Up up and away

It's the last day of maternelle class for my little Charlotte.  Next year she'll be a big girl in CP with a giant pink backpack strapped to her back and bits of important homework in the evenings.  I felt the twinge as I walked her to the door for the last time this morning.  It's the end of an era for me too-- babying and coddling and fretting over washing cloth diapers.  She's my last little one and it represents not just the end of babyhood but the end of all the things that built up to it, trying to even have a baby in the first place.

I kissed her like always but this time I walked her right up to the door and looked her in the eyes for just a few seconds so I could take a mental snapshot of the moment.  One day she'll be god knows where around the world studying god knows what and the phone will ring in her dorm room or her apartment and she'll tell her roomate "oh god if that's my mom will you just tell her I'm out"  but today she smiled and said "love you mom!  I'm sooooo excited because tonight we're getting ice cream after school, yay!! and she jumped up and down about twenty times, grabbing my hands in her excitiement and laughing.

The Dragon Lady Redux

This house is lovely and we've found that you can be happy here but we're wondering if it isn't a house we've outgrown.  It's stead us through a lot of things and we've always said we'd keep it but at the same time it's walls are a bit too close to the neighbors and the neighbors well,...meh.

A few months a go we watched as our new neighbor moved in,  difficult not to notice because he backed his new SUV up to the door and unloaded his handful of things all day, leaving the car there while he lunched on the port even though it blocks the passage for many people, including us.  Ours is a row house and the neighbor's house too is a row house but imagine if you took a nice row house and chopped it up into three tiny studio apartments, well there you'd have the Dragon Lady's lair, her financial goldmine-- one among many in our town.  The tenants change practically on a monthly basis it seems and they all are  either in chaotic circumstances or are a young couple with their first apartment eager to impress everyone with their party throwing skills.  In the summer if the places are empty she rents them as vacation rentals for the astronomical sum of 700 euros a week. At the end of  the day our newly divorced neighbor,a beefy chainsmoker, had loaded his last few boxes into the place and sat down on our steps to have a rest, lighting up a cigarette and pulling out his phone.  I wasn't sure if now was right for the speech..."sorry but this is actually our house and we don't smoke and could you please...and about the parking could you please and ..."     but I was tired so I let it go for the time being.  I'd just had to give this speech a few weeks ago and we had only just gotten to know the last tenant of the downstairs unit, a divorced 60 something year old.  He'd come down on his third day or so and knocked loudly on my windowpaned door, ignoring the bell.  He seemed to be in dire need of something and when I opened the door just before he was ready to rattle my panes for the third time he launched right into his discourse and insisted that he check his electrical counter inside my house.  "I think my counter is in the MAIN building so I need to get in"  he said exasperated. "I understood that he thought we we're the MAIN building so I tried to explain.  "Yes sir but my house is an individual house and has nothing to do with your apartment"  He rolled his eyes as if he was trying to explain to a person of indigenous origins how a telephone works.  "When does your husband come home so I can I ask him?"  He'd obviously seen Seb earlier the day before or something.  I was more amused than angry.  "I'll send him over when he gets home"    And before this lovely man the tenants were a young couple who used one side of my steps for their patio gardening, only their gardening skills were nil and I had to go out every morning to a stairwell full of shedding half dead plants that they never watered.  They used our step too for socialising, smoking and telephoning.  Seb thought the girl was pretty so he asked me not to bother them about mundane things like cigarette butts by our mailbox or loud midnight phone calls under Charlotte's window,  "they seem harmless enough"  They stayed for 8 months leaving behind a few bedraggled plants in their wake.  I'd had enough of them.

There's also the main issue which is the parking issue.  Parking on our street is actually not allowed but we all do it anyway, we have to.  We all park one discreet little car in front of each one family house, and there is the unwritten rule that we park in front of our own houses.  But in the case of the rental house there are often three cars for the unit.  And when there are three cars for one house guess where they park?   And since they don't participate in the community they could care less about unwritten rules or how to be a good neighbor.     Toleration.  I try to practice that as my mantra but I feel like I'm the unpaid manager of an apartment complex and I feel like I'm always explaining the rules and being the bad guy.

Under the cadastral map of our home we actually co-own the landing area directly in front of the Dragon Lady's apartment housing and so luckily we have a say in things like whether or not her neighbors can put out chairs and tables and pull the cars right up to the windows and leave them.  She also has to approve things like mailboxes with us and anything else she puts there.  We own our stairs but that part we both own.  The mailboxes are the latest issue and have caused a stalemate on both our sides.  It all seems overblown on our part but it isn't if you knew the Dragon Lady and how she works.  Believe me when I say that you'd understand.  In the past she's tortured us with issues.   She even sued us and our roofers and had her entire roof done at our expense by lying to an insurance expert.  He admitted to us that she was lying and that the problem she was touting was pre-existing and not our roofer's fault, but he couldn't prove it on paper and in these cases the insurance companies find it cheaper to settle than to enter into litigation...not the first problem we've had with her.  She has sent us at least 18 recommended letters over the years for cracks and repainting walls and this and that--you name it.  She is a piece...of something.  A few weeks ago after being gone all morning I walked up to find her worker cronie attaching mailboxes to our shared wall where the only access to get the mail was to climb onto our steps.  We'd already said no to this spot and suggested she put the mailboxes on her own wall but she went stealth under the radar and did it, or was doing it anyway.  I don't usually get angry with elderly people but I felt my blood rising to my face and in a voice that wasn't my own I swear I let out a burst of pent up frustration and what can only be described as acute intoleration.  I told her exactly how I felt about her, the steps, the renters and her ugly smoke infested apartments.  And it felt GREAT!  I know forgiveness is a glorious thing and she's one of my soul partners here to teach me that lesson and a few more, but at that moment I just needed to release it and let her have it all back.  I think I shocked her.  I'm pretty sure she thought I couldn't even speak French.

A week later she told all the neighbors about the incident and so now everyone is weird with me.  In her version of the story she isn't the Dragon Lady but a feeble old, helpless woman with a sick husband who was only maintaining her properties when suddenly she was attacked by the most foulest of foreigners.  One neighbor said she told her I was the town gossip which had me laughing.  I'm sure I get gossiped about but I hardly think I'm the one capable of keeping track of our village and it's humdrum happenings.

I'm unsure if we'll stay here forever.  The curse of The Dragon Lady takes a lot of the fun out of things and even if we love it here, the constant battles are draining.  But it would be a shame to have to sell because of her wouldn't it.

More on the Dragon Lady from back in 2005

Emotional coaster

I pretty much knew these last few days would be zingers and I wasn't wrong.  Whenever you walk into your old life and look around and walk back out it's always a little gut wrenching.  We did a lot of that this past weekend.  The house* in the Paris 'burbs was empty and new renters were coming so we were forced to make a quick trip up north to check it out and prepare it for the new people arriving three days later.  We couldn't put it off any longer.

Just for the record I was right in my evaluation of the first renter and his ego.  I never got a chance to blog about it; but he didn't pay the rent much and left behind some serious messes and a mailbox full of recommended letters.  Call it women's instict but  we will have to pay to have the brand new living room floor resanded because his little dog peed everywhere and left stains on the floor and even on the wall.  Did I mention how much I hate renting out this house.  If we could sell it and get out from it with our shirts partially intact I would do it in a heartbeat but no lender can seem to help us find a way out...unfortunately.

Otherwise it's a very pretty house and I'm still a proud parent when I walk through and see all the work we did.  Scraped knuckles, elboow grease, paint plastered in hair,  it was an extremely  rough three years where the payoff was in pure beauty.   I was very relieved that the previous renter didn't paint the doors or woodwork, whew!, and that they pretty much left everything as was.  That was a good point in their favor.  The new renters seem a bit fussier and had a list of projects that they wanted done before moving in, odd because we had five people stop and ask about renting the house just in the short time we were there, desperate people asking if they had any chance to get in.  We did one or two things on the list but stopped short of painting the pipes in the hallway and things like that.  The old plumbing pipes I find really interesting, --from turn of the century and stamped with a scrolled GDF logo--so I'd  purposely taken the old paint off and left them bare.  Projects like that freaked me out a bit.  Hopefully they won't cancel 19 hours of laborous scraping and polishing and paint them all white!  You see why I'd love to just sell it.

We saw old neighbors and had way too many aperos and dinners and wished very fleetingly that we could move back.  I'd had it out with the Savoie Dragon Lady right before we left from home for this trip so I was feeling a bit dejected and unneighborly and lets face it vunerable.   It was a much needed dose of friendliness.   But as we all know you can't step twice in the same river, the river and you change so it never works.  It was kind of like that.  The town seemed suddenly small; the people were still fabulous and nice but the atmosphere seemed stale and I quickly noted that nobody got out and walked much or participated in many activities.  I remembered being like that when we lived there. I was a wallflower in house slippers puttering monotonously about my life, internalized.  It was probably the right moment for it because Charlotte was just a baby, but it couldn't have lasted much longer and it left its mark on my personal life.

After leaving this house for the last time three years ago we moved to China and Seb and I seperated and set about the process of filing for divorce.  It was a bittersweet moment to step back inside and see the scars of our marriage all over the place.  We slept in sleeping bags on the floor and I tossed and turned reliving all those moments the four days we were there.  It was such a mix of feelings handing the keys over to the agency to rent the house to new people.  I wished we were handing it over to new owners instead.  It's almost like that house and holding on to it is like holding onto a moment where everything wasn't quite working.  We came home, brim sloshing with  angst and stepped onto the doorstep of here our little Savoie house bought when we were newlyweds, childless and terribly optimistic.  It has a lighter feel and Dragon Lady neighbor aside it is a happy place with a good history.   As difficult as the four day weekend was it helped put a perspective on everything.

*(if you care to read about this house's history and how we redid it go to Labels in the sidebar and link to This Old House 2)

Happiness is....

To clelebrate Spring a little blog post about my happy spots these days.  Yeah I know it's been awhile since I've popped in here.  I've just been cooped up in my art den drawing scratching off the days until the sun arrives.  I haven't been doing much else.  I've had lots of interests.  My brain is constantly churning but mainly it's centered on those few categories of interests that keep me happy.  It doesn't take much!

Art makes me happy.  I bought a new sketchbook last month and finally; finally FINALLY filled the one I started in November 2009.  I had such a bad relationship with that book.  I don't know why but it just had no identity.  I like my new book.  It's an 8x11 Canson 100g sketch and I'm loving it.  My goal is a drawing a day for the next year and that should have me filling it by one year with four drawings per page.  I'm only drawing in pencil now too.  Big change for me since I've drawn for the last five years in pen.  Funny though because I did that graphite ATC challenge a few months back and now I'm really comfortable with pencil again.  Reminds me of art classes in school all over again with the little tin box of drawing pencils, all serious about which one to use!  Nowadays I just grab an Ikea pencil and get sketching.

I can go on and on about art and fill pages about my workshop I'm conducting, ATC's I'm trading and art journaling but I'll save that for other posts.

Books make me happy too.  I'm thinking about making a vow here to myself to read more starting now.  I've got to get back to reading.  I've set a little challenge for myself to read a book a week but I think I'll make it three books a month instead.  I can order three paperbacks from Amazon and score free shipping with three books.  Anyway, I've been living in a cave since having kids and I haven't read much in the last seven years so any suggested reads, even the obvious ones, will be duly noted.  Right now I'm reading Loves and  Louis XIV by Anotonia Fraser.  I like me a good historical read any day.

Fashion makes me happy.  I have a a place to play now.  My closet ie. my fashion playground, looks amazing.  I'm so pleased with it.  It was a year in the making and made on a super small budget but it turned out so nice.  My husband is so cool that he's also building me a shoe closet downstairs that will hold over 200 pairs of shoes.   And yes I do have over 200 pairs of shoes--mostly heels that I barely wear because I have to hike uphill four times a day to deliver my kids to school, but I have them for when I want to wear them in the house and you know, check the mail.  I probably have way too many clothes and accessories but I'm a girl and it's my prerogative (ear worm alert)

Makeup is another happy spot.  I'm totally addicted to those You Tube makeup bloggers  (Michele Phan, Ruth Crilly...), so much so that Charlotte is addicted to watching them too.  No excuses.  A guilty pleasure like chocolate.  I've perfected lots of makeup in the past year watching these videos.  Charlotte watches them on her own.  She even has her own little makeup table in the bathroom.   She  is nothing like me at that age.  I was such a tomboy.  I guess my mother being a hairdresser  and makeup artist turned me off from it until I was a teenager.  Charlotte is the only five year old that can do a smokey eye.

Complaint time.  Why is makeup so expensive in France?  I would love to have a cheap option right up the street but no it costs a fortune.  I am in dire need of a visit home to spend all my piled up birthday money at CVS.  I can spend hours in that pathetic little store.  Talk about happy spots!

Cooking makes me happy.  I am still eating 80 percent raw vegan foods, but I have been baking for my family.  I got a bread machine which I love.  It's my new best friend.  I love the way you can just start it up and go.  I haven't got the kids 100 percent sold on it yet because they're so picky and so used to chemically filled sliced bread (my bad).  The machine bread is really good though.  It's really fun to make.  On Sundays I still cook traditional lunch and dinner.  That's why I'm 80 percent raw and not 100.    Each Sunday I make a feast from my Julia cookbook.  I miss cooking if I don't get out the pots and pans.  This weekend  I'll indulge completely.  Easter holds no boundaries.  I'm even eating cheese.

Lots of other things make me happy but those are just a few silly ones off the top of my head!

Hey baby it's cool man

The kids are on vacation and so am I for a few weeks and  this means we have more time for art and I can sign up for some more trades with all my down time.  Here's a fun one I just finished called called "Lost in the 70's"  I decided to do Linda, Elton, Jim and David.

Elton didn't quite get it right but he was really fun to draw.  I can see myself doing a whole series of Eltons and Bowies based on their chhh.chhh...changes.