Update on the bugs, a perfect Sunday

Just wanted to update you on the bug situation. JD gave me this thing that you plug into the outlet, and it has a cartridge in it and it releases something that keeps bugs away. So, no more bugs. Thanks, JD!

And among the other things I've been meaning to write about... last Sunday JD and I had a great day. This past Sunday, i.e., yesterday, wasn't too bad, but really, the Sunday before was fantastic. To start with, I did 5 minutes of yoga and meditated for half an hour (I think that helped a lot with making it a great day!).

Walking east, we discovered brunch at a place called Les Associés, in the 12th on the other side of Bastille. Wow. For 12€ you get: a large coffee or hot chocolate (or tea), fruit juice (apricot, my new favorite, is a possibility), a croissant or tartine (baguette with butter and jam, tartiner is 'to spread), a green salad, and three eggs, either fried with beautiful bacon, or lovingly, gently scrambled with ham or cheese. Last week it was the first day it was warm enough to sit outside in a tank top, and it was just the best brunch ever. This Sunday (yesterday) we tried it again, but it was warmer out, so we had to sit in the shade, and the chef was apparently different. For though the brunch was still very very good, it was not the eggy magic that it was last week. But I suspect we'll keep trying. :)

Back to last week... we went to the Picasso Museum. We had gone there, remember, the night that the museums were all open for free, several weeks before. At that time, there was a temporary exhibit there on Dora Maar, one of Picasso's seven women. I knew I had a good tour guide in JD when he could name all seven of the women. It's not just a parlor trick, though; he knows a lot about Picasso, and a lot about that particular museum. It turned out then that the whole museum was taken up by this Dora Maar exhibit (with her photos of him, and his paintings and drawings of her), and although most of the exhibit was still made up of Picassos, JD found himself saying in frustration, "Where'd they put the f***ing Picassos?" as he turned each corner, because nothing he recognized was there, or if it was there, it was in the wrong place, and lots of familiar old friends were missing.

So we went back last Sunday. Some, though not all, of the regular collection was back up. It was a treat again to hear JD tell me all about the paintings: history, style, how they were connected to other painters or other Picasso paintings. On this visit we could go through what was there chronologically, so I learned about the blue period and the rose period (recognizing a painting that was in the style of the one in Buffalo's Albright-Knox), and Cubism, and the Ingres-esque style that he did to please Olga, and all the other styles after that. Really quite remarkable how much he did, and how differently, and how even towards the end of his life he was looking around, playing, painting.

I especially liked the animal sculptures: the goat, the baboon with two toy cars for a snout, the bird. I also liked how we took a break in the middle (after only a few rooms, because there was so much to talk about with the paintings!) when I got tired of standing, and we sat in the sunny courtyard and had a drink.

Later we worked at the Café Martini, on Rue du Pas de la Mule (that's the street of the step of the mule, though I like to think of it as the street of the not of the mule): I got my index cards ready for the week, and then we worked on translating a short story JD wrote into English. That was quite a lot of fun, though quite a lot of work, too. The story is poignant but funny, and his English is good enough that we were really discussing very subtle shades of meaning.

Dinner and a movie then: Marie Antoinette. I do recommend the historical book it's based on, the Antonia Fraser book (she's my favorite historian), but the movie, well, the design was lavish and wondrous and educational, but the acting, ahem, sucked.

I saw JD off on the RER and then, as I walked home from the Gare de Lyon, I saw the Eiffel Tower, from very far away, sparkling with strobe lights the way it does the first ten minutes of every hour. A perfect Sunday, all told!