Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in misterajc's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
8:14 am	Did you know that gullible isn't in the dictionary? I just got an email offering to compensate people who had been caught by email scams. Now that's what I cal targeted marketing! (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
12:21 am	Food Meme 1. Are you a vegetarian? Vegan? No 2. What's your favorite food? Chocolate 3. White bread or whole wheat? Whole wheat unless I am in France. 4. What's for breakfast? These days usually oatmeal. 5. You're making a Dagwood sandwich. What's in it? Dagwood. Is that a trick question? 6. What's on your pizza? Canadian Bacon and Pineapple. Or almost anything else. 7. Coffee, tea, milk, or soda? I've been through phases of each of these. Currently it's diet soda. 8. Dark, milk, or white chocolate? Dark. 9. Teetotal, beer, wine, or hard liquor? Any of the above. 10. Does cilantro taste like citrus, or like soap? No. 11. Is chorizo the greatest thing ever or is it totally disgusting? Chorizo? It's OK. 12. Do you use garlic like a vegetable or like a spice? Both. These days more and more like a vegetable. 13. Onions: raw, cooked, or not at all? Both. 14. Does broccoli taste sweet or bitter? No. 15. How do you feel about fish? Fish is good. Really fresh fish is even better. Last weekend I had fish that was still alive about two minutes before it hit the frying pan. Yum. 16. How about sushi? Sushi is just a vehicle for the wasabi. 17. Fave ethnic cuisine? Indian. 18. What's your favorite fruit? Persimmon. 19. Cheese - thumbs up or thumbs down? How about blue cheese? Thumbs up. Blue is good. 20. Finally, favorite dessert? Chocolate mousse, the way I make it. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 19th, 2008
7:44 am	Writer's Block: Best. Concert. Ever. What's the best concert you've ever been to? Brought to you by HP View 501 Answers That's a hard one. I think I'm going to say GRIMMS, because it is the only time I have seen a band forced to do a third encore they obviously hadn't planned. The house lights were up but the audience went on cheering and simply refused to leave the theater, so after about five minutes the band came back on wearing their street clothes and did a rampaging version of Humanoid Boogie. The line up of GRIMMS changed from time to time, but originally I think it was Gorman Roberts Innes McGough McGear and Stanshall. McGough is a well known poet, McGear is Paul McCartney's brother, Innes was the lead minstrel in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Stanshall did the voice over at the end of side one of Tubular Bells. In other words, they were a very eclectic group. They presented a brilliant mix of music, poetry and comedy. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
4:27 pm	Privilege Meme The ones that apply to me are bolded Father went to college Father finished college Mother went to college Mother finished college Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers Had more than 50 books in your childhood home Had more than 500 books in your childhood home Were read children's books by a parent Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18 The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18 Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs Went to a private high school Went to summer camp Had a private tutor before you turned 18 Family vacations involved staying at hotels Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them There was original art in your house when you were a child Had a phone in your room before you turned 18 You and your family lived in a single family house Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home You had your own room as a child Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course Had your own TV in your room in High School Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 Went on a cruise with your family Went on more than one cruise with your family Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family This is really America-centric. For instance the government paid all my college tuition and most of my living expenses at college. I had high quality free medical care my entire life in the UK. I had a good public library within walking distance of my house. My parents took me to see Shakespeare performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Thought I went to a state school it was older and got better academic results than many private schools. My home town had a free art gallery with masterpieces from many great artists. The bottom line is that privilege does not necessarily come from your family; it can also come from the society in which you are born. Current Music: Silence (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 8th, 2007
8:06 am	Preventing junkmail I'd like to put in a good word for a web site called Catalog Choice. This allows you to cancel paper catalogs that you receive in the mail. If you get lots of junkmail catalogs which you never look at, you can just select them here, type in the customer number on the label, and Catalog Choice will notify the sender to take you off the mailing list. Unfortunately it's too late to prevent the flood of holiday catalogs as they are already in process, but if you start now you can have less junkmail in the new year. Please help save a tree or two and cancel your catalogs. Andrew Current Mood: optimistic (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 4th, 2007
10:43 pm	Library Meme These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list. Yes, there are some books I couldn't stand but read all the way through. They were mostly required reading at high school. Dickens, ugh! A couple of these I read out loud, as bedtime stories to the kids. At least The Hobbit and The Count of Monte Cristo, and the first volume of Once And Future King. I'm amazed there is so much Neil Gaiman on the list, as I find him a tremendously readable writer. Maybe it's all the people who liked Sandman and can't deal with books without pictures. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Anna Karenina Crime and Punishment Catch-22 One Hundred Years of Solitude Wuthering Heights The Silmarillion Life of Pi : a novel The Name of the Rose Don Quixote Moby-Dick Ulysses The Odyssey Pride and Prejudice Jane Eyre A Tale of Two Cities The Brothers Karamazov Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies War and Peace Vanity Fair The Time Traveler's Wife The Iliad Emma The Blind Assassin The Kite Runner Mrs. Dalloway Great Expectations American Gods Atlas Shrugged Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books Memoirs of a Geisha Middlesex Quicksilver Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West The Canterbury Tales The Historian: a novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Love in the Time of Cholera Brave New World * The Fountainhead Foucault's Pendulum Middlemarch Frankenstein The Count of Monte Cristo * Dracula A Clockwork Orange Anansi Boys The Once and Future King * The Grapes of Wrath The Poisonwood Bible: a novel 1984 Angels & Demons The Inferno The Satanic Verses Sense and Sensibility The Picture of Dorian Gray Mansfield Park One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest To the Lighthouse Tess of the D'Urbevilles Oliver Twist Gulliver's Travels Les Misérables The Corrections The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Dune * The Prince The Sound and the Fury Angela's Ashes : A Memoir The God of Small Things A People's History of the United States: 1492-present Cryptonomicon Neverwhere A Confederacy of Dunces A Short History of Nearly Everything Dubliners The Unbearable Lightness of Being Beloved Slaughterhouse-Five * The Scarlet Letter Eats, Shoots & Leaves The Mists of Avalon Oryx and Crake: a novel Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Cloud Atlas The Confusion Lolita Persuasion Northanger Abbey The Catcher in the Rye On the Road The Hunchback of Notre Dame Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance The Aeneid Watership Down * Gravity's Rainbow The Hobbit * White Teeth Treasure Island David Copperfield The Three Musketeers Current Mood: amused (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
7:46 pm	Unclear on the concept Google Maps' idea of the Transamerica Pyramid Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
11:35 pm	So it goes Kurt Vonnegut died tonight. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 13th, 2005
10:00 am	Arghhhh 1. Total number of films I own on DVD/video: The family owns a bunch. Myself, less than ten. 2. The last film I bought: I think it was "Secretary" which I bought as a present for Paula. 3. The last film I watched: Puckoon 4. Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me: Monty Python and the Holy Grail The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. Monty Python's Meaning of Life Story of O Fahrenheit 911 5. Tag 5 people and have them put this in their journal: No way am I going to inflict this on other people. Copy it if you want. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 23rd, 2004
1:06 pm	Too Much Information In case you haven't already discovered it, the latest on my life is to be found here paulaandandrew . It will make more sense if you read in chronological order, and remember that some posts are by Paula and some by me. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 30th, 2004
6:02 pm	Return to Roissy Saturday Today we have to be off the boat by nine, so it’s another early start. The boat rental people take our luggage to the railway station, and we walk over there. It’s an hour and a half until the first train to Paris, which leaves time for another boulangerie run. I find one with a line that stretches out the door, and stock up on croissants and pain au chocolat. The train is not the sleek express we cane down on, it’s an older double-decker commuter train which stops at a bunch of other towns on the way. There is plenty of room, which is good, as the kids are getting on everyone’s nerves, especially each other’s. When we hit the Gare de Lyon, things slow down even further. It takes a while to find a luggage cart, find a bathroom, pay for the bathroom, and work out how we are going to get to the airport. There are three choices, bus, expensive but fast, taxi, ditto, and train, a bit less convenient, but cheaper. I opt for the train, and have to wait in line for a long time to get tickets. As we are dragging the suitcases to the platform, and having problems with one that has a broken handle, Paula, who does not deal well with waiting, says that she thinks I am being cheap taking the train when we could have caught a taxi. I am pretty hurt that she calls me cheap after I have just taken the family on our most expensive vacation ever. I should mention why the bathroom at the Gare de Lyon is so complicated. First of all, you have to follow signs downstairs from the main concourse, then you have to pay the attendant in the booth 50 centimes to get a token, then you have to use the token to get in through the turnstile. This is complicated by the people who try to put 50 centime pieces directly in the turnstile, lose their money and get annoyed. Being France, there are no doors on the men’s and women’s areas, and the women are quite happy to wander into the men’s room if all the cubicles in the ladies are full. Things go a bit better once we get on the train. We have to change once, but it is just across the platform. We walk out of the station at the airport, and straight onto a courtesy van which takes us to the hotel in Roissy where we will spend the last night in France. The hotel is a Holiday Inn, modern and boring. Ian goes off to enjoy the sauna and whirlpool in the health club, while Paula, Dan and I take turns having a shower with decent water pressure and water that stays at the same temperature. Paula and Dan go off to forage for food, and return with a bunch of cookies and stuff which tides us over till dinnertime. For dinner we eat at a creperie in what is left of Roissy. The food is not very good, so Paula an Ian return to the hotel before dessert. Dan and I stay on. The desserts are OK, and after dinner we wander around the village. It’s mostly a horrible modern development, with a few crumbling bits of wall or derelict buildings dating back to before the airport. The chateau had been torn down and replaced by a condo development. I’m taking a photo of a billboard for the condos on the side of a partially demolished building, when a plain clothes cop pulls up in his car, asks me what I am doing, and tells me not to hang out there. I’m not sure if this is for my safety of that of the residents, and he is gone before I have time to ask him. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 29th, 2004
12:41 pm	You have no choice Friday (last week) We have a fair distance to cover today, as we need to get the back to the rental company tonight, se we wake at 8 o’clock, to have time for a boulangerie run before the locks open at nine. You may have noticed the obsession with boulangeries on this trip. This is because good baguettes are stale within a few hours of being baked, so to keep up a good supply we need to purchase it twice a day. As I think I have mentioned, stale baguettes are at the bottom of the food chain in France. They are food for pets, domestic animals, ducks, swans, the less aggressive vegetables and plankton. The local limestone is in fact the fossilized carcasses of Paleolithic stale baguettes. The sun is shining and it looks to be a perfect day, which just shows how wrong you can be. We make it to the first lock at 9:10 am, a best for the trip. The locks on this stretch are huge, about twice as wide and twice as long as the ones we have been going through. There is room for about ten boats the size of ours. We end up in a flotilla of four boats, all going through each lock together. One of the boats is a party of Americans, and the alpha male in that group seems determined to make as good time as possible, overtaking other boats and making his way up from third in the pack to first. This does him very little good, as he has to wait in every lock for the other boats to catch up before the lock keeper will close the gates and fill the lock. We christen this guy The Ugly American. Unfortunately The Ugly American pulls up into a tricky lock ahead of us, and instead of tying up at the far end like a civilized person, pulls up in the middle, so that we have to moor on the wrong side, the side that slopes in at about sixty degrees. This requires some tricky maneuvering with the mooring lines and fending off the boat, and getting the boat close enough to the stairs so that the people on shore can get back on the boat, and it doesn’t help that it starts raining at this point. In the end all it costs us is one broken wine glass. The rain gets heavier, and pretty soon we are in a serious thunder shower. Roberta is at the helm, but in a gesture of solidarity, Hugh and I stay out there in the rain with her, making helpful comments about how holding the metal steering wheel will make her more attractive to lightening. Ian is up in the rain too, mostly to get away from Dan. The last lock of the day is the most challenging of the trip. There are three boats ahead of us, and this is a small one, so we have to wait for two of them to cycle through before we can get in. It rains while we are waiting. When finally get in, we have to go uphill, and it is about three meters, the deepest lock of the voyage. One of the lock keepers has to come by each boat with a hook on a piece of string, to bring up the mooring lines. So, here we are in Migennes, probably the least interesting town of the trip, at the boat rental place. I take a quick tour of the main streets by bicycle, and find that real estate is really, really cheap around here, and there is a good reason for this. More to the point, Hugh has stopped by the tourist information office and asked where we should have dinner this evening, “You have no choice,” he is told, and is pointed to the one good restaurant in town. I call and make a reservation. At eight o’clock we are the first ones there for dinner. We are soon surrounded in the small dining room by three families, two of which have astonishingly noisy children, What’s more astonishing, they remain noisy for the entire three or so hours of the meal. This would be moderately annoying normally, but Kay is so much more annoyed than anyone else, that she acts as a sort of annoyance sink, and I can sit back an relax, knowing that Kay is being annoyed for me. I remember the oysters with a sauce that tasted like pickled onions, and the duck with a peach sauce. I love pickled onions, and the oysters were fresh enough not to distract from that sublime flavor. I would never have thought to couple duck and peach, but I’m sure I will do so soon. Good food, in spite of the ambience. Back to the boat, where Dan has managed to find the Israeli army babe we met on the train coming down here. We invite her in for a chat, and I try to picture her driving an armored bulldozer through a Palestinian house. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 28th, 2004
11:31 am	Swanfight Thursday The boulangerie in Vaux appears to be closed, so we have a croissant free breakfast. Our one remaining stale baguette is fed to the waterfowl. There’s a group of five swans who seem content to share with the more maneuverable ducks, though there is one of the swans who gets chased away by the others. Then a second group of swans turns up. There are two parents and five cygnets, about half size and still in their downy brown adolescent plumage. They move the first group out of the way, and then the parents keep the ducks away so their offspring have a clear shot at the bread. We motor on to Auxerre, the largest town we hit on this trip. The river Yonne has become increasingly entangled with the canal the further we travel. The river will enter the canal on one side, and then leave via a weir a little later. We are spending more and more time on the river. Here in Auxerre we are on the river, so we have to swing the boat around and point upstream when we moor. There’s good moorings on the far side of the river from the old part of town, and several magnificent old churches loom on the skyline. I check in with the harbormaster. He’s a charming and helpful guy. There’s a ten euro dockage fee, but it’s worth it to be directed to the best boulangerie in town. Kay has been disturbed by having to compete with our kids for food, particularly croissants, and has taken to secreting stashes of them around the boat, like a squirrel hiding nuts for the winter. She tells us to buy as many croissants as we can. When Paula and Ian and I hit the boulangerie, I buy a dozen croissants, and six chocolate croissants, plus some patisserie for lunch. When we find out how good the croissants are we eat half the ones I have purchased, so I head back to the store and buy another dozen. Back in the boat, the Conways try to decide what to do. There are streets full of half timbered houses to explore, a cathedral, an abbey and a church or two dating from medieval times, sidewalk cafes and the whole of French culture to enjoy. I decide to have a nap. I am cathedraled out. I do not need to see another half timbered cell phone store. I haven’t had an afternoon nap in three weeks. Ah, the luxury. Hugh and Roberta are back when I wake up, and Hugh and I go on a supermarket run. There is a huge supermarket a couple of blocks from the boat, and we stock up on fruit and beer. I find the fish counter to be particularly artistic, with thirty or so varieties of fish laid out in artistic patterns. Here a conger eel curled around a fan of trout, there a octopus tentacle or two curling out from under the ice. Back to the boat, where Ian and I devour most of the black grapes I just bought in the supermarket. Expletive, but those are good grapes. They have seeds and flavor, two things very hard to find in American supermarket grapes. I head back to the supermarket to buy some more. We sit up on the sun deck for a while, eating baguettes and cheese and olives and pistachios, and then Hugh and I cross the river and make reservations at a brasserie that Kay cased earlier. I have to ask Bob the French for eating outside before we go. Does it sound like this whole trip revolves about food? That’s not true, the drink is just as important. We are seated outside, under a roof of yellow Lipton’s Tea umbrellas. There are two hard working wait staff for the whole restaurant, an older woman and a younger one. The younger one is wearing a pink top and very tight black pants. Yes, I can see her panty line and yes, she is wearing a thong. I’m going to enjoy this dinner. I have the seafood salad, followed by one last chunk of canard. The seafood salad has smoked salmon, crawfish, shrimps and mussels, and is very tasty. The duck has been salted first I think, and is rich dark meat, though the skin does not have that crispy texture that duck skin should have. We order dessert. Dan and I both order the chocolate, but it turns out there is only one left. We arm wrestle for it and he wins. The waitress in the pink top is watching, too. I think Dan must have cheated, he’s really serious about his chocolate. After dinner, Hugh, Roberta and I head to a neighborhood bar where there is live reggae. It is a miracle of French engineering. I did not mean to write that, but Dan just muttered it to himself, and it made it to the printed page. There was not much engineering involved in the Reggae, but it is more French than West Indian. Never mind, it is an excuse to sit outside and drink beer and check out the local babes. It’s a shame so many attractive French women smoke. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, August 27th, 2004
9:34 am	Moria on champagne Wednesday The day dawns bright and sunny. When I say the day dawns, I don’t of course mean that unhealthily early moment when grandfather sun peeks over the rim of the earth bathing us all in cold unpleasant morning light. I mean the much more comfortable time when sane people on vacation roll out of bed, say around nine o’clock. There is a strong breeze most of the day, enough to turn the umbrella on the sun deck inside out if we try to put it up. It’s a tough life being an umbrella on our sun deck. If you’re not being battered by the wind you’re being threatened by low bridges. We stop for groceries at the first village we pass through. There is a boucherie and a boulangerie, both of which also carry fresh produce and staples, so we are set up for the rest of the day. I carry a heavy haul of groceries back to the boat by hooking the plastic bags over the handlebars and walking the bike. Back on the main Nivernaise canal, we tie up to the bank and stop for lunch. There’s no choice about this, the locks all close at lunchtime. I check out the route ahead by bicycle. We want to stop at a wine making cooperative up ahead, and it’s not clear from the maps and guides exactly where it is. As it turns out, it’s pretty hard to miss, with its own landing stage by the canal. Then there is a steep hike up a road for a few hundred meters in the hot sun, followed by a welcoming draft of cool air and the smell of yeast as the road enters a hole in the ground. The whole winery, including the parking lot, is underground. There are huge man made caverns in the hill, originally limestone quarries. Some of the famous buildings in Paris were made of limestone quarried from this hole in the ground, and sent down river. It was a quarry from the twelfth century to the 1920s. In the Second World War, the Germans used it for munitions storage. For a while it was a mushroom farm, and now it houses a wine coop, famous for their cremant, or sparkling wine. We follow the road down to the tasting and sales room. The caverns are not well lit, but it is clear that they extend for a long way, and contain a lot of bottles of wine. Sparkling wines are mostly aged in the bottle rather than in barrels, so instead of the rows of barrels piled three high that I am used to seeing in American wineries, there are stacks of bottles stacked like firewood, extending in the gloom as far as the eye can see. I now see why champagne bottles have that tapered shape. They stack really well with one layer facing one way and the next layer facing the other way. There are five million bottle of wine here, about three year’s production. I suspect they are only using a small portion of the underground space. We take the tour, and get to see quite a few of those bottles, as well as various statues that have been carved out of the living rock. Many of them have an earthy sensuality to them. There sparkling wine pouring out of a huge bottle carved in the roof, with a naked girl clutching the stream of liquid. There is a very well endowed Bacchus. There is a carving of a carver, in the act of carving a naked woman out of the rock. There’s even a memorial to those who died on September 11th, 2001, which features a naked man and a naked woman. The air underground is a constant 13 degrees centigrade (55F) so it is quite a shock when we emerge into the daylight and the heat of a Burgundian summer. I turn around and walk straight back into the cave. Duty calls, though, and we head back to the boat, where we go on to the village of Vaux and moor by the towpath for the night. As we have been approaching Vaux, the sky has been darkening, and once we are moored it starts raining. It turns out to be a heavy thunder shower, which lasts all evening. That’s OK, we planned on eating on the boat tonight, anyhow. I cooked up those trout that I bought yesterday. I cut their heads off and hold them up in a bag. “Does anyone want to make fish stock?” But I get no takers. I poach them in white wine with butter, lemon and a little ham, and serve with a salad and potatoes avec too much beurre. The meal is a big hit. We follow with a cheese course, and fruit salad with vanilla sauce. In hot weather the French drink their red wine from the fridge. I’m a little shocked by this, but Bob is a retired wine maker, so I assume he knows what he is doing. After dinner, I load the pictures Roberta has taken so far onto my computer, and we look at them till the battery is flat. She has some amazing time exposures of the Eiffel Tower at night, where she changed the focal length of the lens during the exposure, so the continuous lights are lines radiating from the center, and the sparkly flashing lights are individual dots. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 26th, 2004
8:13 am	Swabbily, swabbily, swabbily, gently down the stream. Tuesday (nine days ago) The rain rain rained like rain this morning. No need the swab the decks today, we have a self-swabbing climate. After an hour or two of this, we tried to switch the controls to the indoor set, but for some reason we could not get the switch over to work. Is it something to do with the fact that the outdoor helm is leaking transmission fluid? We try to call the boat rental place, but we are out of cell phone range. Hugh bravely says that he doesn’t mind steering in the rain. Hugh always likes to have things to complain about. By lunchtime it starts to clear up. Kay and Paula are getting paranoid because supplies are running low, but we have enough for lunch, and dine off baguettes and camembert and ham and croissants and three other types of ham. We stop at the first town that is supposed to have a grocery store, or two, but one is closed for lunch until four and the other one competes by taking a lunch break until five. We admire the fleet of local swans and continue. Ever seen a swan take off? They need nearly as long a runway as a DC-10, except it’s on water and involves a lot of splashing and frantic flapping. Nothing is more graceful than a swan on the water, and a swan in the air has the athletic charm of an Olympic triple jumper, but a swan in transition is about as graceful as a thirteen year old crack addict doing double dutch jump rope. By now it has stopped raining, so we stop to take pictures of a thirteenth century church with the traditional scaffolding, and because there is rumored to be a trout farm in the vicinity. Why do so many of the old churches in France have scaffolding on them? Is it the only way they can keep them up? Can they only afford to restore one wall at a time? Have they raised enough money in the restoration fund to put the scaffolding up, but not to take it down again? I am intrigued buy the idea of the trout farm, so I set out to find it on a bike while the boat goes on ahead. I look round the village and see no sign of fish farming, until I come across one vary faded sign pointed back the way I have just come. It leads to a T-junction, where there are no further hints. At random, I make a left, and in a few hundred meters I find the place. It’s a pretty small scale fish farm. There is a pond full of trout where you can catch your own. The people there seem to be catching lots of fish, far more than the people we have seen fishing in the river and the canal. You can also buy processed fish products, or fresh fish. How fresh? When I order eight trout, the guy behind the counter goes out to a different pond with a net. He asks me if I want them eviscerated, and I say yes, because otherwise they might still be flipping when I get them back to the boat. The French for trout sounds like tweet, and the French for eight sounds like hweet, so eight trout is “hweet tweet” in French. I throw that in, in the interests of international understanding. The French do not find it funny. Back at the boat, man the hunter/gatherer/fisherman meets a mixed reception. I settle for cooking the tweet for dinner tomorrow night while we eat out tonight. Hunting and gathering is a curious experience on the Nivernaise Canal. Many of the lock keepers have stands set up where they sell local produce, mostly wine. Bob picks up a couple of bottles of premiere cru Chablis at ten euros each. It would go well with the tweet, but I think we’ll drink it all before tomorrow night. While I was trout farming in France, the decision was made to do a side trip up a branch of the canal that dead ends at Vermenton, a small town that has more than three shops. There is the traditional church part shrouded in scaffolding, with a roof that seems to consist almost entirely of moss, there is the tower built to keep out the Visigoths, now used as offices for the Bureau of Commerce, there is the tiny main street where every third vehicle seems to be a thundering semi trailer. We have some stale baguettes and Ian, Kay and I have great fun feeding these to the ducks and ducklings who turn up next to the boat. Ian is not pleased about the amount of canard I have eaten recently. Stale baguettes are the bottom of the food chain in France. All the lower life forms eat them, and the crumbs fertilize the plants. There is a gourmet store featuring local food and wine where I pick up a bottle of marc. That’s the stuff they call grappa in Italy, a spirit distilled from the seeds and stems and skins and other crap that gets left over when you are making wine. It tastes really horrible and you should never buy any, so there is more left for me. Bob makes reservations for dinner at L’Auberge de L’Esperance. It’s a tiny place. The dining room has five tables, three for eight people, one for four and one for two. The decor is simple. It’s like eating in a family house. The ladies waiting on us are friendly and whose English seems limited to rare, medium and well done. My appetizer is a terrine de foie gras de something that Ian does not want me to eat. It is addictively good. The main course is lamb liver I think. It’s some lamb product anyhow, but the sauce is so delicious I’m not sure what it is. It’s at about this point that I indulge in my social gaffe of the evening, when I comment that I issue as many commands when I am at the helm as Hugh does when Roberta is at the helm. It’s the first time in my life anyone has asked me to step outside to talk about something. I guess Hugh has not recovered from the ribbing I have been giving him about soaking Kay’s bed, and OH MY GOD HE’S GOT AN AXE. AURGGGHHHHH. Just kidding. In the dimly lit main saloon of the boat with the window open, small flying things are attracted to the bright light of my laptop screen. At first I chased them away with my fingers, but now I have discovered that it is much easier just to breathe marc on them. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
9:17 am	Swabbing the decks Monday (nine days ago) There is a violent thunderstorm in the night, with lots of rain. The rain continues on into the morning, and we all sleep in to about ten. We planned on going shopping this morning, but there are several independent expeditions launched for patisserie and melons and the like, and by the time we have all breakfasted it is eleven thirty when the shoppers depart. It’s clear that we won’t be on our way before the locks close for lunch. Hugh and I excuse ourselves from the shopping extravaganza, and busy ourselves filling the water tank and disconnecting from the shore electric supply. Hugh decides to swab the decks, a process which seems to involve leaving the hose running on the sun deck, and letting the water run everywhere while he makes vague sweeping motions with the broom. Roberta suggests that perhaps the hatches aren’t entirely watertight, but Hugh refuses to consider the possibility. He is half right. Our hatch lets very little water in, but Kay’s bed is soaked. The rain is down to a light drizzle now, the locks are open again and we are almost ready to go. We watch as an organized party leaves, three beat up older boats covered with bicycles and kayaks and full of young people. The first boat has a string ensemble playing, and the second holds the wind section. A guy from the boat rental company turns up in a van with replacement bicycles for the two that have gone south. He has upgraded us to mountain bikes, which will make life much nicer. Hugh is now inventing reasons not to leave. I think he does not relish the thought of getting out of the mooring place, which is in a narrow channel with no room to turn around. The boat does not handle well in reverse. In the end we drag it using the mooring lines past another boat which is double parked to fill the water tank, and I take the helm through the reverse and sixty degree rotation necessary to get us into the lock. It’s not a perfect job. We bump the sides of the lock a couple of times, but no storage jars are broken so I count this as a victory. We cruise on through more locks, low bridges where we have to take the umbrella on the sun deck down, fields of charolais, woods, limestone cliffs and general scenic stuff that really needs the pastoral symphony playing in the background. Ian takes a turn at the wheel. He does pretty well until the Unpleasantness in the Concrete Channel, and even that does not break any storage jars. It has stopped raining, and the weather warms up. Though it is still mostly cloudy, it is quite a pleasant day, and I spend most of it wearing just swimming trunks, sandals, and silly hat. When we get bored or feel cramped on the boat, we can ride a bike along the towpath. We pass one magnificent chateau, part castle and part country house, and one lock that has a garden resplendent with flowers and ornaments (including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and a stand selling local wine and terrines. We stop for the night in Chatel-Censoir, a little village on a hill with a church on top which dates back to the eleventh century. I have to reverse into a mooring place, which is great fun, as in reverse the boat handles like an epileptic hippopotamus. However, we don’t hit anything, and no storage jars are even rattled, so even though we come in at an awkward angle, I count this as a stunning victory. Bob cooks diner, a beef dish with carrots and potatoes. It is good. There is nothing for dessert, so I go down to the kitchen and throw together a vanilla armangac custard with bananas, which hits the spot. We sit round the table by candlelight and listen to the French family moored across from us. Dad is playing guitar, mom is singing, and the kids are joining in the chorus. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 24th, 2004
11:36 am	Do you kiff me Sunday (nine days ago) We arise variously, breakfast on milk and cereal, and before anyone can organize an expedition on to the local open air market Hugh and I get the boat moving. We are on the Nivernais Canal, which winds through woods and farmland giving enchanting views of old yellow stone cottages and farmhouses. Though we are in the Burgundy region this is not prime wine country. There are fields of cows, sunflowers and probably other agricultural products that we city dwellers don’t recognize. The cows are the cream colored variety, Charolais, I think, that one sees so commonly in France. We pass one field by the river where all the cows and calves come to the fence and moo plaintively at us, while the bull remains a little more aloof in the distance. There is one hand cranked lift bridge which provides Hugh’s aerobic work out for the day, and several locks we have to navigate. In England the locks are self service, but here each one has a lock keeper. Each lock has a cottage for the lock keeper to live in. These all seem to date from 1830, so I guess that is when the canal was built. I am expecting the lock keepers to be crusty old men with gaulois dangling from the lower lip, lurching to the lock gates while muttering curses under their breath that their morning nap has been disturbed by these damn foreigners who have the temerity to use their canal, and then asking for a tip afterwards. Instead, they are mostly athletic young people of both sexes, who seem only too pleased to see us, and have the gates open ready when we arrive. About eleven o’clock we start to think of food for the rest of the day. Bob warns us that all the stores will close for the day at noon as this is Sunday. I don’t want to see anyone getting grumpy about lack of provisions, so at one of the locks I take one of the clunker bicycles we rented and head to the nearest village to pick up some bread. I can’t find a bouangerie there, but there is another village two kilometers away, so I head in that direction. It’s uphill, and the bike does not have gears and I’m in a hurry to beat the noon closing. I make it to the village and cruise around looking for the boulangerie. I ask directions from a woman in the street. Between her lack of English and my lack of French she manages to communicate that there is no boulangerie in the town, but there is a little car that visits and sells bread. I go looking for the little car, but end up going down a steep hill and I’m back at the canal. I can’t face heading back up the hill, so I pedal back past the plaintive cows empty handed. I had arranged to follow the towpath and catch up with the boat during the lunch hour when all the locks are closed, and I do in fact catch up with them at the next lock which is still open. I give a thumbs down sign, but as they are half way down in the lock, I go on about a hundred meters to the next bridge where it will be easy for them to pick me up. There, twenty meters from the canal is a building with the paint peeling, but it has an open door, and I can barely make out the words “Boulangerie Auberge” painted above it. I rush in, and buy the last six baguettes in the place. The lady who sells them to me smells strongly of pastis and I think she overcharges me, but it is cheap at the price. I return to the boat, man the hunter gatherer, back from a successful quest for food. We moor, and eat lunch. Bread, cheese and ham, but they just taste so much better in France. What was that line of General de Gaulle’s? “How can anyone govern a country that makes seven thousand types of cheese?” After lunch we drift down river for a few more locks. It’s clear that we need to eat dinner in a restaurant tonight, and Clamecy seems to offer the most possibilities. That the place that the guys did the grocery shopping yesterday, so we feel we know the way around. We sidle into the downtown quai before it fills up for the day, and find a prime mooring spot shore power, and a chance to fill the water tank, if our hose was about three meters longer. OK, about the water tank. It’s a thousand liters, so we have to refill it ever couple of days. The waste water goes straight into the canal. So does the black water when we flush the head. Oh, shit! Literally. Canal water does not move very fast. The boats on British canals have holding tanks. This canal is not very rancid, it’s quite a bit less crowded than a British canal, but I don’t plan on any swimming. We rented four bikes with the boat. Ian spends a fair amount of time on a bike on the towpath, trading pirate noises with Hugh, and putting his feet on the saddle or handlebars. When we get to Clamecy, most of us explore the town on them. Dan is riding one through the medieval part of town when his handlebars start to move independently of the front wheel. His exit from the bike is rapid and almost fatal. He lives, and I call the boat rental company to bitch about the bikes. The medieval part of town seems very authentic, as there are plastic bags full of garbage in the narrow streets, and the buildings are run down and some of them look about to fall down. Paula finds a wine shop there that is open, and I turn up there a little after Bob. He has already ordered two five liter boxes of wine and arranged to have them refrigerated for a few hours and delivered to the boat at seven o’clock. We have a number of options for dinner, none of which seem to want to take a party of eight. Bob makes a reservation at a hotel at the other side of the canal, L’Auberge de la Chapelle. It turns out that the dining room is a medieval chapel with vaulted roof. I think our waiter weighs in kilograms about what I weigh in pounds, and has a moustache that could wrestle small marsupials and win. He waddles to the table, and takes our orders, going round the table for appetizers first, and then main courses. The hostess is as lissome as he is portly. Throughout the course of the evening we try to decipher her shirt. Here is the final analysis. The back says, “Do you kiff me” and the front is a loop that says, “is not for you my sweet heart is not for you my sweet heart is not for you my.” Parse it how you will. There is also a restaurant lapdog, who consents to grace the table with her presence and is much fussed over by everyone. The food is superb, and the service is on the leisurely French schedule. After all, I doubt if our waiter could make it to the kitchen in under five minutes. We have been there over an hour, are on the third bottle of wine, and the main courses have not yet arrived, and we are all content. I have coq au vin, which originated in this region, and which I do a pretty good version of myself. Or so I thought. OK, I have to learn how to cook coq au vin like this. First, take a chicken that hasn’t spent its entire life in a box... When we get back to the boat, Hugh calculates our travels for the day, and works out we are one kilometer ahead of schedule. “If we can get one kilometer ahead of schedule every day we’ll be there before we leave,” he tells us. As I write, he and Ian are playing poker. The stakes are big. Something about bedrooms versus coca cola. Ian is winning, I think Hugh may be sleeping on coca cola tonight. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 23rd, 2004
4:38 pm	It’s better to light a beer bottle Saturday (nine days ago) Travel day. Our last day at the home exchange, so we have to clean, clean, clean, and tidy. Grump, grump, grump, grump, grump. This in not a happy time for the Conway family, especially Paula who does most of the cleaning, and the kids, who do none of it. Eventually we are ready to leave, dragging our luggage to the Gare de Lyon through the metro. Ian feels particularly put upon having to do this after only six hour sleep, but he was the one who spent the pizza money on coca cola. At the station we meet Hugh and Roberta, and load into the train. It’s one of those corridor and compartment things that seem very old fashioned, but this one is modern, comfortable and quiet. There are four seats on each side of the compartment, and an ample luggage rack into which we have great fun trying to stuff all the luggage. Kay and Bob turn up, and wisely choose to sit in a different compartment, and we are off. We change trains, in spite of Kay’s paranoia. We get to the platform the train guy sent us to, the monitor say this train is going to the right place, the signs on the door say this train is going to the right place, and she is worried that it is the wrong train. We drag her on anyhow, feed her, and things get better. This is far less plush than the express we have just been on. It’s a rattling local train with one big compartment and vinyl seats and open windows. Paula gets talking to another family who are also going on a boat trip. They are from Israel. They have a very lovely eighteen year old daughter who is about to serve her time in the Israeli army. That stirs up all sorts of feelings with me. I support a Jewish homeland. I hate the fact that it is happening at the expense of the Palestinians. I suppose the difference between the young Israelis who are oppressing the Palestinians and the young Americans who are oppressing the Iraqis is that the American volunteered. Why can’t we all just get along? We arrive at the end of the line, where we are supposed to be being met by a taxi, but we have half an hour to spare to get groceries. Bob and Hugh and I head of in what looks like the direction of town. It takes us a few minutes to walk there, stock up on wine, cheese, bread, pastis, ham, armangac, baguettes, and beer. Then we have to trek back up the hill carrying all this stuff. As Hugh warned us, whatever we buy we will get it wrong. As it turns out we get it wrong by being late when the taxi is early, and taxi driver has been driving around with everyone else in the van, looking for us. We apologize profusely to her, and she takes us to the boat rental place. So, it’s a little marina on a canal, where we find our boat and unload our suitcases and groceries. Then we go to reception where the charming receptionist explains a bunch of stuff to the family ahead of us, and then explains the same stuff to us. We are not allowed on the boat as it is still being cleaned, so we steal some of the chairs from the deck, and settle down in the shade. I open a bottle of wine, and we start chomping on the baguettes. Time passes. Cleaning activities on the boat have finished, as has the bottle of wine, so Hugh goes in search of someone to let us on the boat. He finds someone who is willing spare the time,and we get the brief introductory tour and cruise, the rest of the groceries that we pre-ordered and four bicycles. Are we really ready to leave? I decide to test the theory. I cast off, and steer the boat out into mid canal. There are howls of protest from the contingent that were planning on dinner in the restaurant that is right next to the marina. Fine. I just wanted to get away from the marina, anyhow, and the people who were moored next to us and smoking. We moor on the bank, about 200 meters from the marina, and so we can walk back to the restaurant. Joggers and hikers and bicyclists cruise the towpath. Oh, look, here’s a car. It’s Isabelle, the receptionist from the boat rental place. We have forgotten a baguette. She triumphantly presents it to us, and then reverses all the way up the towpath back to the marina. When we get to the restaurant, we are first ignored, and then told that it is impossible. The restaurant is too full. Actually, half the tables are empty, and this is just the typical French way of providing service. If we came up with a sufficiently convincing story about why we had to be fed, I’m sure we would be served eventually. I would rather eat on the boat anyhow, so I lead the parade back there. I cook up eggs and ham (sorry, no green food coloring, I can’t do Dr. Seuss) and there are more baguettes and melon and bananas and wine. We eat like kings (who are eating ham and eggs). We sit around the table talking until it gets dark, and keep on talking and drinking pastis. We need light. I fill a beer bottle with cooking oil, stick a paper napkin in the neck and light it. For safety the whole thing is in a saucepan half full of water. Kay has a candle, which rather spoils the effect of my brilliance in improvising a lamp. The night sky is wonderful, with no moon and no streetlights. The Milky Way is easy to see, and Hugh had fun spotting satellites and shooting stars, while Kay explains how much fun it is to be one of the twelve registered Republicans in East Palo Alto, even though these days she votes Democrat. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 14th, 2004
12:17 am	Shiny Friday Shiny I am out of bed first, and while I am eating first breakfast, Luna the cat demands to be fed by jumping on the table in front of me, eating stale baguette crumbs, then shaking her head in disgust. It’s a heart rending performance of a noble animal reduced to eating scraps through neglect, and would quite have taken me in if I didn’t know she had gorged herself on chicken leftovers last night. Ian complains of an ear infection, so Paula and I head off to a clinic with him. We are first ignored, then told it’s impossible to see anyone, then finally given an appointment with a doctor later today. Across the road we stop in at the pharmacy. Pharmacists in France are far more empowered then the American equivalent. They will advise on minor ailments, and even tell you which of the mushrooms you have picked in the woods are safe to eat. This one squints in Ian’s ear and gives us an ointment and a pill to take for his cat allergies. Ian is soon much improved, so we don’t need the doctor’s appointment. On the way back, we stop off in a patisserie for second breakfast, and then go into the metro via the Gare Saint-Lazare. It still looks like the impressionist paintings, if we ignore the posters for sexy underwear which inform us that seduction is not a game. Game or not, by the time the underwear is in view, the result is a foregone conclusion I would have thought. I goof around on the computer, Dan continues to sleep, and Paula goes shopping. Hugh and Roberta are spending the night in the studio, as Kay and Bob have arrived from their trip to Norway, and are using Florenz’s apartment tonight. Anyhow, Hugh and Roberta arrive with luggage, and Paula arrives with spot cleaner for the brown stain in the carpet. Hugh and I go on a beer run, and then we call up Bob and make plans for dinner. Hugh wants to buy a blank book as a log for the boating trip we are going on next week, so he asks for a big bookstore. I suggest Les Halles, so I round up Paula and we leave pizza money for the kids, and head off in that general direction with them. Hugh and I are both wearing shorts. Paula suggests that Kay might like it if I dressed up a bit. I point out that Kay has been putting up with my dress sense for twenty years now. “Yes,” says Dan, “but tonight might be the night that she cracks.” Damn, he’s been reading my weblog. It seems like every time I visit Les Halles it gets bigger, and I like it less. We don’t have any luck finding blank books in the huge bookstore, so we try part two of the quest, which is a thank you card for Florenz. After much trekking through the subterranean maze we end up in a store called Soho, which sells cards and souvenirs, and caned aphrodisiac drinks with names like “Sexbomb”, “Aniversex”, “Metalsex”, “Love” and “Orgasmax”. The French seem to use English words for their performance enhancing products. Is that because English is such a romantic language, or because the English have a reputation for being more virile than the French? Off to Florenz’s apartment, in a modern building across the river from the Eiffel Tower. There are two tiny two person elevators, one of which gets stuck a lot, and due to the shape of the land we enter the building on the 4th floor and have to ride down to the apartment on the first. We have heard tales of how tiny the place is. It’s actually not that small, but it is full of stuff. While there is in fact room to swing a cat in the living room, doing so would knock over at least five side tables and a dozen lamps. Anyhow, we meet and greet Kay and Bob, and walk to a restaurant that Hugh and Roberta dined at last week, Le Scheffer. As soon as Kay and Bob walk in the place, they recognize it. Florenz took them there four years ago and they’ve been trying to find it again ever since. The interior is full of posters featuring everything from Josephine Baker to the Uganda Railway, along with certificates showing that the restaurateur has been inducted into various French orders of chevaliers. These are actually prestigious drinking clubs devoted to one or another wine making region. On the bar counter are two huge wine bottles draped with the medallions and tastevins that form part of his regalia. For dinner I have the rabbit terrine, which is ordinary, and the Confit de Canard, which is superb. It comes with a sauteed mix of potatoes and various mushrooms, all checked, I hope, by the local pharmacist. For dessert, I have cherries in alcohol. This is a brandy glass half full of cherries which have been soaking in booze for a few months. The result is that the booze gets the cherry flavor, and the cherries get the flavor from their pits. The cherries are delicious, and the booze you drink afterwards is even better. There is a birthday party going on at another table in the restaurant. Who would have thought that the French version of the happy birthday song is “Appy Birthday to You”. Same tune, and sung in English. After dinner we walk over to the Trocadero which has the best view of the Eiffel tower. It is all lit up at night, and looks quite stunning. However, the best is yet to happen. On the hour, they turn on the sparkles. These are strobe lights, mounted all over the building, which go off randomly, with lots of them at any given time. The whole thousand foot tower is glittering like the crown jewels in a disco. Tomorrow we leave for a boat trip. I won’t have Internet access for a week or, but if there is a power supply I should be updating this diary, so you will get all the news when I return to the land of the connected. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 13th, 2004
1:39 am	The BD section Thursday It rained heavily in the night, and Ant and Carol did not close the skylight in the studio, with the result that we now have a huge wet patch on the rug with extra added ugly brown stain to contend with. This morning we have the great airport run. Ant and Carol are going back to England, and Patrick is off back to San Francisco. I’m out of bed at the crack of eight, as I’m the designated navigator. There’s a few minutes of panic as we are leaving and Paula can’t find the car keys, but the eventually turn up, having dived suicidaly from the desk they were on and crawled behind a speaker to die. We make it to CDG with no problems, and drop Ant and Carol off at terminal 3. We’re hoping to unload Patrick at the same spot, apparently his flight does not leave from there. Every other airport I have ever driven to has signs up telling you which airlines leave from which terminal, but apparently this concept has not reached France yet. Maybe we could trade it for the bidet? We head off on a tour of scenic CDG. Terminal 1 has no available temporary parking for drop offs, and terminal 2 is divided into 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, 2E, 2F and 2G. I think we visit them all before we finally find the British Airways sign in letters about one centimeter high waiting in ambush behind an airport bus. Back in Paris, I answer my email and wait for the kids to wake up while Paula watches a video. I make a return visit to Jonglerie Diffusion, and leave them some samples of the IJA’s DVDs, in the hope that they will order some wholesale. They seem quite interested. We’ve already had an order from Oddballs in the UK, so next I have to find someone in German to carry them. Ian comes with me, and buys a pair of fire retardant gloves, so that he can juggle flaming tennis balls. Paula wants to go out and do something, but we can’t all agree on what we want to do. Ian doesn’t want a lot of walking, I don’t want to swim and Dan doesn’t want to do anything that involves being awake. Eventually, I send Paula out shopping with the promise that I will take the kids out later. I eventually drag them out to a cafe, with the option of a trip to the mall at Les Halles later. As we leave the apartment it starts to rain, but we make it to a local cafe before we get too wet. Dan has hot chocolate and Ian has a coffee. There’s a TV, and the US women’s soccer team are beating the Greeks. We watch this while the rain gets heavier and heavier outside, so we stay for the end of the game. By then the rain has let up, so we hop on the Metro and make for Les Halles. The kids take me to a part of the mall I haven’t been in before. There’s an indoor swimming pool, a conservatory, and a billiard room. There’s also a huge bookstore, so I find my way to the comics section. I can just about read a comic book in French if I have a dictionary handy. The aisles of the comic book section are full of kids and young adults sitting on the floor reading the books. They’re all hardbacks, so there’s no harm being done, and some day those kids will actually be able to afford to buy the books. Incidentally, the French for comic strip is bande dessinee, or BD. I get excited when I see the bookshop has a big BD section, but it turns out not to be Bondage and Discipline after all. I send the kids home on the Metro, and walk myself, as I want to pick up some food for dinner. We had been planning a picnic with Hugh and Roberta. Hugh has found another free concert, a Palestinian Oud player who threatens to rival the Legendary Tigerman bringing a new meaning to the word “entertainment”. However, in view of the uncertain nature of the weather today, not to mention the fact that the lawns will all be waterlogged, we decide to stay home and eat our picnic on the dining room table. There’s an assortment of cheeses, the ubiquitous baguettes, a rotisserie free range chicken, and a calvados tart for dessert. Oh, yes, and I picked up a bottle of wine from Chignon, as we had visited the town last week. (4 Comments |Comment on this)