I have started my journal a little late. We are well into our 8^th day now. I won’t say much here about how it has been going. Let’s just say that we have been busy – bien pressé! Now, we begin again – at…

Day 1, Friday, Feb. 26: We arrive. Our big concern on the trip over was the well being of the cat and dog. There was nothing we could do from Houston to Paris, and no way to check on them in Paris. When we boarded the Air France plane for Marseilles, Robert expressed concern to l’hotesse de l’aire, and she checked to be sure that they had been loaded for the flight. She confirmed that they were on board, so we relaxed somewhat. When we picked up our luggage in Marseilles, there they were, on the moving luggage belt. Pucky started barking when he saw Robert, and Ashley looked ready to jump out of her skin. Robert took Pucky outside immediately, where he peed about a quart. I tried to take Ashley out to pee, but she was wearing a harness – a terrible new experience for her – and she couldn’t think of anything but getting away to hide. She actually slipped out of the harness once, but she was too frightened to run so I caught her. We had no problem getting them through customs. Les douane were busy hassling a family with lots of luggage, so we had to almost beg someone to look at our papers. One man glanced at our papers and waved us through. We did not tarry. We got the car, and it was now about 3:00 p.m. I called Mme Ville, the wife of the owner of our house and said that we would be there in about 1 ½ to 2 hours. We started our journey. The proud new residents of France promptly got lost leaving the Marseilles airport. We ended up in Aix en Provence, we’re not sure how. In our defense, the roads were torn up due to new construction and the signs were a mess. We finally arrived at the house in Mazan a little after 5:00 p.m. Including our unscheduled trip to Aix, it took about 2 hours 20 minutes. The Villes were waiting for us. We got the animals settled (Ashley hid in the garage for 3 days!), and the Villes showed us around Mazan – that took about five minutes. We bought a few groceries at Casino (a small market), I ordered a Herald Tribune at the Presse for delivery Monday, took leave of the Villes and went to Pernes Les Fontaines for a pizza at our favorite place. We tried not to sit there grinning like idiots, but didn’t succeed. Here we were, in France, to stay for a while, eating our favorite pizza, drinking cheap local wine by the pichet, totally exhausted and happy as pigs in a trough. We went home to a warm cozy house, with a slight buzz on, and slept like rocks – until 3 a.m. Le jet lag. We managed to sleep a little more, then woke up to……

Day 2 – Saturday, Feb. 27: Saturday is a busy day in every town and Carpentras is no different. After a nice breakfast of strong coffee, good bread and cheese, we were ready for a trip to town to buy a few things for the house and enough groceries for a week. Lesson One on Day Two: NEVER shop at L’Eclerc (a large hypermarche and shopping center) on a Saturday. It was like Houston’s Auchan times two. Besides the crowd, I didn’t have a clue what we really needed, where anything was located or what all those little French words on the labels meant. Several hours later and $150 lighter, we left L’Eclerc with very little to eat and a lot of things for the animals and the house. Money was a little short and all the banks were closed on Saturday, so we stopped at an ATM machine and I got the maximum – 2000ff. I am very happy to report that everything went well and that the machine didn’t eat my card. We had a little money to move around with. We had not been able to pay the Villes the 15000 ff (down payment on our rental) in cash on Friday because we arrived too late to go to our bank on Friday, and it was not open on Saturday. We told the Villes we would get the money on Monday and arranged to meet Mme Ville at 10:00 a.m. in front of the Intermarché to pay them. More on this later! As we already knew, everything closes up tight at noon and doesn’t open again till about 3:00 p.m., so we went home to put away the things we had bought. We had bread, cheese, sausage and wine for lunch. Tired but still grinning. In the afternoon, we went out car shopping. We investigated leasing and found a possible purchase – a Twingo for 32,500 ff (about $5500), but it had only a front seat – no back seat and the price did not include tax or carte grise (title). It was about a ’96 model and had a lot of kilometers on the speedometer – 74,000. We went home to think about it. I made a dinner of turkey cutlets with bottled mushroom pesto sauce (sounds ordinary but it was very good), risotto, a good salad with a boiled egg, haricot vert (little French green beans) and fresh strawberries for dessert. Our first meal that I cooked, and pretty good – I must toot my own horn. We spent the evening watching TV. Watching is the correct word because we might as well have had the sound off. We didn’t understand a word!. Went to bed and slept pretty well, till 3:00 a.m., then off and on till…

Day 3, Sunday, Feb. 28: Sunday – a slow, lazy day. Of course, nearly everything is closed on Sundays so we had a late breakfast of strong coffee, great bread – "du compagne" that Robert found in the village – fromage blanc for me and cheese for Robert. We lazed around, unpacking and settling in, till afternoon, when we decided to go into Avignon. We needed to get 4 photos each for our "carte de séjour" (permit to live in a certain area). Someone had told us when we were here in January that we could get identity photos from a machine at the gare (train station) in Avignon, so we went there first. I mentioned that things are pretty quiet on Sundays – we found out why. Everyone in town and the surrounding territory was at the gare. After fighting traffic, getting behind people who were picking up or dropping off s-l-o-w-l-y, we finally found a parking space. Into the gare for the photos. We had to figure out the directions in French; no small trick since all of our good dictionaires are in the shipment, which has not arrived. The only thing I had was a Berlitz phrase book with a very limited dictionary. We never really figured out anything but the fact that the machine "ne marche pas" (didn’t work). We stuck the appropriate money into every available slot and it just fell through, so we gave up. Now we had to fight our way out of parking area of the gare. We decided to park in a less congested area and walk to the Internet Café – first discovered in January. Fortunately we remembered where it was, which was a much-needed success after the gare. We collected our e-mail and Robert broadcast a "we are here – more later" message. He talked to a young man at the Café, who spoke English, about how we could become connected in Mazan. We drove around Avignon a little to locate a truck rental company the young man told us about. We were thinking of renting a small truck to use to pick up our shipment in Marseilles. We believed that the shipment was to arrive over up the weekend, or by Monday. We went home and I fixed a box of Knorr soup mix for dinner – we had had a big lunch of leftover turkey and risotto. We watched TV again for the evening’s entertainment. Ashley has settled down and now thinks this French stuff is okay. She likes French cat food, she is able to come in the house more and things are generally better for her. Pucky still has his allergies here. I was hoping it would help to get him out of Houston. On to bed for out nightly 3 a.m. wake up and then to…..

Day 4, Monday, March 1: The first big day of frustration with life in France. We had decided to go into

Mazan to pick up the paper I had ordered on Friday, buy some more of the good "pain du compagne" Robert had discovered on Sunday, get the carte de séjour and go into Carpentras to get the money for the Villes. Sounded simple enough to me. First, there was no paper – they didn’t deliver on Monday….demain (tomorrow)….Okay, then the bread. We discovered that since the boulangerie (bakery) that makes the good bread was open on Sunday, it was not open on Monday. Demain. On to the Marie (mayor’s office) to get the carte de séjour. We knew that we still needed the photos, but the girl at the Marie didn’t want to accept our other papers because they were copies. She wanted originals of our birth certificates or livre de famille (marriage certificate) – all in Houston, of course. (When we were in Houston, the French Consul there told us that once we supplied all the original documents for the Visa, all we needed to do was show up at the Marie and we could get our carte de séjour. Since we had run into problems in Avignon in January similar to the ones we were now having in Mazan, Robert had returned to the Consul in Houston before we began the move. He had obtained assurances from the Consul there and also a note from her to give to the authorities in France, saying if there were any problems or questions to call her in Houston.) We finally convinced the girl in Mazan, with the help of the note, that the French government had all the documents it needed. Understand, of course, that this is all in French (fractured French) because the girl in Mazan didn’t speak a word of English. She still wanted the photos, she wanted our Schwab bank statement figures translated into French francs by a French bank and she wanted a copy of our signed contract showing that we actually had a place to live in Mazan. Small catch there – the Villes had the contract and we wouldn’t be able to get a copy till we paid them….Demain encore. We found a place in Mazan to get identity photos, so that part was solved. On to Carpentras to get the money to pay the Villes. We have two accounts in France. One is a US$ account, where we can make deposits in dollars from our US accounts, by check; the other account is in French francs, where we can get cash in francs or write checks in francs for phone bills, etc. or use where they don’t take VISA. We just ask the bank to transfer from dollars to francs when we need to. I had faxed the bank in Bourges (where the account was opened) before we left Houston, asking them to transfer $4000 into the franc account. Since the account was in Bourges, the bank in Carpentras had to verify that the funds were in the franc account before they could give me cash in francs. Guess what – banking in France is not true branch banking. The bank in Carpentras could not look up our Bourges account in the computer. Guess what else - the bank in Bourges is closed on Monday!!…. Demain!! Encore!! This meant that I had to call Mme Ville and tell her that it would be another day before we could pay her. We arranged again to meet at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, in front of the Intermarché. I got the maximum allowed out of the ATM machine again – 2000ff. At this rate, we could maybe pay her in two weeks. We went to the hypermarche L’Eclerc again because by this time, everything else was closing. I spent a good hour and a half in the store, looking for things and choosing two French cookbooks. I chose one of them because it had lots of pictures, with names and descriptions of a lot of vegetables and meat cuts that I am not familiar with. The problem with this book is that it is written in French, requiring a lot of time spent with the demi-dictionaire. The really fun part is that all of the measurements are in grams or soup spoons or mille litres. Do you have any idea how much butter 60 grams is? I don’t. I had already run into this problem when I first tried to cook in my new little kitchen, and as near as I can make out, there are no measuring devices in my kitchen. I actually spend the largest part of the hour and a half looking for measuring cups and measuring spoons. Turns out they don’t have such things here, at least not anything we would recognize. I was finally reduced to buying a baby bottle because it was the only thing I could find with mille litres marked on it. Robert was waiting semi-patiently in the car with Pucky. We left and looked at cars briefly, but didn’t find anything we liked. We finally dragged ourselves home. I made a call to Houston to the freight company that was handling our shipment. The shipment should have arrived by Monday, but I had not yet received a fax with the airway bill number. The girl handling the shipment in Houston said that Air France had delayed the shipment, but that it should be in by Tuesday afternoon. Another wait, but that seems to be the norm. I made really good potato-leek soup for dinner with a fantastic goat cheese salad. I won’t touch goat cheese in the US, but it tastes good here. The food really does taste better, or we had had such a day that anything would have tasted good. Unfortunately, it takes me hours to fix anything, because it is a strange kitchen, I have to find the implements and figure out how to use them. All instructions are in French, of course, so it is back to the dictionary. The stove is the slowest thing I have ever used. It is electric and takes ten minutes to heat up, but also twenty to cool down. I MUST NOT leave anything on the burner unless I am in the mood for charcoal. I start cooking early and we eat late, then collapse in front of the TV till bedtime. We are still waking up at 3 a.m. I stay awake for several hours, so that when I finally do fall asleep again, I sleep too late, which brings us to……

Day 5, Tuesday, March 2: My day from hell in France. I had an appointment with M. Waibel at Societé Generale (our bank) at 9:00 a.m., to get the money thing straightened out. Unfortunately for me, Robert, who had stayed up since about 4 a.m. reading science papers, lost track of the time and didn’t remember to wake me up till 8:35 a.m. I had the world’s fastest toilette to get ready and we dashed off. No time to get the paper. We arrived in Carpentras at the bank a little after 9. When I met with M. Waibel it turned out that he didn’t speak a word of English and had a pretty thick Provençal accent. At least in my half-asleep state it seemed thick. I wanted to get 20,000ff to pay the Villes and to have money for the rest of the month. I then wanted to close the accounts in Bourges and move the accounts to Carpentras. M. Waibel called Bourges and they were open! Great start. Unfortunately, the person who handles my account, who-ever that is, was not there to verify our funds and the computer in Bourges was down – ne marche pas – so that the woman who answered the phone couldn’t verify. I couldn’t believe this! Another wait! I would have to call Mme Ville again with more excuses. The frustrations of the past few days, the semi-jet lag, semi-half asleep state caught up with me. I lost it. Poor M. Waibel had to watch me come unglued. I started crying and couldn’t stop. Poor man didn’t know what to do with me. I settled a little and we tried to start the process of changing the accounts. Turns out that to transfer funds, both Robert and I had to sign the papers. Unfortunately, Robert was off looking at cars! Another wait. M. Waibel said to come back at 3:00 p.m. and promised that everything would be all right. I left, and went to the ATM machine for more cash. Now I was up to 6000ff. I was not going to let this "without funds" thing happen again. I then had to call Mme Ville again. She was beginning to be a little less friendly. By now, I had put her off three times, and I was very embarrassed. Robert and I went to look at cars again. We found a little Panda, by Fiat I think, accent on "little". It was nearly new, looked okay, ran pretty well and was not expensive. Robert tried to drive it, but it was so small that his foot didn’t fit on the gas pedal. He wasn’t too impressed. Then we found a little green frog – another Twingo. Robert loves Twingos, but I think they look like frogs and this one was bright green. It was nearly new looking, a lot more expensive that the others we were looking at, but it had only 13,000 kilometers on it. It had electric windows, power steering, automatic locks and air conditioning. I liked that. We thought it was a ’98 for 46,000ff (about $7800). It looked like a pretty okay deal. We drove home to think it over. It was lunchtime, so I decided to cook our big meal of the day then. I cooked champagne chicken, fettuccini, big green asparagus and strawberries for dessert. Really good. By the time we had finished with lunch, it was nearly time to go back to town to the bank (3:00 p.m.). This time we got the money!! Robert was with me so we were able to transfer the franc account. Things were looking up. Or so I thought. It turns out that the franc account is in Carpentras, but the dollar account will be handled in Avignon. Guess whose computer didn’t work this time. If you guessed Avignon, you are beginning to understand the system. I will have to go back Monday morning to set up the $ account. It resides in Avignon but I can do everything in Carpentras (in theory, but that remains to be seen). I called Mme Ville again to let her know that we finally had the money. She, of course, was not at home. All of the calling from town I have mentioned means that Robert drops me off at a cabine de telephone and searches for a parking place. Carpentras has one parking space for every 50 cars looking for a space, and things are really busy between 3 and 6 p.m. Robert found a parking space and met me on the street. He pointed out where he was parked, about a block away – the little blue Punta we had rented, parked next to a little white truck. No problem. He returned to the car to wait and I returned to the cabine de telephone to try again. This time I got the Ville’s daughter. We arranged to meet at the house in Mazan at 6:00 p.m. I hung up and headed for the car. No Robert. I sat on a bench in front of the car to wait - he was probably walking the dog. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes – no Robert. I examined the car – a blue Punta next to a little white truck. The inside looked right. I waited some more. I decided to walk back to the phone booth. I thought maybe Robert had gone there and we had missed each other. I didn’t see him, so I walked back to the car and started to sit down on the bench again. I happened to look down the street a little farther and there was Robert waving his arms. He was in front of a little blue Punta. Next to a little white truck. Now what are the chances! After I confessed to feeling like a total idiot, he admitted that he had tried to get into the same car I had been sitting in front of, but that his key hadn’t fit. He searched and found the correct car, but he couldn’t see me sitting on the bench waiting, and hadn’t seen me until I was walking back from the phone booth for the second time. By now, it was getting late, barely enough time to get home by 6:00 p.m. to meet Mme Ville. We stopped at the Presse anyway, to pick up the paper, which was there this time, and arrived at the house just in time. Mme Ville brought her daughter and the two of them spoke a lot of French to us while we nodded and tried to make French sounding noises. The Villes are very nice people and I wish we could communicate better with them. We had had our big meal at lunch, so we just snacked for dinner. Robert was watching a great magic program on the TV – it didn’t require much understanding of French because it was so visual. While he was doing that, I decided to try one of my French cookbooks and make a dessert. The easiest thing was an apple tart. Now I know in general how to make an apple tart, so this shouldn’t have been too taxing, but I wanted to make a French pie crust, this one called a pâte brisée. I am now in complete conflict with the metric system of measure. The earlier successes in the kitchen were from memory, so that in spite of measurement and pan conforma-tion difficulties, I was mostly on familiar ground. Not so this night. The sugar was different and wouldn’t caramelize. The pâte brisée had way too much butter in it, so that it kind of melted all over the apples. The oven temperature was anyone’s guess so that the apples were way short of cooked at the end of the recommended cooking time. Robert was very gallant and said he liked it that way. For this disaster I had consumed about two hours in the kitchen. I sat down with Robert to watch the rest of the magic show and said to hell with it. We ate the tart the way it was. Because of the kind of day it had been, I never had a chance to call anyone about the shipment, but I still had not received a bill of lading or an airway bill, so it was certain that nothing had arrived. Later we turned in, to be ready for….

Day 6, Wednesday, March 3: Robert’s day from hell in France. The day actually started out pretty well. Since we had paid the Villes the night before, we now had a copy of the signed contract. We had the four photos from Monday in Mazan, M. Waibel had translated our Schwab statement from dollars into francs on Tuesday, and we had all we needed to apply again for the carte de séjour. This was important, because we only had 8 days from the day we arrived to apply. So it was off to the Marie. We got there about 9:00 a.m. and the girl checked our papers. Everything appeared to be to her satisfaction this time. She accepted the copies we brought of the birth certificate (mine was the only one we had, but she didn’t seem concerned this time) and other documents. She then began to fill out the paperwork. There were about 4 or 5 forms for each one of us. Most of the forms asked for the same information – full name, date of birth, address here and in Houston, full names of both parents, passport number and date, so on and so forth. Everything was done by hand. If she had had a good computer program, she could have filled it out once and had it all posted to the other forms. No such luck. It took her an hour and a half to fill out all the forms for each of us. We then signed them. She said if there were no problems, we should get our carte de séjours in about 8 days – the temporary ones – and then the official ones in about 2 or 3 months. I don’t want even to think of what might go wrong. We have not had a call from her so far, and hope we don’t. We then went into Carpentras to take another look at the little green frog – the Twingo. We had pretty much decided to buy it because Robert likes Twingos, it drove well, it was nearly new and the price was right. Wrong. When we got to the car place and started talking to the salesman again, it turns out that the car was a ’96, which made the price not so great after all. He absolutely guaranteed that the speedometer was right and that the car only had 13,000 kilometers on it. He showed us the Argus, which is the French version of the blue book, and is the bible for car dealers in France. It showed the wholesale price of the car, the premium for low mileage, the premium for air conditioning, etc. The price they had on the car was probably a fair price, but Robert was not too pleased with the situation. I thought that we were mixing up some of the things we thought to be true about the car with another one that was right next to it in the lot when we first saw it. I looked again at the other car, and sure enough, it was a ’98 at about the same price. We let the salesman start to write up the carte grise information after a lot of dickering about price, guarantee, cost of title, etc. The dealer would guarantee the car for one year and throw in the cost of the carte grise. We went home again and ended up having a "rather spirited discussion" about whether to actually go through with the sale. The problem was that Robert really wanted the car, but was understandably upset that the facts did not seem to match what we had thought to be true. Robert went into Pernes to talk to an insurance agent he had talked to the day before, and the agent said that the price seemed fair for the car. While he was gone, I talked to the girl in Houston again about the shipment. She said the cargo had been shipped and she would fax me the airway bill to a little shop in Mazan that makes copies and sends and receives faxes for the public. She said she had already faxed a copy to the fax number I had given her before (for our real estate agent, who had the only fax number I knew while we were still in Houston). I called the agent, Christian, and he said that he had received 12 pages! I arranged to meet him in Carpentras to pick up the fax. Robert came home and we agreed to buy the car. We went into Carpentras, I got the fax from Christian, and we stopped by the car dealer and said we would take the car for sure and would call or come by when we got the insurance. We then went home and Robert started to get the computer set for the Internet. He had spent a lot of time in the past few days buying PC magazines, gathering free introductory CD-ROMs and asking everyone he could for recommendations. The bad part about asking questions in French is that the people tend to answer in French and then we are in trouble. Most of the recommendations were at the mercy of our ability to understand the answers. At any rate, Robert was embarking on his version of the day from hell. Absolutely nothing went right with the connection process. He attacked the problem from every possible direction and came up with the same result – no connection. He was having his version of my French cookbook – all the directions were in French. He could puzzle out a lot of it, but there were frequent cries of "bring the book". As I mentioned before, the dictionary has about as many useful translations as Carpentras has parking spaces – not nearly enough. Robert was moaning and threatening to move back to Houston in the morning. He could put up with a lot of the problems we had endured for the past few days, but this was serious. This was his Internet!. This painful process went on for hours. Finally we agreed that he would stop the frustration for the night, he would take the computer to somewhere he knew the connections worked and see if the problem was with the computer, the software, or our telephone here at the house. With that decided, we turned in, to be ready for…..

Day 7, Thursday, March 4: Robert left pretty early in the morning to try to solve his problems. First he went to Pernes to talk to the insurance agent again. He had the car information – model, serial number, etc. He then tried to find the French Telecom office. He never found it, but while looking, he ran across another Cyber Café. He talked to a guy and a girl there and found out that his problem was the connector between the computer and the telephone wall plug. He needed a special adapter. The guy at the Cyber Café drew him a map to find the French Telecom office so he could get the adapter. While he was doing all of these things, I was trying to find out about our shipment. I had a number that I thought was in Marseilles, but it turned out to be in Lyon. I had a guy who could speak English. (In fact, I had talked to about 5 different people to get to him. He at least seemed to know what I was talking about.) He said that the shipment had arrived in Paris but was not yet in Marseilles. He promised to call me when it arrived in Marseilles and to tell me when it would clear customs. We were still planning on picking it up, but had given up on renting a truck. It would cost more to rent a truck than it would to make two trips in the little car. I had been asking all along if there was anything special we needed to do or any papers we needed to bring to get the cargo released, but of course they said no. I was waiting for Robert to return or call to tell me what he had found out. I was trying to figure out how to use the washer and dryer because by now we needed to have a few things washed. It turned out that I didn’t have any soap for the washer, so I couldn’t wash anyway. Since I couldn’t wash, I decided to start the beef bourguingnon I wanted to make. I then discovered that the recipe was in the shipment that refused to arrive. Not to be denied, I decided to make a beef stew instead. I had just started it when Robert arrived, a little past noon. As soon as possible, we took off for town, Pernes this time, to the insurance agent. Robert had arranged to get some renters insurance that wasn’t very expensive, and he wanted this agent to write the car insurance too. We spent a couple of hours with the agent, getting ourselves insured. As soon as we had the binder, we went to the car dealer just outside Carpentras to tell him we were now insured and ask when we could pick up the car. He said at 6:00 or 6:30 that evening. That sounded okay to us, so we went into Carpentras to find the French Telecom office so that Robert could get the connector he needed. We finally found the office, and guess what? French Telecom doesn’t have any connectors. They said to get one at L’Eclerc. We had been there a dozen times, but didn’t know to get the connector! We visited several other hypermarches near French Telecom, sort of to learn our way around Carpentras, but none of them had the connector, so we went to L’Eclerc. We got the connector and hurried home to put away some other things we bought at L’Eclerc and to check on the stew, which had been cooking slowly all afternoon. It was after 5:00 by now and we didn’t have time to tarry. Robert wanted desperately to connect to the Internet, but we didn’t have time. We started out for the car place, and decided to take a short cut on one of the little back roads so we would not have to get into traffic in Carpentras, since the car place is on the Pernes side of Carpentras. Bad idea. Of course we got lost and made a big unintended loop around the area. We were nearly out of gas in the rent car, and were afraid either the rent car, or the new car, which had had nearly no gas in it when we first looked at if, would run out of gas on the way home. We also had no idea how late the gas stations would be open. We got to the car place at just past 6:30, with visions of arriving too late. Everyone was still at work when we arrived, so it looked like everything was going to be okay. We had asked the car dealer if we could use our Visa debit card to buy the car and they said fine. I called Schwab in Houston to be sure it would be okay if a large amount like that came through. They said the money was in the account so there would be no problem. I get nervous now when anyone says no problem. We proceeded with the sale. The salesman, a very young man, couldn’t get the card reader to work and called his boss, the owner. The secretary had already gone home and the owner wasn’t sure either how to work the machine. It kept giving an error code. He finally called the Visa authorization office somewhere – Paris probably. We spent at least 45 minutes on the phone between Paris and New York, trying to get authorization. The problem was that they usually charge things like tires or repair bills, not a whole automobile. The machine had a stop on it above a certain amount. Also, since our Visa is with Schwab, not a standard bank, no one knew exactly how to proceed. After a very long time on hold, we got the authorization, the owner was stepped through how to overcome the block and we had bought a car. We went into the garage to drive it home. I wouldn’t start! Seems in the process of cleaning it up, some water had gotten into the motor and the distributor cap was wet. The young salesman, in his effort to help me start it, flooded the engine with gasoline. Bottom line – no car this night. We finally got home about 8:00 p.m. with no car. We had stew for a late dinner and Robert got the Internet working. Hurrah – some success for the day. I tossed a load of clothes into the washer, having studied the manual during the morning while waiting for Robert. The washer ran okay, and ran, and ran, and ran….seems that you not only have to start this washer, you also have to stop it. You don’t stop it, it doesn’t stop by itself. I had the misfortune of putting into this load a huge, heavy terrycloth bathrobe – pool robe that weighs a ton dry. Imagine it sopping wet! After the machine had run for a VERY long time, I advanced it to the last position on the control to hurry it up. As things turned out, this position does not spin the clothes, just drains the tub and, finally, quits. I now had a load of clothes dripping wet, heavy, way too wet to put into the dryer and it is getting late. I had to wring the things out by hand and then into the dryer where after 120 minutes (that’s two hours, folks), they are merely wet, not dripping. The things had to wait until the next day to try again. I went to bed, totally exhausted.

Day 8, Friday, March 5: Needless to say, I slept late. We really intended to go to the car place early, but I had the problem of the wet laundry, so Robert worked on the computer and I worked on the laundry. By the time I got that first load dry, I had figured out how to make the washer behave, so I wanted to run a new load to be sure I had it figured out. All ran smoothly this time. We didn’t start out for the car place till nearly noon, but we did make it there before they closed. We picked up the car, which ran fine. We got gas in both cars and turned in the rent car. It began to look like our luck was beginning to change. All of the things we needed to do – money in the proper bank, payment to the Villes, carte de séjour applied for, carte grise applied for, new car, insurance, Internet connection – are either started or finished. The only big hurdle remaining, besides learning French, is the shipment from Houston. After we returned with the car, I began to work on that problem. The young man I had been working with, Cyril, said when I called him on Friday afternoon, that the shipment was in Marseilles and should clear customs that afternoon. I discussed the cost of having it delivered to the house instead of picking it up. The cost was very reasonable, so I said please deliver it. He said that we could have it at our house on Monday. That was only a week later than we had expected. I relaxed and decided to enjoy the rest of the day. It was a little too soon to relax. The phone rang at about 6:00 p.m. It was Cyril. It seems we needed a letter or statement to give to customs stating that the items in the shipment were personal goods owned for longer than 6 months and was not for resale. Remember that I said I had called several times to verify that we didn’t need any more documents to release the cargo. This requested letter sounds like a new document to me. The letter had to be in French. I asked Cyril if it had to be in good French, because I didn’t trust my command of the language. He graciously offered to write the letter in French and fax it to us for us to sign and return to a guy in customs whose name and number he gave to me. I asked Cyril to be sure to put our name and phone number on the fax so that the little shop would know whom the letter was for and how to reach us. We waited about 20 minutes and decided we had better go into Mazan to the shop. It was getting late and they might close soon. We went in and the fax was there. Cyril had forgotten to put our phone number on the fax. We signed the letter and refaxed it to customs. Hoping all was well, we went home again. About an hour later, the phone rang again. It was Cyril. He said that he was having trouble setting up the delivery because he could not find the town of Mazan in the department of Var. I said that was because the town of Mazan is in the department of Vaucluse. Uh oh. He had told the truck driver it was in the Var and was not sure how he would be able to contact him. We now have a problem pending on the horizon. I will be at the bank Monday morning with M. Waibel, so if there are any problems, Robert will have to handle them, in French. Cyril told me that the truck driver not only speaks only French, he also speaks it with a strong Provençal accent. Poor Robert. Actually Robert is doing really well in French. He just starts in and people seem to be able to figure out what he is saying. He is no longer afraid to try. After dinner on Friday, Robert worked on the Internet and I did a little work on finances and portfolios. We went to bed at a reasonable hour and slept better than we have been. I guess we are beginning to settle in.

Day 9, Saturday, March 6: This was the most restful day we have had in France. Since there was not anything that had to be done by us, we didn’t even leave the house. Robert stayed on the Internet most of the day and I did some more laundry and basically puttered around. I finally kicked Robert off the Internet so that I could send an e-mail, but other than that I wrote in the journal and read the paper and did as little as possible. We need a day like that from time to time.

Day 10, Sunday, March 7: Sunday is the day of the big market at L’Isle sur la Sorgue, a pretty little town about 20 kilometers south of here. Most towns and villages have an outdoor market at least one day a week. Farmers bring produce, artisans brings things they have made and a large group of merchants go from market to market all week and never have a specific location for a store. Most markets start early in the morning and last till noon. If you don’t get there before ten, things are somewhat picked over. For us, it is best to arrive about 9:00 a.m., do our shopping, then just look around and watch the show, which is what we did today. The market at L’Isle sur la Sorgue is noted for the large number of antique dealers who bring items for sale. To me, a lot of it looked like a huge garage sale, but as I continued to look, I began to find things of interest to me. There are lots of hand embroidered linens, some very old, with other people’s initials on them. There are pillowcases, sheets, lace tablecloths and napkins and many other items of whose utility I am not sure. If I could have found initials of JK or RK I might have bought something, though they were certainly not cheap. It would be a shame to return home without something unique and French, but this was my first market and I have plenty of time. I need to get a feel of what is good and what isn’t. We stayed until a little after noon – it appeared that this market closes up around 12:30 – and then sat out-side for a cup of coffee and "crepe avec beurre et sucre". That is a French pancake, cooked on a portable hot pan right in front of us, slathered with butter and sugar. Very decadent and good. We had our coffee at a little brasserie on the bridge over the river Sorgue, sitting outside, very pretty day, just cool enough to need a light sweater, but warm in the sun. We are beginning to enjoy our new existence. We finally went home to Mazan and put away the things I had bough, mostly produce. We spent the rest of the day puttering around, working on the computer and watching TV. We were ready for the big day on Monday, the promised arrival of our shipment of things from Houston. We still have our fingers crossed on this one.

Day 11, Monday, March 8: As mentioned before, I had an appointment with M. Waibel at the bank at 9:30 a.m., to finish the transfer of our Bourges accounts to Carpentras. Today it was to be the US dollar account (if the computer in Avignon "marche bien" this time). Since both Robert and I must sign to transfer funds or to close an account, it would be much better if he could come with me, but we were worried that we would miss the arrival of the shipment. I decided to call Cyril again to check on things. Where we left it Friday was that he had given the driver the wrong department (like counties) and we were not all that certain that things were straightened out. Cyril said that yes, he had been able to contact the driver, and no, the shipment would not arrive in the morning. Was anyone surprised at that? The new ETA was around 2:00 p.m. It would be okay for Robert to go with me to the bank. In Provence, there is never any guarantee that things will happen by the time they are promised, but you can be absolutely certain that they will not happen before. Off we went to the bank, and things went smoothly. All of the computers seemed to be behaving themselves and our new account was set up in no time. We ran a few errands in town and them went home to wait for the shipment, without too much faith that it would actually arrive. We had lunch, then settled in with miscellaneous activities, trying not to think too much about the shipment. We were very surprised, therefore, when the gate buzzer sounded at ten minutes BEFORE 2:00 p.m. Could it be? It was! A very nice young man, who’s French was quite understandable, helped us unpack the large shipping carton and unload the 16 boxes of stuff we had shipped. What had we been thinking when we packed all of these things! Now the house, that looked so large, is beginning to look small. We are rapidly filling up every available space. Where will we put guests?! Actually, once we began to put things away, we managed pretty well. Robert went immediately to his computer and began to set it up. At last, there will be peace in the family. One computer just is not enough for two people who are accustomed to using the computer any time they want, and staying on for as long as they want. The unpacking process consumed most of the rest of the day. Robert got his computer working and hooked up to the Internet. There was a little more to it than he expected, but all is working properly now. Looks like we are about settled now.

Day 12, Tuesday, March 9: After some pretty cool days last week, the weather is beginning to warm up. This day promised to be really nice. I worked on unpacking for a while and Robert worked on the computer. The day was so clear, bright and warm, about 65, that I had a bright idea. We should take a bike ride so that I could begin to draw some of the beautiful scenery we see every day. Anyone who knows Robert knows that he was not much in favor of this idea. I finally persuaded him and we hauled the bikes out of the garage and started off. We had not gone more than 3 feet when Robert declared he wouldn’t go any farther on the incredibly hard and uncomfortable bike seat unless something was done. He went into the house and brought out a towel for a pad and we set off again. Robert complained non-stop about the discomfort and the danger from the small autos that whooshed by alarmingly fast. I kept remarking on how beautiful the countryside was and he kept saying that all he could see was the four feet in front of the bike. We rode a very short distance, no more than one kilometer, to a place where there was a good open view of Mount Ventoux. I sat down to sketch and Robert just sat down. He had forgotten to bring any papers or books to read. I sketched for about an hour while Robert lay down on the in the sunshine. An hour was as long as I felt I could push his cooperative attitude, so we packed up and went home. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, but I suspect it was the first and last bike ride of Robert’s stay in France. We spent the rest of the day puttering around the house. I did discover that I would need a LOT of practice with my sketchbook. The painting will come later. My two big projects while in France are to learn to speak better French and to take up painting again. So far, we have had very little time for either project. We knew that we didn’t speak enough French when we arrived, but didn’t realize how very limited our vocabulary was until we tried to begin "daily life". Fifteen years of travel didn’t prepare us adequately. What I had learned about food was how to order from the menu, or pick up essentials at the market. I had NO vocabulary for cooking food or getting it to the table. The same condition existed for the intricacies of banking, buying insurance, hooking up the Internet, washing and drying clothes with European appliances and on and on. We are getting better at the things just mentioned, but we still don’t have enough opportunity to speak with the people. Our accents are too difficult for them to understand. I am trying to find someone with enough patience to teach me how to pronounce better. It has been less than two weeks. Our comprehension and accents should improve.

Day 13, Wednesday, March 10: The weather was even warmer today. It got up to 70 degrees F. Now I am worrying that it will be like Houston and will be unbearable hot too soon. I shouldn’t worry yet. The evenings are crisp and cool, the humidity is low and the weather has the feel of spring to it, not an "almost summer" feel like Houston. We sat outside for part of the afternoon, and even Pucky was happy just to sit in the sun. Ashley went out with us, and when we decided to go into town for a few little things, she was nowhere in sight. I figured she would be okay, so we locked up the house and left. Robert is investigating whether or not he can begin flying at the aerodrome nearly. He would have to go in the planeur (glider) instead of flying a regular plane because of his history of heart problems, but he is eager to start. We went to the aerodrome, where Robert talked to the people there and got membership information. Now all he has to do is get over his miser’s colic, pay the money to join, and he can begin flying. We went into town and bought paper for the computer, got a few more colored pencils for me and then went home. Ashley was no where to be seen. I went around the yard calling, looked and called in the house, looked and called in the garage to no avail. No Ashley. A little later I went outside and called for quite a while, but got no response. I looked in the garage again and called. Nothing. It was beginning to get dark and I was getting worried about her. She is not a very adventuresome cat, and usually responds with a meow when I call her. I was afraid she had gone out into the neighborhood looking for us after the car drove off and had gotten lost. We had dinner, and then the phone rang. I had hopes it was a neighbor saying they had our cat, but it was an English lady we had stayed with last year when we were here. She knew we were living here now and invited us to dinner on Saturday night. That was an unexpected pleasure. We discussed the foibles of cats and hung up. I went out once more to look for Ashley. I checked the garage again, and out she walked, hungry. Why she never answered me when I kept calling I don’t know. Our little family was again complete. Robert was terribly disappointed that she had not disappeared. He tried to make concerned sounds when I was pacing about with worry, but he never did manage to be very convincing. It is obvious that our days are calmer now, when the short disappearance of the cat is the big event of the day.

Day 14, Thursday, March 12: My big project today was to make beef bourguignon for lunch, which takes about 1-½ hours. Instead, I started working on the computer as soon as I got up, and didn’t go to the kitchen all morning. By noon I hadn’t done a thing. Ah, the lazy life. My other project was to return to the scene of my sketches and finish a picture I was working on several days ago. It was another beautiful day, warm with clear blue skies. We had a simple lunch out on the terrace in the warm sun. It was delightful, and it reminded us of why we wanted to live here. We lazed around for a while, trying to convince ourselves we really should be doing something. I finally got around to going back to the sketch site and finished my drawing. Robert went with me and stretched out for a nap in the car. When I had finished my drawing, we didn’t want to go back to the house, so we took a long drive to several of the nearby communities. It was an altogether smashing afternoon. By the time we got back home it was 5:30. It was way too late to cook the beef bourguignon for dinner, so I started it anyway for tomorrow night. It ended up taking 2 hours just to prepare, and then had to cook for several hours more. Robert went out to get us a pizza for tonight. Today is the end of two weeks in Provence. The first week was hectic and frustrating, but still very pleasing. The second week has been idyllic. We are enjoying ourselves very much.