Posted by mofembot
Sun, 17 May 2009 11:41:00 GMT
In about an hour I will have to leave for the Marseille airport after an unexpected weekend home (I don’t feel like talking about it right now). Unfortunately, a direct flight from and to Frankfurt was too expensive to manage, so I’m on a KLM flight that connects through Amsterdam, thereby prolonging the trip by several hours. I will not get back to Heidelberg until around midnight, I think. (I’d been in Heidelberg this past week to reacquaint myself with the vagaries of my German client’s internal software, and to get acquainted with the people with whom I will be working long distance for much of the summer; I will be back here in France “definitively” as of this coming Thursday, Ascension Day.)
As I get older, I seem to find traveling more tiring. “No duh,” I hear you say. I should clarify: I still like traveling when it’s to someplace interesting and new. Business travel, however, rarely qualifies. And since my business days tend to be jam-packed with business-related activities and tasks — and none moreso than when working for my German client, because invariably my other major client, based in Paris, has work for me to do for them concurrently — the prospect of a too-late arrival home (assuming all flights are on time) and having to leave my rented room by 7h30 tomorrow morning (by agreement with my landlady, who uses my room for babysitting)… tires me just thinking about it.
On the plus side, I have no luggage to check in, and I brought with me a bunch of clothes that I’m leaving here in Aix-en-Provence, so I will be traveling light indeed. (Ever looking on the bright side, that’s me.) The weather in Germany will continue to be on the cool side, but it looks like the rain may have finally stopped. With any luck, I may have enough time to see something fun on Thursday morning before I head back to the airport. And definitely on the plus side, at least Mr Mo and I will be on the same connecting flight from Amsterdam to Marseille on Thursday evening.
Bon voyage to us all.
UPDATE: It was on this journey that I found myself in Schiphol airport in Amsterdam just before boarding time for my connecting flight. As it turned out, the flight to Frankfurt was at a gate right next to a flight to Marseille, and boarding times were about five minutes apart. As I looked at the two gates and destinations, I honest-to-god could not remember if I was coming or going, and had to look at my boarding pass so as to get into the right line. Sheesh.
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Posted by mofembot
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:01:00 GMT
Per my post below, “Real life and death in the virtual world,” I expected that JohnnyRook, aka Steven Kimball, would die soon, but it was still a blow to learn about his passing this morning via a most eloquent obituary/tribute (followed by many eloquent comments) on DailyKos (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/5/23559/31946/555/705253).
Although I have greatly cut down on commenting on LTEs in the
Salt Lake Tribune, I deliberately looked there today for a climate change-related thread in which to post the following:
I am very sad this morning, having just learned that this past Monday the Earth lost a great champion: Steven Kimball, aka JohnnyRook. After learning that he had acute myeloid leukemia some two years ago, he devoted the rest of his life to providing meticulously-documented evidence of what he called “climaticide.” I encourage people who love and are concerned about the biosphere to read and ponder the information that he spent the last of his energies on: http://www.climatechronicles.org [The Climaticide Chronicles]
The hard-core naysayers and deniers will eat their words only after it is far too late to do anything to turn back the human-caused and accelerating changes that threaten us all. JohnnyRook worked to try to open the eyes and minds of those who prefer short-term convenience and profit to humanity’s long-time survival for the sake of his own teenaged son, and for us all.
A previous DailyKos diary had paid homage to Steven Kimball’s work while he was still alive, and induced me to send my thanks directly to JohnnyRook’s Climaticide site in hopes that he would see the impact he has had on me:
Thanks for opening my eyes so much wider. Thanks for your enormous efforts to get all of us to open our eyes and see the impact we’ve had on the biosphere. Thanks for giving us the facts and ammunition we need to counter the willfully blind, often profit-driven nay-sayers who hem and haw and do their best to stop or delay the difficult steps we must take to save ourselves (and them along with us — such irony!).
I hope you will rally again and stay with us longer. Obviously I am one of many of the faceless, pseudonymous people who wish you well and who selfishly grieve at the thought of your voice silenced. My sincere best wishes to you for renewed strength, my sincere best wishes to your family and “in person” friends for comfort and solace in the days ahead.
The good die young, “but time and chance happeneth to [us] all.” JohnnyRook was only slightly older than I am, and he firmly believed that his cancer was due to exposure to carcinogenic material in the environment. I think of my 15-year-old nephew who died in early 2007 of a type of cancer that appears only in heavy smokers over age 40… and I wonder about the provenance of his disease. “Time and chance,” indeed.
Climate change (as JohnnyRook so carefully documented) is very real, and weather extremes and unpredictability will continue to spread and increase unless we stop virtually all activities that pour CO2 and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. The odds of this happening on a global scale is zero. This fact, coupled with the continuing economic downturn, does not make me (ever the catastrophist) feel especially happy today, especially given the loss of yet another voice for needed change.
Rest in peace, Steven Kimball. You will be missed.
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Posted by mofembot
Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:07:00 GMT
I’ve started tracking down some of my Mormon feminist writings from the 1990s (published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Mormon Women’s Forum, etc.), and I guess now the question is — what do I do with them? The Dialogue article in particular is quite long; some articles are PDFs and I don’t know how to deal with that format on this site (yet); and publishing any of them here, or even linking them, means… giving up my comfortable semi-anonymity.
I’m pretty close to being ready to give up the anonymity, lingering paranoia over the “no-fly list” notwithstanding. I suppose, however, that I could start a website with my own name for those kinds of things. Hmm.
Then there’s the whole issue of posting new content, or revised content, about Mormon feminism. Do I really want to get into that again? The thought makes reason stare, but I’m not sure exactly what reason is staring at. My perspective on Mormonism has changed dramatically since those early internet.lds and mormon-L and even elwc days, but that doesn’t make me any less an expert (or former expert, assuming there’s some kind of statute of limitations on theological musings). I have been presenting myself as an expert on Mormonism over at DailyKos….
(This scarcely qualifies as a blog post. It was going to be longer, but I got distracted a number of times. Fine, it’s another “stub,” and sorry about that. I reserve the right to return to this topic at a more convenient moment.)
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:33:00 GMT
There was a brief golden glow in the sky this morning before I got out of bed, and I thought that maybe, maybe we’d see a little sun here in Hamburg today, but No, it is not to be. At least the top of the nearest church spire has finally emerged from the fog, and it no longer seems to be actively raining.
I am starting to think that having grown up mostly in Southern California weakened my resistance to gray-related Inertia and Low Mood. I certainly seem to have more energy and ambition when I wake up to a blue sky. I have to wonder how the Hamburgers can stand this, but even they have it easy compared to, say, the Swedes in Stockholm, whose daylight at nadir is a paltry six hours, and whose skies are apparently prone to similar levels of gray during winter.
Fine, I’m glad this isn’t Stockholm. But it isn’t Quinson or Provence, either. We’ve had a fair bit of gray and rain at home this winter, naturally enough, but less frequently. And more daylight overall, and oh, believe me, visiting Mr Mo in Hamburg is a good reminder that I should appreciate the “home comforts” more. (Such appreciation will last until the first tiny white snails appear. Even though we will be moving to our village house sans jardin in April/May and thus be spared too much interaction with the wretched little creatures, the Joys of Country Living will be nonetheless briefly diminished in proportion to their numbers.)
Anyway, days like this always bring to mind one of the best songs from the Mamas and the Papas, California Dreamin’:
All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk
On a winter’s day
I’d be safe and warm
If I was in L.A.
California dreamin’
On such a winter’s day.
If I were in L.A. today, there would be the awkward expectation that I’d be going to church with whichever sibling I’d be staying with. (My “black sheep” brother has no room, thus no haven there.) Meh. There are many shades of gray, even in L.A. (Of course, realistically, were I in California at this point, I’d actually be enjoying the day with Oldest Child in San Diego.)
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Posted by mofembot
Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:32:00 GMT
I was in tears earlier today, having learned via A Siegel’s diary on DailyKos this morning that one of my favorite diarists, JohnnyRook, is not expected to live through the weekend. JohnnyRook has been writing about “climaticide” (his term, as reflected on his website, “The Climaticide Chronicles” at http://climaticidechronicles.org) for a while now, and I have found his articles to be well-researched, compelling, superlatively illustrated and documented… and totally scary.
JohnnyRook has AML—acute myeloid leukemia—the same wretched, fast-acting cancer that killed my old boss and friend Janet Mattei a few years ago. Barring a miracle, he will soon leave behind his wife and teenage son, many “real-life” friends, and many more virtual friends like me. He is, I believe, 55.
I hate thinking of his voice going silent, his website material archived…. I’m not a scientist, and I don’t think I’d be able to continue his work to inform people about the critical state of our biosphere, but I would be willing to help if I could. Given all the craziness of these past few years, the chaotic economy, the rapid disappearance of so many species of flora and fauna, devastating wars (and so on, infinitum ad naseam), it’s been easy to think that there is really nothing that I as an individual can do to counter such overwhelming entropy. But I think JohnnyRook’s reaction to learning about his cancer is a right and proper way to respond to the global mess:
My initial response to learning that my life was likely to be shorter than I had expected was, not surprisingly, rather selfish. I thought about the time that I would lose with my family and friends, of the traveling that I would not get to do, of the books that I would not get to read.
But something else happened too: the world became more poignant to me. I’d always thought of myself as a caring, empathetic, compassionate person, but now I found suffering, cruelty, and abuse to be intolerable regardless of the form it took. Debeaked hens crammed into tiny cages and stacked in factory-farm warehouses, infants shaken to death by their parents because they wouldn’t stop crying, genocide in Darfur, my countrymen in Appalachia and on the Gulf Coast treated as if they lived in a Third World Country, Iraqis bombed by us and by Al Qaeda… It was all too much. I was feeling the world’s pain.
And I realized, pardon my presumption here, that I didn’t want to die with the world in such terrible shape, which, finally, brings me to global warming. Of all the insanities that bedevil human beings on this planet none is greater than global warming.
From this realization, the Climaticide Chronicles were born, supplying information and arguments to counter the willfully ignorant claims of the naysayers and deniers. Our biosphere is in desperate trouble, and still there are individuals and groups and corporations and even entire nations that put their short-term comfort and profits ahead of any hope of long-term survival.
We have largely been, both individually and collectively, such poor stewards, preferring dominion and exploitation to conservation and selflessness at every turn. I have asserted in religious forums that if Jesus were to come again, he will not wave a magic wand and presto!—all will be clean and pristine; rather, he’d look around and in righteous wrath and disgust tell these “faithful” types, “You’ve got a thousand years. Clean up this mess!”
Well, anyway. To cry real tears at the thought of someone dying whom I’ve met only through his words and occasional exchanges in the comments may seem overblown to some, but oh, the grief is real. Very, very real.
I hope writing this is completely premature, but — requiescat in pace, JohnnyRook.
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Posted by mofembot
Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:54:00 GMT
Remember what I wrote yesterday? Do you? Do you? Huh? (If not, scroll down. It’s still there.)
I said that doodling helps me focus during boring meetings. And guess what, ha ha ha. It does. Read this and marvel:
Researchers in the United Kingdom found that test subjects who doodled while listening to a recorded message had a 29 percent better recall of the message’s details than those who didn’t doodle. The findings were published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
“If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream,” study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade, of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, said in a news release issued by the journal’s publisher. “Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.”
http://health.yahoo.com/news/healthday/takenotedoodlingcanhelpmemory.html
So there.
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Posted by mofembot
Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:39:00 GMT
“Adventure” is a bit strong. This post is about cutting. No, not self-mutilation (although I had to deal with that god-awful phenomenon when I was a school principal), but more like cutting out paper dolls. Only what I’m cutting out (endlessly, endlessly) are the zillions of doodles I’ve drawn over the years (nearly always during interminable meetings of one sort or another).
First of all, the doodles: I figured out that doodling is not a distraction: rather, it helps me focus. It is the manual equivalent of something I seem to do subconsciously when driving: humming/singing the same tune over and over again (but in a “theme-and-variations” kind of way). I have not been formally diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder), but I sure have all the classic signs, and yes, the “extra activity” (be it humming or doodling) takes up enough of that part of my brain that is distractible to allow the rest of my brain to focus on the meeting at hand (to listen and actively participate). My doodles are sprinkled throughout my notes.
Most of my doodles are of faces, and these faces come from… I don’t know where. I learned early on not to draw people in the same room: for one thing, if people think they’re having their portrait drawn, that becomes a distraction to them; for another, the reaction of the “portraitee” tends to be one of two kinds: either they love the caricature or portrait and then start bugging me about doing a “real” drawing of them, or they hate it and are insulted. Best not to draw people in the meeting.
It would be a facile thing to say that the expression on the faces I draw in some way reflects how I am feeling at the moment, but given the wide range of expressions, styles, and so on, that burst forth from one minute to the next in the same meeting, this seems unlikely. I can say, however, based on numerous fancy calligraphic renderings, that my most common feeling is expressed by the word BORING. In the worst or longest-lasting meetings, yawning faces (sometimes accompanied by a ballooned calligraphic “YAWN” emanating from the drawing’s mouth) are present.
I have been drawing faces since my earliest childhood. My paternal grandmother saved a drawing I did when I must have been around 3 or 4: if I recall correctly, it’s a picture of a policeman from the waist up, in profile (even if the nose-in-profile is on the order of nonexistent).
When I was in kindergarten, I won a district art contest (in the kindergarten category) for drawing three men’s faces. I was indignant when people assumed I’d drawn The Three Stooges (I don’t think the faces looked anything like Moe, Larry, and Curly): I most certainly had not: these were faces from my own imagination. By then, I assume I had figured out that mustaches belonged underneath the nose, not above, but I don’t remember if any of these three faces sported a mustache or not. I vaguely recall one wore a hat. (The only other memory related to this art contest was how hard a time I had choosing the prize: I could either have Are You My Mother? or A Pickle for a Nickel. My teacher, Mrs Sullivan, patiently read both books; then, as I still couldn’t make up my mind, put both behind her back and instructed me to pick left or right. I ended up with A Pickle for a Nickel, long out of print, I believe—whereas Are You My Mother? is still available… and I’m happy with the choice.—But I digress.)
Anyway, I’ve been drawing faces for my entire life. I regret that there’s pretty much nothing from my elementary school days, nor even junior high, but at some point during high school, I started saving my doodles and made a “scroll-collage” out of them (on the paper that carpet-cleaning companies would put down after shampooing our wall-to-wall). (I still have an envelope with more doodles that need to go on the last part of this collage, by the way.)
Collage, you see. That’s what I’m after, that’s why I’m spending the time culling and painstakingly cutting out these doodles. I’ve already done one framed work, “The Engineering Meeting,” which I hope that daughter no. 2 recovered from the start-up on whose walls it hung for awhile. I recently put together a smaller collage, but discovered to my dismay that the rubber cement wasn’t holding on the drawings after a short time: I think the problem was that I’d forgotten to check if the base paper was acid-free (it was not). I will have to peel off everything and try again on the right kind of paper.
Acid-free base is important… but I wonder about the paper on which my doodles are drawn. I intend to scan everything, of course. And I suppose I will have to rely on scanning and printing out to deal with another unfortunate phenomenon: the fact that at one point I doodled on both sides of the page. Very bad. I don’t do that anymore (well, hardly ever). Which of the faces to use? Well, I want ‘em all.
Meanwhile, I find myself occasionally cutting in meetings instead of drawing, but I think people find the cutting more distracting in the larger sense than the doodling itself, so I’ll have to confine myself to cutting in, say, doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms and other “down-times.” I wish to heck I could cut out my doodles while waiting for a plane, but since gott knows that I’d use my scissors as a weapon… that’s usually a couple of hours of cutting time down the drain. So far I have remembered to put my scissors in my checked bag, but I can just imagine that one of these days I’ll forget. And then I’ll get royally angry at this kind of stupidity-in-the-name-of-security yet again as I watch the agents confiscate my “weapon.”
I am tired of cutting, but It Must Be Done for the Sake of Art. N’est-ce pas? Mais oui!
ADDENDUM: I want to point out that I did not doodle in all meetings: If I was conducting the meeting, for example, or if the meeting was convened expressly to deal with (say), the school I ran, especially if the meeting was held in the presence or at the behest of Big Cheeses, I rarely if ever doodled. In France in particular, I think my doodling would have been misconstrued as a sign of inattention (or worse, disrespect) rather than a technique to aid focus. I rarely doodled (or doodled only a very little bit) at school board meetings, for example, but I doodled a lot during “Conseils de Classe”—class councils, mostly because at best we’d have a handful of American students in those classes, and since all students were discussed one by one… I had a lot of time on my hands. But again, I took notes, jotted down ideas and observations based on what I was hearing—and hearing better, I think, for allowing my Right Hand free rein to draw at will.
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Posted by mofembot
Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:36:00 GMT
Well… I hesitate to say that I tentatively think that I might have possibly decided to stop bothering with writing comments in response to letters to the editor in the Salt Lake Tribune. “Oh!” (I hear you say.) “I didn’t even know you were writing comments in the Salt Lake Tribune.” Well, yes, I was. And sometimes lots of comments. But after taking a bit of a break over the past couple of weeks, I went back the other day, posted a couple of things and decided that I really wasn’t enjoying it.
For one thing, the same old crowd is there (as one might expect). The waves of conservatives vs. the waves of liberals. Both camps have a couple of articulate writers. Given my own political sensibilities, I have found the points of view expressed by the conservative camp — especially the articulate ones — to be singularly misinformed, reliant on very questionable sources.
Some people on both sides of the political divide are inarticulate, semi-literate, frequently rude, and sometimes just downright nasty. I have cringed more than once at some of what “my” side has produced.
Well. It isn’t that I’ve gotten thinner-skinned. Nor is it the slightly disturbing phenomenon of finding myself praised by some of the most virulent conservative types who dwell in the Trib’s comments section. It is true that I very rarely lose my temper online. It is true that I have a pretty damned good memory for things that I have read and can (and if necessary, do) track down sources. I argue the issues, I provide facts along with anecdotes, I avoid ad hominem attacks, and generally manage to respond “masterfully” to such attacks when thrown my way by those who become furious at the notion that I might not accept their assertions, nor their sources, as reasons to change my mind.
I… think I need to spend my time more productively overall. (OMG, when was this not true?) I want to start supplying more writing (as in diaries, for example) to sites such as DailyKos and a few other places where my thoughts and even my artwork might get more traffic. It would be nice to think that people might start coming to the mofembot site from efforts expended on dkos and all, but I need to have more content here to make it worth their while to stop by.
As for my book (on the nonlynnear site). Well. I got some feedback the other week that I’ve been pondering about, with the net result that my project has come to a screeching halt. (I think I’ll write about this more on the nonlynnear blog rather than here.) Suffice to say, however, that I am no longer going to spend much if any time over at the Trib. The people who hate and fear Obama will continue to hate and fear him no matter what I may say in the comments. (And yes, I’m well aware that the “real” audience is not those who are arguing in the comments, but those who read the comments; I guess I have to wonder just how many people that ends up being. I’m pretty convinced that the traffic is quite light overall: after all, people who actually subscribe to the physically-delivered paper are not especially likely to look at the online version; and while there’s a hard-core group of about 30 or so fairly regular commenters… based on the number of thumbs-up and down, I just don’t see that the traffic warrants continued investment on my part.)
I reserve the right to change my mind. I will say, however, that commenting in the Trib has at least gotten me to write something about political and moral and religious issues on an almost daily basis, and I have culled my comments each month … not just so as to preserve my Sterling Prose in its entirety, but also to serve as a possible basis for longer pieces (whoa, maybe some pages herein!) about issues I care about.
As the French say, “On verra.” (We shall see.)
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:41:00 GMT
This particular post is going to sound like one of those wikipedia entries: “this is a stub.”
I haven’t written anything on this blog for February. This does not bode well for good intentions. Yes, I’ve been sort of kind of busy. But not enough to justify the lack of loquaciousness.
I will try to expand the stub shortly.
I wish I were as consistently witty as Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert). I don’t always agree with his political positions, but his blog is always entertaining, and often laugh-out-loud funny. (Have I said how much I hate “LOL,” especially when it’s pronounced the way it’s spelled? Spare me. LOL. Gag.)
I am witty. I know this. Sometimes other people recognize this quality in me, too, but I am by far my best audience. And often when I think of something that amuses me, it amuses others. I have managed from time to time to write some pretty witty stuff. My favorite piece is still my “lighter minds” article in Sunstone some years ago, “Buttons, or Her Strength Lies in Her Principles,” which was based on a great drawing by Elizabeth Layton that I saw in (I think) the American Heritage Museum National Gallery of American Art in Washington, DC. (This drawing, “Buttons,” can be viewed on http://elizabethlayton.com.)
However witty I am, however, I am not consistent in my efforts to reach a broader audience. So I am not yet a rich and famous comedian nor comic writer. And until such time as I have the discipline to post on a regular if not daily basis, I have no one to blame but myself for the lack of income from this direction. And I suppose I will have to throw off the cloak of anonymity as well. Shoot. Kept me warm in the thought that TSA would have to work a little harder to figure out who I am.
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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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