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just a quick note to say i've finally finished putting up the photos from our rome trip. some scribblings too. probably could have left some of them out.

next up, things that are less than three weeks in the past!

every transacton still feels like a great accomplishment. there's a little shop on the other side of town that sells electric gadgets. not electronic gadets, only stuff that wasn't invented in the last forty years. i've always wanted to go in because the signage is from the late 50's and beautiful. the whole place looks like it wormholes out of the same vortex that portland does.

the tiny old lady with few teeth is so friendly and helpful. i show her the old bulb and tell her the wattage. she rummages around in drawers under the electric razors and alarm clocks and asks me how many i want. there's a little confusion as she tries to tell me i have to do something with the bulb. something about my rights. we work it through: hm, halogen bulbs. i can't touch with the hands? hands->fingers->"doigts" (not "droits"). ah, got it!

i pay her more money than the bulb is really worth, but if it keeps her in business i'm happy to help her. probably not enough people buying handheld back massagers and rotary phones these days. bon soir! merci!

then i go across the street to a fancy boulangerie and get a snazzy sandwich to eat at the park. yeah! i'm on a roll!

i've been hacking on my photo gallery software some. new design and some new features.

lately, i'm finding it easier to add little blurbs to photos than to write whole stories. i added an RSS feed feature to the gallery, so that those with feed readers ("aggregators" or whatever they're called) can keep tuned in to updates to the photo site. any directory in the gallery can be monitored, and it chooses the most recent files from everything in subdirectories too. so you can stay in touch with everything new in avignon by using this feed. or if it makes you feel better:

bonus: through the magic of xsl, the same link should render well in any recent browser. so you can still stay up to date by bookmarking it and checking in there now and again.

of course, let me know if things aren't working right.

also, i'll try to post to this blog when i put up a new set of pix. i'm only three weeks behind now!

while i've got you:

i don't know if i mentioned it specifically a couple posts back, but it was chocolate yoghurt. weird. also, the yoghurt drink i tried wasn't thin like an indian yoghurt drink, it was pretty much just drinking peach yoghurt. (you can get choco flavor and the other usuals too.)

also, am i the only one afraid of a thing called an aggregator? i can draw one for you in crayon and it's pretty scary to me.

a couple weeks ago miss and i took a train trip to go see corey, our portland friend who's doing the same program as missy a couple hours away.

the train ride was great. an unexpected snowstorm hit as we were leaving. it got pretty intense. the train couldn't run at full TGV speed so we missed our connecting train in paris (even with a harrowing action film taxicab ride from Gare du Nord to Gare Montparnasse) and coerced our way into having SNCF put us up in a hotel there for a night. we had just enough time for a midnight dinner and glass of wine and some bitter cold getting lost on the walk home.

miss had a $8 cheeseburger and it really was worth it.

all trains go through paris, even if it makes the journey twice as long as it would be direct, like this time.

the next day we get to poitiers and there's lots of snow here as well. the most anyone's seen in a really long time, says carole, corey's french sweetheart. there's a small open source art conference going on in town (the other, lesser, reason for coming) so carole drops me off and everyone else trundles off to drink tea and stay warm. interesting presentations. half of them in french, the other half in english and translated into french (good practice!) learned more about some things i'd heard of but never investigated and met the folks that make em. hard to summarize. worthwhile.

that night we had a nice meal in a french restaurant that had american road signs and posters plastered inside. probably named Arizona or something. who would think to check for those things first? also the rarest steak that can exist. the french call it bleu, but that's absolutely backwards. too much for carole even, we politely ask for a little (more?) heat be applied and right on cue leather comes back. good fries though.

and then off for the real piece of resistance, the night wander! we walk through the blanketed town, bordeaux in hand, checking out the old town and cathedrals. great architecture here. the town houses have the swiss wooden X embedded in white stucco thing and severe second story street overhangs. really cozy/claustrophobic. it's saturday night, so there's a buch of other loud drunky wandery folks out too. they're friendly if we share our wine.

later: corey lives in a small room in an odd wing of the school he teaches in, which he describes as Hogwarts from Harry Potter. yeah, it really is like that, especially at spooky quiet night and we're the only ones around. we decide to snoop around the huge old school and see what corners we can poke into. mostly anything interesting is locked, but we find a cavern near the base of an out of service elevator. it's a brick arching catacomb place, not unlike in Poe's Cask of Amontillado. the floor is made of scattered old wine bottles. some of the dates on the bottles go back to the 70s. the ones with labels. so either people are drinking well-aged wine, or there's ghosts of old malcontent students about. i gather it's the "smokin' in the boys room" of france. the girls won't come in. corey and i goof a dead poet's thing for a while until the girls have had enough. i wish i could find those photos.

the next day all the snow has melted. corey and carole show us the main huge poitiers cathedral in the morning. i cram in as much art conference as i can in the afternoon before the tired train ride back.