A quiet day at home

I haven't gone into Paris this week as much as I usually do. I have to go in tomorrow for lunch with some fellow board members of AARO and I went in on Tuesday, to the library, but that's it. When you stay home, you get sales calls. Paul accepted one and yesterday a couple of guys came over to tell us our roof beams were being eaten away by bugs and we needed to reinstall insulation, all for the "low" price..... You get the picture. So, this morning, Paul took a good look at the contract and had some reservations. He also took a good look in the attic and decided that the beams were fine (he checked by trying to poke a screwdriver in) and they did their calculation as if there were no insulation already there, so the savings between what we do have and what they want to replace it with will not be so great. That said, we are not entirely against investing in better insulation, just not at that price.
When Emma was still here, we went to see "Maison La Roche", a house designed by le Corbusier. It's not the first house of his I've seen. There's the Villa Savoye in Poissy that I visited a couple of years ago. Anyway, this Maison La Roche is very small. It was built with the Maison Jeanneret (Le Corbusier's brother's house) in a small impasse in the 16th arrondissement. La Roche was a bachelor art collector, so most of the space is his gallery. There is great use light. There's a roof garden that we could not see because it was raining. It's very inexpensive to visit, only €3. When you look out the back windows you could almost be in Philly, on Panama St. looking out at the courtyards and backs of the houses on Pine Street. We spent more time investigating the streets around the impasse trying to find the ones whose backs looked so nice to us.