Tuesday & Wednesday, November 17th & 18th
When one is confined to one’s home, except for grocery shopping and a walk, finding something interesting to blog about gets tricky at times.
Tuesday was a complete stay-home day. We had to wait for a delivery of cat supplies as well as a visit from a heating expert, as we have been unable to program the individual thermostats in each room. The heat runs under the flooring and the thermostats are hand-held divises that have to be in sync with WiFi in order to work. The man who came reprogrammed each one, and now we are able to regulate the temperature. It’s a very good system once you know how to use it. But we still haven’t figured out how to set the timers for daytime and nighttime - and neither could the person who came to help us. As with everything else we’ve bought here of a technical nature, there are no written manuals as to how to use them. At some inevitable point, you have to look it up online.
Yesterday, Wednesday, turned out to be a clear, cool late-fall day. We decided to go the farthest away yet to explore shopping opportunities in another area - Issy-les-Moulineaux- again down a long, steep hill that of course we had to walk back up - with groceries. Until about 15 or so years ago, Issy was a small bedroom town, located right off the Periphique - the inner ring road around Paris. Now, it’s a cement jungle of modern apartment buildings, shopping, restaurants, and lots of traffic. There are still a few areas that have escaped the rebuilding boom, still lined with Plane trees, still relatively quiet. Our route took us through one such area, that is depicted in one of today’s photographs.
Everyday, I wear the same combination of clothing in one form or another - a pair of Hue tights that I have snatched off the display wall from time to time on my way to checking out at Nordstrom’s Rack, a turtleneck from ages ago when they were a staple at stores like Chicos or Land’s End, and either a sweat shirt or a down vest. With no place to go where a modicum of a dress code applies, this is what it’s boiled down to. Not much changes from day to day right now, and the most exciting thing to look forward to is being able to write this blog and to work on my novel - and the latter is rewriting itself into what feels like the same-old, same-old. I’ve got to consult an online synonym dictionary more frequently. Maybe I’ll kill off one of the main characters or another will suddenly have an epiphany that will allow her to discover the meaning of life. Yeah, it still needs a lot of work!
