Talbert Pipes Life in France Adventures Four Years On November, 2006 Four Years On I'd totally forgotten about this.  I guess it's good that I remembered to write 'Four Years On' before we hit our fifth anniversary here!  It rolled by unnoticed last May because we were so distracted by the arrival of our second set of parents in one year.  Hell, I'm not even sure what happened during this past year!  It seems like it was all a blur of round-the-clock work and either preparing for, or recovering from, having various parents visit.  2005 was the year I came up with the strange idea of the Pfeifenigma, as well as being the first time we'd seen our parents since 2002.  We still couldn't afford to visit the states - Everyone always asks me this, as if I actually have cash lying around in four thousand euro chunks for casual trans-Atlantic travel.  Aside from which, I don't even want to visit the US other than to see family and do some shopping, and the way air travel is these days it's just more hassle than I feel like dealing with.  I'm not too keen on paying seven hundred euros in air fare so I can be rectally searched on entering the country and banned from carrying in magic markers because someone could possibly hijack a plane with them.  The extent to which the US has gone terrorist-crazy in privacy invasion, intrusive monitoring, unwarranted searches, and all other forms of power abuse makes me very happy to be where I am, because the USA today is not the USA that I left in 2002.  I'm afraid it would feel a lot like Frodo and Sam coming back to the Shire to find that Sharkie and his boys have transformed the place beyond recognition. Changes...  Hmmm.  I turned 40.  No red mid-life crisis sports cars have appeared yet. People have begun telling me I look young for my age, however, which is surely one of the telling signs of the slide into creaky oblivion - Any day now I'm sure I'll find myself yelling at some kids to, "Get off my lawn!" One big change has been the arrival of our website blogs in 2005, which to a large extent have superceded the rest of the website as my communication venue - They're faster and easier to update, and provide a more ongoing dialogue instead of the static, library-like presentation of our regular website.  Since we have this ongoing series of chapter-like descriptions of the year's events, I thought I'd simply link back to some of them with comments.   First Post The blog kicked off with a post about the Z-grade horror flick "Pinata:  Survival Island" - a horror flick about teens stalked by a deadly possessed pinata.  I have no clue what I'm going to do with the blog at this point. I don't eat tongue I began to realize the humor potential of blogging some of our daily experiences... The New Us I looked back over the previous few years and jotted down some observations, such as the fact that my wife and I have changed together to adapt to our new environment, so we're not aware of whether (or how much) we've changed to others. October Blues A year ago last month I was sitting down to write about our struggles with SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, here in the land where we get about four hours of sunlight a day from October through February.  We still have our "sun" light and we still use it - remarkable what a difference it makes in our winter energy levels and attitudes. Memories of Summer The preparation for my parents' Christmas visit was already starting up when I wrote this in late October.   Ramblings on Halloween and Linux I really do try, on and off, to keep my blog entries thematic and concise, but regardless of this they still tend to spin off in several directions at once - This one covers French Halloweens, beer, computer operating systems, and my status as a geek.  Tellingly, it also mentions the arrival of my easel and the creation of my new mini art studio, a project which was birthed by my Pfeifenigma ideas. Help, I'm turning British Blimey.  Wot wot?  Thoughts on the fact that all our television is now British accented. The 2005 Riots The suburbs of Paris exploded in 2005 with violence that bordered on open insurrection level, though this still wasn't enough to keep people from making a few funny jokes about it.  A year later, things aren't much better - today, I read that the ghetto youth have started to actively lure in police cars for massive ambushes designed to actually kill the policemen inside.  Civil services have abandoned these suburbs, and the only vestiges of state power that remain are fortress-like police stations.  Ahh, the romance of Parisien living... The first parental visit My parents came over for Christmas in 2005.  Like most stressful situations, their visit produced some great stories for the blog, from their disastrous arrival experience aboard an exploding TGV to the encounter with the camera-eating toilet to our near nervous breakdown state of stress while they were here.  I even got some away time out of it, since my mom was willing to write six full blog entries' worth of impressions about their visit:  1 2 3 4 5 6 Sloths During this past year I've gotten a lot more social, both locally and online with some gaming communities that I've joined, which makes it seem a little odd to look back at just how disconnected I was getting back in January after three full years of barely associating with anyone. In February, we began watching the BBC coverage of the Winter Olympics, which inspired me to be lofty, silly, and sillier.  Truly, Olympic skiing is just like greyhound racing, without the hair.... Later, it occurs to me to wonder just how well we represent America to the Frenchies. Letting go of the Homesick Blues This post seemed to worry friends and family, but looking back on it, I mark it as the point where I really began to drop the whole idea of "going home" in favor of "going forward".  Between the wide scattering of everyone I used to know and the terrorism-driven transformation of the country, I'm quite conscious that I doubt I would recognize anything on a trip home. In Spring, I began posting about the forthcoming visit of Emily's parents: Despite looking a little somber in the above pic, they were a lot of fun and it was an excellent visit that ran smoothly, producing some very pretty photo travelogues but lacking the life and death adventures from the Christmas visit.   Anyone following the blog for the last year has gotten to see a lot of cool dolmens and menhirs, more commonly known as standing stones. Back in June I started a series of blog entries on the subject of, "Who's better?" where I'd intended to keep score on a wide variety of fragments of daily life, just to compare and contrast the US and French approaches to, well, everything.  Alas, I quickly got distracted by surprise events  and didn't develop the idea like I'd wanted to.  The subject of the One-Way culture door between French and US/UK popular culture came up again at the recent Utopiales science fiction convention, where I chatted with a professional and quite successful French writer who'd never been published in English translation... this despite the fact that nearly everything written in English seems to turn up here in translated form, even the absolute dreck.   In September I posted some more very nice photos, thanks to discovering the retouching abilities of Picasa, and told some funny stories about the wonders of French traveling carnivals,  hand-to-hand combat in the grocery stores here, giant Breton spiders, the wacky other folks who do stuff like this, and my favorite article of the year, "Beware the Murky Frogpits", which was dedicated to the ambiance of French rural small town cafés. And that pretty much covers our fourth year in France!