From the local free wireless

D and M arrived this morning! And now they are napping. We took a visit to the post office (not very touristy, I know, but it closes at noon on Saturday and I really needed to mail some things), and then to a cafe at Place des Vosges, and the sun even came out.



D's steak was a very cheap cut for a lot of money; even for a tourist area it was a lot of money for what it was. But, we had to let go of that. Anyway, the sun came out and it was warm and lovely, and that was marvelous. The sunshine made us want to get out of the Marais, though, on account of the sun doesn't always get down that far between the buildings when they're that close together.

We wandered around a bit; M expressed a desire to lie down for a bit by a fountain, so I went to BHV and bought curtain hooks (did I tell you I got a curtain a few days ago?) and two more stripey bowls (so we can all eat at the same time, and also Elijah if he comes). When I came back I got this cute picture of D and M napping.



Then across the islands, detouring around the Place de Notre Dame which was wall-to-wall tourists; a brief stop for chocolate-covered marzipan for M (I had a bite too...mmm) and a Coke for D, and back home.

I'm glad I got a little floor cushion when I got the curtain, because they're taking up the bed at the moment!

It's so great to see them here; I'm pleased as punch, and it's definitely helping me to see my neighborhood with new eyes, not that my own eyes are that old after all, but. And my brother, for all he complained about studying French at the time, actually remembers a good deal of it. M needless to say is very good at French.

I'm writing this on my new computer, which as you know is a Mac. (Thanks everyone who made this possible...) I'm typing offline in my apartment, waiting for the battery to charge so I can take it to the wireless cafe and start loading it up with the things I need (third LaTeX install since I got to France...must be some sort of record!). I'm prepared to really like Macs once I get used to them. Right now...well, I've been having a lot to get used to, and so opening the machine and having to deal with learning a whole new way of doing things, again, after having done it with Linux as well on the other machine...that part is really not very happy-making. Plus the trackpad seems awfully hard on my hand somehow. But on the bright side, it's lighter than I remembered, lighter anyway than the other computer I've been lugging around. And hey, an American keyboard, very much appreciated. My external hard drive is plug and play, and if you're reading this, so is the wireless networking. So, I've nothing to complain about.

Speaking of complaining, I did not finish the paper yesterday, as nobody who knows me will be surprised to hear. It is actually going pretty well, but I got stuck on something. I used the train ride home as a time to figure things out, which went beautifully, so that when I got home I spent a while typing out the things I was thinking so that I wouldn't forget them. Interestingly, my main conclusion is going to have to change, but the moral of the story is still the same. Anyhow, I think the train ride will be very nice for that sort of figuring-things-out work.

Last night I went to dinner chez B's house, also in the 4th (though much more in the middle of things than my place). There were a couple of other linguists there, her partner Jn and this syntactician LN, who is at Paris 8 and who I knew slightly before, and a student, and the student's (non-linguist) husband. They were all really fun in any case, it was a good meal, and it was very nice to get to know B and LN a bit better.

I got through the whole evening mostly in French, and it made me feel good that I had little trouble understanding, at least at first when I was fresh and they were speaking slowly. Later when they started with more gossipy things, it was funny that my understanding of the gossip was kind of vague, not really sure in some cases just who they were talking about, so I couldn't possibly repeat any of it. :) Well, okay; some of it involved acquisitionist KW, and his wife, wanting a king-sized bed for their stay in Paris, definitely not an accepted size for mattresses here, so you can imagine the only kind of place that would have a king-sized bed (though KW and his wife didn't seem to mind)!

The Mac is getting easier on my hands as I get used to typing on it; also I fiddled with some of the keyboard and trackpad settings. So I think it should be all right.