They Are Coming, Version 2.0

Today's pic is a nice shot I snapped on the way back from our Sunday at Quimiac. While France is not as experimental in the use of wind power as some other countries, this particular windmill is really operational, though I suspect it's usage is more scenic than practical.

A lot has happened since I last wrote. The government has completely scrapped the CDE employment contract in a humiliating climbdown that proves the current administration really is as toothless as international jokes make it out to be. My own feelings were best summed up in the Expatica article on the hysteria surrounding "Le Précarité" - the total shock evidenced by people's reactions here to a bill that would likely greatly reduce youth unemployment by making it easier to fire poor employees. Heavens above! I might have to survive through a two year period when I could be fired! How can anyone live with such stress??

Ahem, sorry, my sarcasm is showing...

In other news, Em and I are braced for Parental Visit 2.0, or "Emily's Parents Strike Back", or "Parents 2, Electric Boogaloo". In theory, they are coming at the end of this month. I say "in theory" because Emily's parents utilize a planning and traveling style that is so diametrically opposite to my parents as to be impenetrable to me. During the lead-in to my parents' visit, my mother would email me nineteen times a day questioning every tiny aspect of the trip - Is this pre-paid, is this reserved, have these tickets come yet, how do we get from X to X, etc. It was a fully prepared, micromanaged, highly scheduled operation that ran like a tactical military assault (and pretty much left all of us dead from exaustion once their ten days here were up). By contrast, Em's parents don't even seem to have their plane tickets yet, and their date of arrival is supposedly barely two weeks away. We're not sure exactly when they're coming, where we'll be meeting them, or whether they will actually come. Emily seems content with this vagueness, so I assume it is normal operating procedure and simply float along making pipes, expecting at any moment for them to turn up without notice on the doorstep.

The nice thing about this more-relaxed approach is that I expect their visit to be the same - a peaceful couple of weeks of casual walking about and birdwatching, instead of the hardcore Griswold's European Vacation experience of my parents' visit. ("C'mon kids, we've got nine thousand three hundred works of art to see, and the Louvre closes in fifteen minutes!") So, if people wonder why the website goes quiet for a few weeks of early May and there aren't frequent new pipe updates, it will be because we're all sitting in an outdoor café somewhere in a tiny rural village finishing up our lunchtime crépes and trying to figure out what European bird variant is nesting in the steeples of the gothic church tower.