Fun With Poultry

On Saturday we went to the weekly market in Uzes. We bought herbs to plant in the yard, and sausage with thyme and walnuts, but the thing that broke the bank was the chicken. Not just any chicken - a fancy chicken. A Poulet Noir, the French King of the Barnyard. We paid €18 for 5 pounds of poultry!

We brought our precious dinner home, and while Ella and friends dyed and painted Easter eggs in the living room, and Owen disappeared into the tree-house with a book, Bob and I got to work on dinner. Ah - such fun! First we had to cut off head and

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Carnaval Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie Style

I read that there are 32 Saint Quentin municipalities in France and they had to come up with some name changes to differentiate them all for the postal service. Our Saint Quentin is one of the oldest pottery making regions so, in 1886 the 'la Poterie' was added.

Today was a big celebration in town. The kids and I walked to where we saw everyone else walking and  watched. We weren't sure what was happening or why but it looked like a lot of fun. Nearly

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Scotland to France on the Eurostar -- Part Deux

The next day I left the kids in our hotel and took a shuttle to the Renault Auto Lease office at Charles De Gaulle Airport. It's an incredibly efficient system. We leased a car for about ten weeks -- much cheaper than renting. Once I was in the office, the whole process took about four minutes. I walked back outside, my car pulled up and I got in. I reached forward to enter the hotel address into the GPS system... Wait there's no GPS. And no map. I really thought there was going to be Sat Nav in the car. I can read a map fine, I learned in Mr. Bunte's fifth grade geography class, but I don't have a map and now I need reading glasses and the signs are in French and I took Spanish in high school and I can't even speak that and Brenna's not here, so who am I going to yell at when I take a wrong turn?!?

Unfortunately I wasn't paying attention to the roads when I was on the shuttle from

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Farewell to Scotland

We rolled into Scotland fresh off the boat (really -- we drove off of a ferry and onto the left hand side of the road) back in October. The autumn light was amazing. It made our snapshots look like photographs.

We decided that the hearty Highland Cows are maybe the coolest looking cows on the planet and that we like the sheep with the white fleece and black faces best. We yelled, "SHEEP!" and, "HORSES WITH COATS!" whenever we drove by, well, sheep or horses in their winter blankets. Later we just said it, not yelling. We started counting pheasant roadkill, but decided it wasn't really very challenging. We learned to carve turnips, and the differences between red squirrels and grey ones (aside from the obvious color!). We learned to ride the buses, and the rails. We drank hot tea at lunch. We made new friends and visited with old ones. We saw more of Scotland than many Scots will see in their entire lives. We made homemade tablet and mince pies, and sampled other local delicacies -- some I can recommend, others... not so much. We found words like 'bit' and 'wee' and 'brilliant' entering our vocabulary. We figured out how to

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Less Is Sometimes More, and Hard Is Often Good

We're packing up for our next big move, and our goal is to cut our belongings in half (again) before we leave. At this rate, when we get back home we'll each have a swimsuit and a t-shirt to our name. And a steamer trunk full of electronic gear.

Today our job is to pick up every single individual item we own, decide what pile to put it in, and either give it away, send it back to LA in a suitcase, or keep it. We're about half done. I'm exhausted, the house is a wreck, and I leave for LA tomorrow morning, while Bob carries on by himself. 

We're giving LOADS away to charity shops: extra electronic stuff, UK electrical adaptors, winter clothes bought from other charity shops six months ago, markers and notepads and little plastic toys from cereal boxes, maps to places we've already been, book we've already read...

We all have our own way of dealing with the paring down. Eleanor has been

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