(Friday night)

Some offline blogging, 7pm on Friday night, since I now have a
computer at home (though no internet).

There are some seriously dark clouds outside my window. It's twilight
so it's dark anyway, but they are quite menacing, almost like smoke.
They seem to be at about my height, here on the sixth floor. And
moving quickly to the east.

I haven't talked yet about the "vis a vis" issue. Across rue Crillon from my
building is another building, and there are similar apartments under
the eaves in that building, that face my window. Many people have
curtains, but not everyone. Nothing really terribly juicy going on,
however. Some people have TVs, some people have plants, some people
have cats. One has a piano. Some people lean out the window to smoke.
I entertain thoughts of holding up a sign saying hello but as I don't have
curtains myself I think I'll try to preserve a little social distance.

Maybe I should give my neighbors fake names and histoires to amuse
myself...heh heh...

About curtains. I tried to buy curtains the other day, but I was
overwhelmed and left without them. This was the otherwise very
successful trip that got me the drying rack and the clothes rod, so
no apologies. But it was oddly overwhelming. Curtains are expensive,
and none of the pre-cut ones in the department store were anything
like the measurements of my windows. There are two windows, and they
open like French doors (um, on account of their being French), and so
I shouldn't like to get a single curtain for the two of them.

One of my across the street neighbors has these little lacy things
hanging on their windows, which are a good privacy screen during the
day at least, and let the light in. I don't know where you get such
things, though.

That seems to be the major thing about being an expatriate: EVERYTHING
takes FOREVER. I have to learn where and how to do everything. And I
thought my errands took a while in LA!

I guess the point is, though, that you start to reconsider which
errands are really necessary. Same thing with living up six flights of
stairs: It's one way to convince yourself you don't need to own
something, if you don't want it enough to lug it up six flights.

Tonight it's back to the 5th to hang out with J and UCLA linguist
friend Nn, in town for a few months before he goes back to LA to
really settle down to write his dissertation.

I have looked up the cafes that have free wireless in the area; there
are some at Bastille, 5 minutes away, so I'll get some internet
tomorrow (as long as it's not raining). Hmm, maybe if I feed J he will
help me install LaTeX and Thunderbird...(why is LaTeX hard to install
on this? Dunno...). Again, I'd really just like to have things work,
because there's a bunch of writing I want to get to, none of it very
annoying, so that it's very annoying not to be able to get to it.

I must say, despite the slow start to the actual work, I seem to be
doing quite well on the hanging out with people bit. Next step: to go
to Amuse-Gueule by myself and try to make friends with the people
there, in French, so I can have friends in the 4th!

I've got French radio on at the moment; I like to think it helps just
to listen to it even if I'm not understanding it much. Actually, I prefer to
listen to the BBC but I felt I should try to improve my French somewhat.