitting on tables. There was even a journalist from another newspaper, L’Observateur.
JP was brilliant (are we surprised?). He presented some main points of his book about land tenure among the Winyé and then made some links to current land conflicts, like the one in Kounkounfouano that I recently blogged about.

Afterwards, I stood around and watched JP sign copies of his book for his "fans". I’m married to a famous author! In fact, the library (which is selling the book) is going to have to re-order, which is very rare. So far, JP’s book is second only in sales to “Large Mammals of Western Africa” , which was their last “big” title. Woo! Not bad for a 300 page book about an obscure tribe. Everybody likes large mammals. Elephants and hippos are an easy sell. But land tenure? Good luck. But JP makes it exciting. Really! If you read French and are interested by Africa, I highly recommend it.

Tomorrow I’ll publish the last and (I promise) final instalment of my adventures in Gourcy.

Yesterday was a busy morning, as I scurried about, getting ready for the big Thanksgiving feast scheduled to occur at my house today at 6 pm sharpish.
There was the usual stuff to buy….well, not so much. There's no cranberry sauce in the shops or canned pumpkin. But I did buy bread at the bakery, so that I could make the stuffing. I also hunted around town, trying to track down some decent soft drinks for my guests. For years, all you could get in Burkina were Coke and Orange Fanta. Over the past few years, the local bottling company franchise added Fanta Citron (lemon), Fanta Cocktail (citrus+mango) and, finally last year, the piece de resistance: Fanta Fiesta (strawberry!!). As I think Orange Fanta is a tool of Satan ("Welcome to Hell!" says Old Nick "Have a drink of this Orange Fanta, then we'll get you right to work raking live coals with your bare hands"), I was much heartened. But it was not to last. They quit making Fiesta a couple of months ago, and the Cocktail and Citron are nearly impossible to find. But after visiting several distributors yesterday, I happened upon a cache of Cocktail. Victory was mine!!!
As turkeys are rare birds (ha!) around here, I had to order ours a while back. In the interests of our holiday protein intake, I went by the butcher’s yesterday to verify that the promised birds would show up as scheduled this morning. I had to order two, as I was told they’d only weigh between 6 and 9 pounds each – a far cry from the 25 lb Godzilla-turkeys that roam the freezer sections of American supermarkets. Later, I was tempted by some inexpensive harvesty-colored fabric at the marketplace, so I suddenly decided to have new tablecloths sewn up for the event. As if I needed more to do. That involved a trip to the tailor, then they had to be picked up later, washed and ironed.
I also had a doctor’s appointment, had to get my head examined (X-rayed, specifically) and then there were many (4!) drives to various pharmacies searching for all the needed meds. My allergy woes and stomach ailments are too numerous and boring to go into. Suffice it to say that the amoebas will be gone soon and my cranium, while having a nice symmetrical configuration, has less than lovely sinus cavities.
While I was in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, I was re-reading Eat, Pray, Love. (thanks Babzee!) I came to the line where The author writes that her sister has described her sartorial style as “Stevie Nicks goes to yoga class in her pyjamas”. I once again had a good laugh at this, but glancing down at my worn tapettes, old pagne, grimy fingernails and frizzy, demented hair, I thought “Geez- My style must be: Stevie Nicks’ poverty-stricken sister goes to yoga class in her pyjamas during the sack of Rome.”