Pain Complet*

*translation: whole-grain bread

Hey, I came to France a year ago mid-March.  And this is now actually my second-longest romantic relationship.  Oh what crazy things come to pass with relatively stable housing.  (-And with men who speak French.  Is it a coincidence?)

Today we hauled off all the remodeling detritus and declared the work officially done.  I still need to find a desk and chair for my...office? I don't really do any work, so what should I call it?  A friend had a She-Shed, filled with arts and crafts supplies, where we'd decoupage and paint and she'd smoke weed so as not to disturb her adorable son asleep in the house.  Here, I have a sort of siding (white-painted cladding) on the walls, and the car is parked outside the window, conferring a somewhat garage-like feel on the room.  I don't yet know if the vibe of my old Alaska dorm decor will fit this more conventional space (ie: free brochure maps, pastel-shaded pages of adult coloring books, postcards ranging from Beaux-Arts illustrations of the night sky to animals with glitter to Route 66-type kitsch to mediocre food photography).

Most significantly, I have someone encouraging me to write.  Who himself likes to write, and talk about what we read, and how we formulate our ideas and our sentences.  Sitting, biting your nails a little, leafing through the thesaurus, talking to yourself, and looking at how the sunlight changes and moves; trying to both look at something and imagine at the same time, to describe it precisely but also in your own way.  Whether or not it is work, it is good to have a place to work it out.

not pictured: bike path into the woods 

Jean-François's office is the perfect writing shack

Something possessed the previous owners to paint the wall behind the bed midnight blue; we have eliminated all trace of this tomfoolery.

my office is a cluttered blank canvas 

We also spent many hours repainting the BROWN walls and *ceiling* of the bathroom.  Jean-François's godson is a master carpenter and all-around swell guy, and added the window in my office, opened a wall between the bathroom and the separate toilet room just next door, walled over the former toilet room door, built cabinets, and kept us in good humor while everything and everyone was covered in plaster dust.