This has been a Bad Blog Summer for me, despite the best of intentions. Ironically, it has been one when I have had lots of photos to share; it's just that I've been so busy taking those photos and dealing with other things that blogging has been relegated to last place. I've missed blogging and, if anyone has been paying attention, I have also consistently missed my self-imposed deadlines. But I still haven't given up entirely and hope at some point to get back on a more-or-less regular basis.
The summer has passed quite quickly. My young guests have only two weeks of their summer courses in French remaining. Yesterday afternoon, after their morning classes, they boarded the train for Marseille. Why Marseille of all possible places in the south of France? Well, it appears that a family friend of one of them had offered them a stay at a very nice hotel there - free of charge! Quite naturally, they accepted the offer. I am very happy for them. Our weather here has been rainy and wet and the weather there will have sunny days during their visit. We all would like to see some more sun. On the other hand, I am missing the heat wave (la canicule is the French term) that is currently afflicting the US East Coast. HWMBO is receiving the full effect - another reason why he should have stayed here longer.
Their mothers will arrive next week, only to be whisked off to Paris for a long weekend with their offspring before they have even realized that they have jet lag. They had kindly invited me to go along - and I do love visiting the "City of Light" - but believe that the moms and their "babes" need some catch-up time. We'll all get some visiting time together once they return. I will also host a visiting cousin and her travelling companion for a night before the moms arrive, so next week will pass quickly in a whirl of activity.
In the meantime, my own life has taken an unexpected turn.
With no small reluctance, I had been preparing to let out my beloved apartment here beginning this fall in order to relocate to the US for a time. This had been based both on financial and personal considerations. Like the embattled US Government, currently being held hostage by a minority of fanatical right-wing zealots who refuse to raise taxes on the top one percent of the population or even to reinstate the tax rates in effect prior to the last administration's infamous give-away to the very wealthy - by this stand officially rendering corporatism into latter-day feudalism - my finances needed a shot in the arm that would be consistently reliable. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, the short-term jobs that I have needed to make up the difference between my basic resources and my costs here have sputtered until they have dried up altogether. Meanwhile, none of my other "irons in the fire" had caught fire, even though there had been some promising moments from time to time. Suddenly, like a deus ex machina in a plot where the hero/heroine looked all but lost, I was offered a chance to teach at a small local university. For this autumn trimester, it's just one course unless something happens so that a second course is offered. But if that course works out - and there is no reason to believe that it won't - I will be able to teach as much, or as little, as I want from then on. And my finances, although still precarious for the fall trimester, would certainly receive a needed shot in the arm.
Yes, the opportunity could still fall through or I could decide that for many reasons (HWMBO and grandbabies principally among them) it is not what I want to do. But, for the moment, I have had a small respite from the looming rental decision that could still become inevitable, even if just for a time. So the grand relocation has been averted for a while longer. In the meantime, I am spending my free moments researching, studying, redesigning the course syllabus that I received, reviewing course materials and plotting out lectures and class activities for a 12-week period between early September and early December. I have even tutored myself in the intricacies/mysteries of Powerpoint over these past days. I have certainly used Powerpoint before, but that was when I had talented and knowledgeable staff to turn my rough materials and drafts into masterly professional slides so that all I had to do was to present them. Now I must learn to do such things myself. Ha!
Please keep your fingers crossed that all will go well! In the meantime, I WILL finish posting about the wonderful trip to Italy and in general try to get "caught up" (in the infamous words of my late mother) with this, of late, woefully neglected blog.
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