Christmas in July

Word on the street is that it has been blooming hot in the States.

Not so in Paris. Not so at all, my friend.

I am currently bundled in my duvet cover, blanket, and I have a pillow on my lap for extr warmth/iPad holding...in the 6th floor attic of an apartment building. There is no heat to rise right now, so my attic is nowhere near as toasty as I had fearfully predicted.

So, I may not be celebrating actual Christmas in July but the weather is close enough that I might as well. Since my arrival in mid-May I think we have only had three days over eighty degrees Farenheit. And it's mid-July. The girls at work are grousing because there has not been the opportunity to wear summer outfits to work. One of the grousers persists in wearing all black everyday even though it is, as I reminded you earlier in the post, mid-July. I guess there is not a happy place between all black and summer wear. Alas my light khaki summer suit sits forgotten in my closet, too.

Other than the grey and chilly weather, I have nothing new to report. I still have not yet decided on my plans for Bastille Day. My friends from work are pretty much all leaving the city to go elsewhere for the weekend, so I'll probably have to do something by myself. There are still some unexplored areas of Paris for me, and I just realized the other day that I haven't gone to this one museum I want to go to, so I'm just going to play it by ear.

Work is going well. I'm still playing catch-up from being out sick most of last week, and lots of people are on vacation so we are working with somewhat reduced capacity. I have gotten to do some pro bono work, which has been interesting and mostly comprised of immigration and translation work.

Oh, on an unrelated note I have a Wednesday pick-me-up for you. I was reading a book description on amazon (yes, for a free book) the other day that makes "caulking a gun" seem almost eloquent.

The description said something like: Mary Ann was determined to show Bobby that she was his solemate. iPad autocorrect likes to turn solemate into sole ate. So, there's that.

Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition!

It may surprise you to know that I don't really do very much in Paris. I go see movies, I walk around and window shop, I sit in Starbucks and enjoy my chai and this wonderful French Starbucks creation called the donut blanc (it's a donut enrobed in white and dark chocolate, also known as what I had for dinner today), but that's really it. Of course I've done the touristy stuff but after eight weeks in Paris and a limited budget, I'm kind of running out of classic tourist stuff to do.

My weekends are largely composed of reading free books on my kindle, or iPad/iPhone through iBooks. In fact, if you've never done this before I highly recommend giving it a shot just to see what kind of stuff people are putting out there for free. Sometimes it's good and sometimes it's horrific, but quite a few new eBook darlings (cough Fifty Shades of Grey cough Amanda Hocking cough) got their start as free or über-cheap books available on the kindle. Honestly, the most I pay for a book right now is $2.99, and that only when it's an author I know(ish) because I've read one of their free creations.

Sometimes, reading free kindle books is worth it for the sheer amusement value alone. My new goal (should I never find gainful employment as an attorney...I'm covering my bases) is to start an editing service for authors who are going to put their books on kindle for free or substantially reduced prices. I know I will make NO money, but I'm reading this crap for free anyways, I might as well edit it while I'm at it.

Which leads me to...my number one free book pet peeve -- homonym mistakes. And I'm talking beyond your usual your/you're to/two/too mistakes, which are annoying enough as it is.

I'm talking great literary gems like:

"He pailed at the sight of her blood."
No son, we pale at the sight of blood. Pail is a bucket.

"I can't believe she baled on us!"
Yeah, I'm not that fond of chicks when they bale hay on me either. God forbid she bail on me!

"The tight tank top really showed off her bear arms."
Like the Second Amendment? Granted, this actually could be a legit sentence. Teenage paranormal romance being its own genre now, I could see there being a character with a human form, all but her bare bear arms. Heehee.

"Yeah, mmhmm, she's always been kind of lose."
Really? Loose and lose aren't even homonyms!


And the grand finale....

"He heard the squeak of footsteps on the stairs and quickly caulked his gun."

I almost rolled of my loft bed when I read that one. I just pictured our handyman hero getting out the caulk in response to a potential home invasion, and then caulking his gun. Which really could not help the gun. Even though they test some of those things like underwater and what not, I can't see caulk forming part of the testing battery.


On another note, I made a stupido stupido mistake today. I pranced out of the house this morning, excited because I had been sick all this week and today I was feeling back like my old self. It was a beautiful day, and this niggling little thought told me, "Oh huh, I totes thought it was going to rain at some point today but the sunny cloudless sky this morning probably means it's not gonna, so NO NEED TO CLOSE THE SKYLIGHT OVER MY BED, nuh-uh."

About 6:00, I'm looking up stuff about how long you have to archive your tax records for in France, when Tropical Storm Debby's twin, Debbée, arrives in Paris. This was some serious rain, and I stare out the window in HORROR thinking about my poor bed and how it doesn't deserve it.

I arrive home long about 9:30, and clamber up the ladder to my loft bed to find it not quite as wet as I might have thought but still more than damp. I bust out my hairdryer and go to work, so that worked out well enough. But sadly, my stuffed friend Watercolor Bunny (I never got around to giving her a real name, that's just the model name from Build-a-Bear) got a little drenched as well.

So I bust out the hairdryer aging and try my darnedest to dry her off, too. It worked to some extent, but her fur is not quite as...fluffy as it once was.



Which reminds me of an old bear I had named Ali, short for Ali Ba Bear, if you must know. Dear Ali was hanging out in my car after I packed up my stuff to go home from college for the summer one time. I was staying at a hotel near my school because I was hanging out after dorm kick out day because of my DEAR COUSIN'S graduation and wedding. So, I moved some of my stuff into the hotel, thinking that I had left Ali safe and sound in the backseat.

Next day, after a torrential southern Illinois thunderstorm I'm trotting out to my cousin's car to go on some errand and I notice Ali sitting on my car's trunk. Sodden, sopping, with little bits of gravel on his face. I guess he tumbled out of the car when I was moving my stuff and someone put him on the trunk. Ali and I had never discussed his end of life care, so I made the executive decision to chuck him unceremoniously in the trash bin in front of the hotel. I think he was beyond the hairdryer method.

Ironically, I just noticed that the song playing while I wrote those last three paragraphs was "Bring on the Rain" by Jo Dee Messina. And who said iTunes shuffle doesn't have a sense of humor!

Cinéma-ing on the Cheap

Last semester, I took a survey course on the rules governing the  EU common market and the core EU freedoms (i.e., freedom to provide services, free movement of goods, freedom of establishment).

So why am I mentioning it? In the class, we read a decision from the European Court of Justice about selling DVDs (released in another EU Member State) in France before they were officially released in France. France is unique in the EU in that it has one of the longest (if not the longest) delays between when a movie first comes out in theaters and when it may be released on DVD. If I remember correctly, it’s one year.

Madagascar 3, then, will come out in Germany months before it comes out in France.
Trying to rectify this issue, foreign distributors (all the while crying “free movement of goods in the EU!”) wanted to be able to distribute DVDs already release in other parts of the EU in France, and claimed that France’s unusually long delay was a barrier to the free movement of DVDs within the EU. The European Court of Justice agreed that there was a barrier, but sided with France’s claims that the delay protected art and culture and French cinema, entertaining evenings with friends, etc. My professor noted that it really protects the movie theater industry (like a back door subsidy) more than it protects film as an art form, but hey.

Relevance to today, you ask? Well, the French National Cinéma Festival is in full swing this week (until Wednesday, at least) and I am taking advantage of it. Essentially, when you buy a full price ticket (or student price ticket for me), you get a cute little bracelet. Then for every showing thereafter, when you show your bracelet, the ticket is only € 2.50! This means that I went to see What to Expect When You’re Expecting on Sunday, and Madagascar 3 on Monday, and tonight I’m going to a movie, and Wednesday I’m going to a movie…you get the point.

On a side note, I adored Madagascar 3. I will even admit to quietly clapping my hands (and grinning like a fool) when things were working out well for Alex the Lion and his crew of lovable zoo escapees. My personal favorite character, I must admit, was the Italian sea lion Stefano. He's quite cute, although admittedly only of slightly below-average intelligence. The French crowd laughed at the jokes about France, and I had a BIG chuckle when they made fun of French labor law, saying that the monkeys (who work for the clever penguins) now only need to work 2 weeks out of the year. I have had to do a little French employment law during my internship, and although the French definitely work more than 2 weeks a year, it's still definitely a different legal landscape than the US!

What to Expect When You're Expecting was fluffy and I laughed, which is what I was looking for on the rainy, dismal afternoon that was last Sunday. I cracked up at the end because I noticed that the group of spectators in front of me was composed of 4 boys in their late teens -- no girls in sight. Not exactly the demographic What to Expect was expecting.

I'll let you know how my next two movies go. :)