Memories of Summer

Here's a little reminder of summer weather, now that we're mired in the rains of autumn. This was taken at a backyard lunch with our friend Marie-Blanche and her family. MB's husband Marcel is a professional chef, so one can imagine what his "picnics" are like! This is also a funny pic because it's one of the few that show both Emily and myself, since normally it's always one or the other of us taking the shot.

Like the pipe pic blog, this is a bit later than intended in being updated, because of me trying to finish up the four pipes I just posted. I am going to be so happy (and so exhausted) when all the Halloween pipes are finished and we can relax...

The last few days have seen a frenzy of transatlantic emailing as my parents finalize the details of their trip here for Christmas. We are trying to cover every detail and provide back-up plans for the back-up plans (Which reminds me, I need to find an English speaking member of the pipe club in Paris who is willing to be an "emergency number", in case Emily and I are abducted by aliens or something en route to the airport). Helping them plan has brought back memories of our final trip over. It's impossible to describe what it's like to be looking out an airplane window knowing that everything you own is on your back or on a boat, and you are leaving an entire life behind. It was exhilerating and terrifying - mostly, it just felt like being genuinely 100% alive. We don't have a lot of moments in life that are frozen in our memories forever. Most of the ones we have seem to stop as we finish with childhood and our adult lives become one long hazy corridor lined with grey doors and bills, without a lot of genuine moments to punctuate it, so it's nice that I've picked up a few more vivid memories to decorate the walls with. People always ask me, "WHY did you move to France?" There are about a hundred answers to that question, but maybe the most essential one is, "Because I did not want to be lying in my deathbed at 85 or whatever, looking back and thinking that I didn't have the courage to live a little more".

And the Halloween movie of the day is............ "Undead". This low budget indie film from Australia was clearly an attempt to do a modern day Peter Jackson flick, sort of "Bad Taste" with CGI. It's a very over-the-top horror comedy, a genre quite hard to do well, and I can say immediately that Undead has some of the silliest and funniest scenes I've seen in anything SINCE "Bad Taste". That is, at least for the first two thirds of the film. Had the last part been as excellent as the first two acts, it would have been a masterpiece of low budget cinematic zombie cheese, but alas, it goes downhill and in about fifteen random directions and by the end, we were just sort of staring blankly at the screen as "stuff" kept happening louder and louder. Overall, a fun flick, worth a rental if not a buy-al.