mofembot in france

Provence is France's "U.S. Deep South" in winter weather

Posted by mofembot Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:39:00 GMT

[From an email to Oldest and from comments made mostly in the DailyKos regular feature, “Cheers & Jeers”]

We’ve been having all sorts of Weather Adventures here. Marseille’s gotten a foot of snow and all the autoroutes leading out of Aix and so on are closed “until further notice”… because I think there are all of like two whole snowplows in the entire Bouches du Rhone department. [Update: there are three.]

I was lucky to make it to Larry’s yesterday afternoon. Nearly didn’t make it over the hill from Gréoux to Manosque (I foolishly thought the A51 would be clear. Ha! Ha! They made us exit at Cadarache.) The 1.25-hour trip took 3.5 hours and I was lucky not to join the thousands of stranded motorists, many of whose vehicles are still on the road impeding cleanup efforts.

Middle Daughter ended up staying in a hotel in Frankfurt last night at Lufthansa’s expense. She called about 45 minutes ago after arriving in Lyon (on an alternate flight, since the Frankfurt-Marseille flights were all cancelled today as well)… her connector to Marseille was cancelled (no flights are being allowed to land as the airport roads are completely blocked and no one can get through to pick up anyone!! update as I write this, your dad skyped and says it’s now accessible)… so they put her on a train to Marseille. At least the trains are mostly running again (they weren’t yesterday). She should be able to take a train up from Marseille and get here sometime around (I’m guessing) 19h30. Hopefully. At least the central station here in Aix is close to Larry’s.

The slush is god-awful and my boots are… alas, not entirely waterproof either, dammit.

Meanwhile, Youngest’s boarding house is snowed in, so she and her fellow boarders didn’t go to school yesterday or today. The phone lines there are down, no internet… finally got to talk to her on someone’s cell phone. Per her, the boarding house people are dubious that the kids will make it to school tomorrow and they’re thinking the kids will have to stay there on the weekend. Youngest would like me to pick her up because she’s out of clean clothes and so on. If the roads are back open, I’ll certainly give it a go if it seems plausible. Thank god for brand-new snow tires (and I’ve got the chains in the trunk).

We are now safely back home. The trip was without incident (thankfully). Middle Daughter’s bag is still missing and the baggage agency isn’t answering its phones, so who knows if she’ll get it before she leaves for Boston on Monday. (If not, she says she can live without it, and I will try to have the airline deliver it to her there.)

Marseille is still a big mess. Accidents all over the place. Slush, ice… you name it. Very little snow removal equipment in the department of Les Bouches du Rhône. Schools are cancelled, workers are still stranded in their offices. Motorists are in shelters set up in towns adjacent to the autoroutes, etc. The last time they’d had something like this was in 1987. Good grief.

[Later} I am now entirely stranded in Aix-en-Provence: all autoroutes and highways leading out of the city are “interdit” (forbidden) to motorists. Can’t get to the Marseille airport, but then again, neither can my middle daughter (which is why I ventured out in the snowstorm yesterday from my remote tiny village in Upper Provence). As I write this, I believe this daughter is in the air someplace between Frankfurt (where she spent the night in a hotel at Lufthansa’s expense) and Lyon… but her connecting AirFrance flight from Lyon to Marseille has been cancelled. Ideally, she could take a train from Lyon to Aix Centre (the main train station, just a few blocks from here), but of course train traffic is all bolluxed up as well.

I would like to see my middle daughter, since she’s going back to Boston on Monday. (And she’s left Important Stuff at our home in the tiny village that she really has to take back with her. I’m sure I’ll see her… tomorrow. I guess.)

Youngest daughter sms’d me and asked me to call the boarding house where she’s at. (This place is 30 minutes from the main school campus.) Of course, the boarding house phone is not working, nor is the internet. I have now talked to Youngest via a fellow student’s cell phone. They are snowed in today as yesterday, of course, and looks like there’s no chance of getting to school tomorrow, either. There simply isn’t any snow removal equipment in this part of France!! (And very few trained operators of such equipment, either.) She’s hoping I can get out and pick her up, since she’s pretty much out of clean clothes & the washing machine there is apparently not working either.

Well. If I can get out of Aix tomorrow, I can give it a go. This has not been especially fun, but it will certainly be memorable.

I am glad I got to Aix safely, glad that my husband’s colleague is a hospitable fellow, glad that I didn’t have to spend the night in the car. (I was prepared: sleeping bag, food & water, and … yes, make fun of me if you will… even a few “Depends” for those, um, special moments.) Yaaaaaarrrrrrrgh.

I’m just hoping now that the rolling blackouts that France’s electric company is fearful of do not come to pass.

Middle daughter is now on a train from Lyon to Marseille. (At least I hope so, she called in a breathless hurry en route to the platform; I have all possible body parts crossed.) There are lots of trains from Marseille to Aix Centre, so hopefully she’ll get in around (late) dinner time-ish tonight. Maybe. The main train station is only a few blocks from here through the slush. So yay for that. All flights into Marseille are still showing delays or cancellations, and AirFrance’s last flight to Marseille (the one daughter would have been on) was cancelled (they kindly sent us an SMS).

Headline in the local paper (which congratulated its staff on going to extraordinary lengths to publish and distribute, some of which was done on foot): Blanche pagaille = “white mess.” If, god forbid, I were to have another daughter at my age (did I say “god forbid”? I meant GOD FORBID!)… maybe I’d name her “Blanche Pagaille.” Hmm.

Aix IS a nice place, but totally unprepared for snow. I don’t think anyone here owns a snow shovel, judging from how bad the sidewalks have been.

[Later] Happy to report that we got home safely. No particular incidents to report en route home, youpie! Being snowed in here in “sunny Provence” was an experience that I hope will not be repeated anytime soon.

And, too, I am unimpressed: Youngest’s boarding house was completely, totally unprepared for this kind of event: they ran out of food and TP early on, and their phone/internet service was out, leaving the “responsables” dependent on a couple of kids’ cell phones. Perhaps zey will have Learned Somezing From Zees. I hold not zee breath, however.

Youngest will now have more ammunition for her weekly Monday whining about not wanting to go to school. This week she had all of one day of it (Monday, in fact.) I will still try to turn a Deaf Ear to this sort of thing, but I will keep an eye on the weather reports from now on, I guess. (On the other hand, this sort of weather event is uncommon—the last time Marseille area got snowed in was 1987.)

With all the plane-switching and ultimate train/bus-taking to get to Aix, Middle Daughter’s luggage was lost, and we can’t get through to the Lost Luggage people. The odds of it showing up in time for her to take it home to Boston with her on Monday are… slender at best. They’re still “tracing” it, per the online luggage tracer feature. She says she can survive without its contents, however. I will probably have to have the airline deliver it to her Stateside.

I am SO looking forward to spring, and yes, I do in fact realize that we’ve only barely gotten to the second week of January and all. ::Siiiiiiiiiiigh.::

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The joy of spam

Posted by mofembot Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:29:00 GMT

I wrote a little nothing of a diary over on DailyKos entitled The casino spam on my website, in which I pasted, verbatim, some choice morsels that had been taking the place of genuine feedback on this site.—Well, okay, “taking the place of” is not entirely accurate, given that I’ve gotten all of two (count ‘em 2!) genuine comments since starting this thing.

In any event, they were cluttering up my space and filling me first with false hopes of feedback, and then with a certain degree of outrage: how the hell do the spammers do this? And what was the point of sending me completely unreadable crap? (The casino spam was at least kind of coherent.)

—to be continued—

Well, maybe not. Go read the DailyKos diary and then tell me I should continue.

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I'm on a roll

Posted by mofembot Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:01:00 GMT

Yes, indeed, I am on a roll, if posting two days in a row counts as a roll.

I had a strange dream the night of December 30–31. As with most dreams, I don’t remember too much of it, although this one involved a sort of near-vertical tramway or roller-coaster kind of conveyance to the top of a mountain. Riding it was fun (at least going down). To take it up, however, one had to take an elevator to get to the “ride” platform. It was while waiting for this elevator on the lower level that I ended up speaking to Condoleezza Rice. (No, her guest appearance did not automatically place this dream into the nightmare category.)

She had separated herself from a group of people (stage right) who had been jeering her (no great surprise there) and was standing in front of the middle elevator of the bank of three. I was stage left and moving toward the middle elevator anyway, and here was my chance to tell her what I thought of BushCo and national security and foreign policy (lack thereof) in particular. What did I say?

“Dr. Rice,” I said as we entered the elevator together (I am known for my politeness on the boards that I frequent). She turned toward me, and before I could launch into a well-deserved critique, asked me if I knew what the parking rates were.

I did not know. Ignorance but rarely stops me from providing an answer, however, so as we stepped off the elevator on the upper floor, I hazarded a guess that she (as someone parked in long-term parking) would be paying in the neighborhood of $2.00 an hour. She looked relieved, and then moved off into the swirling Dream Medium. I tried to follow her, but somehow could not (it is apparently against the rules). I ended up spending the rest of my dream trying to get aboard the Up tramway, sliding off of the track….

Thinking back, I wonder if my customary politeness and more particularly my desire to always have an answer at the ready deprived me of the chance to light into “Dr. Rice” for the Bush administration’s astonishing and infuriating malfeasance. I was willing to let a bogus, fact-free “answer” take the place of righteous indignation.

On the other hand, I was probably completely wrong about the parking rates, which were likely much higher. Ha! Ha! Vengeance was mine after all!

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Happy 2009, I think.

Posted by mofembot Thu, 01 Jan 2009 10:31:00 GMT

On this First Day of 2009, I am answering the exigencies of at least one resolution—the one to blog more often. And yes, one post on New Year’s Day doth not a fulfillèd resolution make, not by a long shot. My resolution is open-ended: I haven’t committed myself to writing on a daily basis, although that could be thought of as ideal (or not). I’m gunning for at least once a week. My record last year was… pathetic. Further, I’m going to try to do more original writing here, rather than simply porting over DailyKos diaries or entries from other venues.

I am also going to try to work on my book in a more regular and Very Serious way. I am restructuring the book’s organization. I would like to get this thing published while people still have money to buy it. (Sighhhh.)

I have some other resolutions as well, but I am not quite ready to write about them. I’d like to see if they stand a snowball’s chance in the usual place of actually occurring, rather than opening myself to Torment and Ridicule. I haven’t had a great deal of success with the whole resolution thing, but some improvement in certain areas, even if only temporary and largely occurring in the first part of the year (okay, the first week of January), is better than doing nothing at all. I think.

So. Here we are in 2009. We have another 19 days to go before Obama is sworn in and solves all of the problems he’s inherited from BushCo and ushers the entire world into a Golden Era of Peace and Prosperity. (No, I am sober.)

I want to go on record here, right now, that I agree with Bob Herbert’s most recent New York Times column: Bush should not be allowed to slink off quietly into the sunset. He and his band of merry mercenary miscreants need to be brought to justice. Equal justice under law isn’t just a nice slogan on the façade of the Supreme Court building. (Well, let me revise that: it shouldn’t be just a nice slogan.) I am not interested in vengeance, I am interested in restoring America to moral good health: without a full accounting, there can be no remediation. Without justice, all of America becomes complicit in the many crimes BushCo has committed ‘lo these past eight extremely long years.

I can dream, can’t I? (Yes.)

While I’m dreaming here, I am also going to hope that the looming global economic catastrophe can be averted. And that the looming global environmental catastrophe can be mitigated. And that I can lose some weight.

Bonne année, tout le monde.

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