Busy, busy

From Ile-de-France Walks - 2009

The weather has been fantastic. I can't believe it's only April and Paris. Hardly any rain. It's been warm and sunny! That's been great to get out on those Wednesday walks. If anyone is more interested in them, Ed has set up a blog to replace the e-mails he used to send out: http://idfwalks.blogspot.com/ and then there are my pictures: http://picasaweb.google.fr/elebelle/IleDeFranceWalks2009?feat=directlink
Yesterday, I went crazy and bought lots and lots of fabric. I think I'm in a sewing mood. Sewing is no longer really economical and there are fewer and fewer shops with nice fabrics. Even the Marché St. Pierre (for me that's the big Halle aux Tissus St. Pierre and all the other shops in the neighborhood) seems mostly upholstry and curtain fabric. There's not much nice selection for clothes any more. The rue de Steinkerque only has 2 or 3 fabric stores left. It used to be only fabric! I got a remnant at one of them -- they're closing and switching into a souvenir shop, like everyone else on the street. Anyway, I found enough at another remnant store to get myself busy.
Last week, we had the new lawn laid in. It looks great! We took advantage of the work to have an automatic sprinkler put in. The whole job just took four days -- unbelievable! So, I've been working a little on my tan. The idea is not to have aspirin-white legs in August.
Claire was a bit worried about the slow rate of reply to the wedding invitation, so I created a survey on line using surveymonkey.com. It's gone really well, I think. We didn't have e-mail addresses for everyone, but for all the requests sent out, there's been a 65% rate of return in a week. Some are from people who had already replied by post and some from people who had spoken to one of us but had not formally replied and some from who were spurred into action.
I had lunch yesterday with a fellow tech writer. In fact, she's the person now at KDS. I'm glad I left. I think the working atmosphere has not gotten any better. They haven't filled the second tech writer position and never will, but she thinks she needs back-up and asked me if I might be interested in freelancing occasionally for them, if she can get the idea approved. It's something I would have done easily shortly after leaving, but now I wonder. We're going on vacation, then there's the final build-up to the wedding and to the baby.... And it might not be a great help to her, either, if I were to show up.