The last few days have been the idyllic sort that make me live this state. Warm to hot days, walking the dogs in the woods and then going to the river to swim. Freezing cold water that feels refreshing for the minute it takes for your body to start going numb, then standing up to get warm and skipping stones, wallowing in the joy of nature (and of dog joy).
Evenings are cool, nights are chilly, and sleep is heavy.
Drove to New Hampshire to pick my sister up from the airport today. We went to Portsmouth for a late lunch and walked around for an hour or so before heading home. Tomorrow I work early and Wednesday we're off to Montreal for a final visit. Very excited. I can already taste the date nut bar I will be buying first thing at the pastry shop in the Jean Talon market. Mmmm.
On that note, off to bed.

The rest of my Chicago trip was also fairly hectic. Did I mention that we're moving back? Oh, yeah- so we're moving back. In three weeks. I just gave my notice at work, so now I can officially talk about it without fear that I may have mentioned this sill blog to some random co-worker a year ago and they are out there, lurking, waiting for me to admit that I have been interviewing for jobs back home since January and that oh yeah- I'm out of here.
So there's that. I will be working at a Large Natural Foods Chain, also as Wine Buyer. The money is not great, but the benefits are, and there is no Oddfellows Local 151 and therefore room for growth and an opportunity for merit pay and some bleeding advancement, for the love of gods. Mostly there will be live music and ethnic food and non white people and friends and family. We are scrambling to find housing at present. It is not fun.
Kilgore has apparently lost his mind. He has broken through three window screens in the past month, the last one being the one in our 2nd floor bedroom. The b.h. got a call from our landlord while he was at work. The message said that the dog was on the roof of our porch. The b.h. ran home to find Kilgore lounging on the roof in the shade or our maple tree, without a care in the world. This does not bode well for our move. It's one thing if the five neighbors that we have known for three years have to deal with him, and entirely another when we're the new kids on the block. *Shudder*

The conference I attended vacillated between mildly interesting and wildly annoying. My roommate was a woman in her late fifties or early sixties (going on a hundred, I'd say). When she walked into our hotel room, I was sitting on the bed sending text messages. I couldn't see the door from there, so when she said loudly
"Oh, she's here now," I was not aware that she was alone.
When she came around the corner, I stood up and stuck my hand out to shake hers.
"Hi, I'm Heybartender."
She looked at it as if I had offered her a wet turd and said
"Yeah, I put that together."
She ambled over to her side of the room, plopped into the chair, and asked what time I had gotten in.
"I got in last night at about one in the morning."
"Then where have you been all day?" she demanded. I wondered if I was about to be grounded. It seemed as if she hadn't noticed that I had dropped my suitcase off at noon before I went out with my tour group, and for some reason it made her suspicious. I answered her very curtly, and then her phone rang. I texted my sister saying I was going to need a place to stay and left the room without another word.

There were seminars and a dinner, and after everyone was going to one of three get-togethers, all of which promised expensive drinks and terrible company. At the end of dinner, I sprinted up to the room, packed a small bag of overnight essentials, and headed directly to the parking lot. I left my suitcase on the bed, hoping The Roommate would sleep fitfully without the chain lock on the door.
My sister hadn't answered my texts, so I got in touch with my friend T, and headed down into the city to crash with him. He made me some pizza rolls and other various frozen veggie fare (another lovely aspect of the Airport Hotel is the fact that there were exactly two places to eat, one very expensive sit down place and a sort of grab-and-go sandwich counter area that was also incredibly expensive, as well as having almost no vegetarian food and always, always a line thirty-odd people long) and we talked for an hour or so before I finally had to go to sleep. I was up very early the next morning, bright of eye and bushy of tail as I often am when I wake up in a city. I dressed and washed up quickly and tip-toed out so as not to wake T. I went to a bakery right near my old apartment and got a huge cup of delicious coffee, an egg and spinach and feta sandwich on a croissant, and a dessert pastry, all for the same price that I had paid for a small cup of coffee and a shitty bagel at the hotel. It was glorious. I drove back out to the airport feeling fabulous. The day went fairly quickly, and the seminars were interesting. The Roommate was in my second one, and slept through the bulk of it, at one point waking herself up when she started snoring too loudly. At the lunch break I left again and drove a couple miles down the road to an Italian place, where I bought a big bag of fries and Ravioli with marinara from a guy who looked like an extra from Goodfellas. I caught a couple people eying my greasy fry bag hungrily during the next seminar, and ate them slowly and smugly at the next break in front of a long line of people waiting for their seven dollar pizza slices. Saturday night I pulled the same trick with The Roommate, leaving for my sister's without a word and my suitcase still on the bed. I slept soundly again, and again woke up feeling refreshed. Sunday was a short day, with only one seminar and a longer presentation on the Global Economic Shitshow.

My flight was cancelled, and for some reason no one bothered to announce that fact an passengers were not alerted until we approached the desk at the gate fifteen minutes after we were supposed to begin boarding. I walked up just as the young lady in front of me was simultaneously bitching at the woman behind the counter and the person on the other end of her cell phone.
She was probably nineteen or twenty, and acting like a complete asshat. I went downstairs to the other desk and got in line. After several minutes, I got to the front of the line and the man behind the desk put me on a flight to D.C., where I would then hop another flight to Chicago. I would be landing four hours later than originally planned. Fine.
I killed forty-five minutes, then boarded without incident.
On the flight to DC, the nineteen-year-old sat behind me next to a British guy. She proceeded to talk at him for most of the flight, which is how I learned that she had been sent to Ohio, where her parents would drive five hours each way to pick her up.

So I'm at the airport, waiting for a flight to Chicago. There is a conference there that I am attending as a member of Oddfellows Local 151.
I have other irons in other fires there as well, but more on that later. For the time being, I am focusing on beer and food and family waiting on the other side of this flight.
Work has been a bit trying lately. The weather has been mostly shit, too, so I haven't had much to say lately. Hopefully there will be fun stuff to report this weekend.

NOTE: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH NEW BLOGGER. I DID NOT COMPOSE THIS IN ONE LONG, STUPID, UNREADABLE PARAGRAPH, BUT THAT'S HOW IT IS PUBLISHING. IF ANYONE CAN HELP ME, I WOULD BE MUCH OBLIGED. Our friends from The Business were here last week. They played a show on Sunday night in Montreal and then had two days off before a show in Northampton, Mass., so they stopped and spent a night with us. I wanted very badly to see them in Montreal, but as usual I had no one to go with me and the b.h. doesn't actually get weekends, ever, so I stayed home and cleaned the entire house instead. I'm actually lucky, because the house was less than sanitary, and as you all know nothing forces a scrub down like impending house guests. One of the charming/alarming things about our hundred-plus year-old house is that it leans. It leans forward a lot and to the right (stage right, if you're facing it from the front) very slightly. Thus, if you drop or spill something on the floor, it generally races to one corner of the room. Our toilet seat is also a victim of the lean, and we always warn male guests not to lift the seat because it has a tendency to close itself unexpectedly (and yet the lid stays up- do not ask me how or why), and we don't want any... injuries. When the guys arrived, they were accompanied by C, their usual merch guy, as well as A, who is a professional photographer. Our house is approximately 800 square feet, so six house guests is pretty amusing, to say the least. Luckily the dogs are quite fond of them. The b.h. had made a big meal and I grabbed a twelve pack on my way home, so we all sat around eating, drinking, and catching up for a bit and then headed down to the b.h.'s bar. As we were getting ready to leave, Kilgore went over to S, the drummer, and lifted his leg as if to pee. I didn't see it immediately, so when I shouted at him I didn't know if he had already done it, and I was alarmed. S was unfazed. "Did he just pee on you?!" "If he did I probably deserved it." He didn't even look down, and I wasn't sure if that was a definite yes or a definite no, so I pulled Kilgore closer to me and kept trying to look without S noticing. We walked down the very precarious hill, R's boots slapping the pavement as he attempted to slow himself down. "I could drive some of us," I offered. "Then I can shuttle everyone in two groups on the way home." He said he was fine and joked about walking like a girl in her first pair of high heels. The bar was busy, but there were enough seats for most of us. The b.h.'s boss came over and talked for a few minutes, in the slightly too loud and slightly too cheerful manner of a man who has just finished a twelve hour shift. S has only recently discovered Truck Nuts(Lorry Bollocks for my British readers), a phenomenon which the rest of the country has been aware of for at least several years now, and he was eager to discuss said product with the guys. That subject, combined with his volume and enthusiasm, was weird bordering on creepy. He must have realized it, because he made an abrupt exit a few minutes later. I was relaying the story about Kilgore possibly peeing on S, and R shook his head, laughing. "He is just not very aware. You can say to him, "Hey S, watch out for this thing right here. Don't touch it because it's really fragile, okay?" And like, five minutes later you hear a crash and he's standing there in front of a pile of broken glass going, 'What? I didn't know!'" I felt better. I ended up getting a ride back to the house from our neighbor and going back to shuttle everyone to the top of the hill. I used them as an excuse, but really I didn't feel up to walking it either. We watched the end of the (crappy and disappointing) Blackhawks game, and then set about finding space for everyone to sleep in. They had air mattresses, and we have a guest bed and two couches, so we made it work. The b.h. was filling everyone in on the shower (another part of our house that is a bit finicky and dangerous), and I reminded him about the toilet seat. "We've been through that," he said. "I made sure to tell them about it as soon as they got here." "Yes, we don't want anyone slamming their dick in the seat," I laughed.

I had to be at work at 8am, so I turned in. Exhausted, I immediately fell sound asleep. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of the toilet seat and the strangled cry of a drummer.

Why has Blogger gone and changed again? I hate this new system. I liked that before I could start a draft and regardless how long it took me to finish, the date would be the start date. This whole "publish date" nonsense is putting things out of whack. This will be of no use to me as a journal if I can't have proper dates. Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap.

Life at the Local Grocery has been irritating since I returned. Don't get me wrong- I am more enthusiastic than ever about wine, and I think my customers are responding. Sales have been great, tastings well-attended, and I have been feeling very good about my job and the future of the department.

My co-workers, though, have been really wearing on me. The constant whining and negativity is exhausting. It's like I work in a middle school, or an asylum. Ugh. There is a very entitled attitude from many of them, and many of our customers as well, and the combination isn't good.

I was able to attend a very nice dinner with a local couple who makes mead, though, and that was interesting. We first toured the meadery. It was my friend C and me (the b.h. had to work so he couldn't make it), and some people from another local winery. The Mead Makers had invited us because we all sell their mead and they wanted to thank us for being good customers. The Winemaker from the other winery interrupted the mead guy every third sentence to tell us how *he* did things differently in the winery. I wanted to punch him in the mouth at the three minute mark. Needless to say, dinner was long. I placed myself carefully at the opposite end of the table at the restaurant. Mead Guy and I had a fascinating conversation about how he and his wife sold all of their belongings, joined the Peace Corps, and wound up in South America, where they learned beekeeping. Honey led to mead, and now they have a pretty little shop in the middle of nowhere in Vermont, and they make mead and ice cream (in the summer) and have a great life. The Winemaker inserted himself into the conversation whenever possible, and actually tried to start an argument with me about Demeter certification, which was silly since I had just returned from Austria and was fairly well-versed on the subject. His wife was oblivious, but the two people who worked for him were clearly uncomfortable. I somehow managed to gracefully side-step his arguments, even though he was wrong on many levels and I would have loved to tell him what a twat he is. The best part? I carry his wines, I have always thought that they were mostly crap, and now I have even less motivation to recommend them. Bravo, sir. On that note, The Local Winemaker from Hell, whom you may remember from last year- you know, the guy that demanded that I carry all of his products and display them at eye level because he is the most local? Yeah. Charming, that one. So he came in and made a complete ass of himself again, this time not abusing me (thankfully, or I would likely be typing this from a jail cell)but rather several of my co-workers. I immediately pulled all of his product from the shelf and sent an e-mail to his distributor asking them to pick it up. Quite satisfying, that was. I can't wait to see what happens when he notices.

"Paris is so full of shit. Can't the dogs use the pay toilets?"

This was my first "note to self" after a quick jaunt around the Latin Quarter. It was really my only complaint, and I think the reason it was so shocking was simply the stark contrast between the quantity of shit on the sidewalk and the comparative civility of everything else in Paris. The b.h. And I spent most of the first couple days walking- we did more than ten miles on our first day, plus whatever distance we walked in the Musee d'Orsay. We started out going through the grounds at the Palais du Luxembourg, walked up to the museum, then went up the road to the Grand Palais and the slightly less grant (Petit?) Palais across the road. We stopped for baguettes and cafe noir at a small stand, and when we saw the Arc, we decided to head toward it. A longng walk and 344 stairs later we found ourselves staring down at the French equivalent of Chicago's Miracle Mile, with all of the excess and douchebaggery and perfumed tourists behind us. It was beautiful, but we were glad to be above the fray.
After that we made the long trek to the Eiffel Tower, which we chose not to climb. The Tower was even more striking than I had expected, actually, which was great. We were embarrassed by how blasé we had become by the time we had finished the Impressionists in the d'Orsay, but we couldn't help it. There had been a feeling of overload, of "oh look, there's another world famous masterpiece- oh, and there's another. Are you hungry? I think I want coffee, too." I'm not sure that having such large collections of the same artists (Monet and Manet, in this case) is as impactful (is that a word?) as having just a few. Don't get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It's just that each new thing kind of wipes out the wonder of the last, and by the end of the day I had barely held onto the morning's highlights. Luckily I took literally thousands of pictures.
We walked and walked and ate and looked around with our mouths open a lot. The first couple days we mostly got food from the market downstairs from our apartment and ate inside, collapsing from exhaustion on our couch/bed with a bottle of wine and some fresh bread and cheese after walking all over creation.
Then our friends from Sweden showed up.
You may remember our friend J(male) from the many dinner parties of the last two years, many of which involved more wine than food. He is living back in Sweden now, and he and his wife D joined us on Sunday. Thus began the Bacchanalia. We met for breakfast on the first day, then walked around taking in sights for a couple hours, then stopped for a drink, and then coffee, then more walking, and then a snack and another drink, after which we would find a place to have dinner and more drinks. Since both J and the b.h. are fond of eating feet and brains and rare meat and parts of animals that most Americans wouldn't go near, we were treated mostly very well by the members of staff at the restaurants and cafes. The language barrier was a challenge, but mostly we found it pretty easy to get what we needed. I think my favorite things were the outdoor markets. I was amazed at the array of food to be had right in the middle of any random street. Also, as expected, the fashion was fabulous. I was impressed by the colorful array of stockings and tights on women of every age in the City of Light. I did not, however, find anywhere to shop for the good stuff. I mean, I could have forked over a month's rent for some over-priced crap at one of the designer stores on the Champs Elysees, but that's the same over-priced crap available at the same stores in any city, so I didn't feel inclined. In fact, we couldn't really find much of anything to buy, which was slightly disappointing. I bought a copy of Christpher Hitchens' Blood, Class, and Empire at Shakespeare and Company, but more books wouldn't have been practical. There were stalls and stalls and stores and stores full of tacky garbage - striped "French" shirts that no one in their right mind would be caught dead in, berets bedazzled with the word Paris, and, perhaps most puzzlingly, many variations on an apron with a picture of a kitten wearing both the aforementioned "French" shirt and a beret, with the words "I (Heart) Paris". I am not sure what the market for these products is, but since we were there in the off season, I guess we were mostly spared the type of people who would purchase such things.
The Louvre was everything I expected it to be. We decided not to even try to see most of it, and instead went directly to the Etruscan, Roman, and Greek section. We also managed to see a bit of Ancient Egypt, and stopped by some of the more famous works (Mona and Venus), since we were already walking past. Everything was wonderful. Napoleon's apartments were also quite impressive- a monument to one man's outsized ego. Again I was relieved not to be there during the height of tourist season, since it was crowded enough already. We actually avoided talking in front of other English speakers as much as possible, since neither of us was particularly interested in getting stuck talking to other Americans. This strategy served us well until the last night in town.
The four of us went to dinner at a higher-end, highly regarded restaurant, and no sooner had we sat down and ordered than a couple sat down next to us at the banquette. They were big and loud and stereotypically American in a way that makes me cringe and want to claim Canadian citizenship. When our food started to arrive, the man would lean over, his face only inches from each of our arriving plates, and point and ask "What's that?!". We tried hard to be nice but avoid engaging him. It wasn't easy. At the end of the meal, he finally broke the imaginary wall between our tables completely to have a loud (this tiny, elegant restaurant seated maybe thirty people) conversation about tipping. It was horrible. My favorite was the part where he said, typically of a particular brand of self-important New Yorkers, that when he was younger, he used to live in "The City" (As if there is only one. See #9 on this Post from one of my favorite bloggers for an entertaining observation on the subject). I chose to think of that experience as a useful reminder of how little we had actually had to put up with while we were there.
So yes, we enjoyed Paris. we will probably be going back at some point. Here's a random smattering of photos:


fish at the market

An illicit photo I took inside Shakespeare and Company. The signs said not to take pictures "in order to respect readers", so I used my phone and took them when no one else was around.

This is a stained glass window in the Cluny Museum. I sent this picture as a post card with the caption "Ouch. Quit it." Medieval Christians were not a terribly upbeat bunch.

This was taken at a very touristy little spot next to the bookstore. That's a glass of 2003 Medoc in the foreground, and Notre Dame in the back. Best thirteen Euros I spent all day.