Blinded by the Light!

Erik has been a busy little bee these past couple of days.


First up is the bedroom. I won't tell you how long it took to put that lampshade together. But there is overhead light! In the bedroom! That you can turn on with a light switch! The installation of this light, and all the outlets in the room means that we no longer have an extension cord running across our main hallway. It had been there so long that neither of us even noticed it anymore, but I certainly notice that it's gone! The downside of the overhead light is that now I can't pretend that the bedroom walls don't need another coat of paint.


This was my surprise when I got home from the gym on Sunday. The kitchen is now absolutely glowing. We've gone from one flourescent bulb that took a good five minutes to fully warm up to five super bright halogens that turn on right away. Oh, and in case that's not enough, Erik also installed three under cabinet lights. All that light makes the kitchen seem HUGE!


And the piece de resistance...another surprise when I got home from the gym tonight...we finally have lights on the other wall of the main that aren't bare bulbs! We went to Leroy Merlin today and returned 160 euros worth of stuff, including the sconces we had originally chosen. It was just getting too complicated to figure out how to install them. Anyway, we figured out a solution, that you can kind of see if you look closely--the white plastic circles at the base of the lights are covering up the boxes that the cables have to come out of. I have no idea why stores can even sell fixtures that don't fit properly over these boxes, but I'm glad we were able to figure something out. Now we have to paint the white parts, and fix the plaster on the channels above. These new lights are much less forgiving than the old bare bulb.

And I haven't been spending all my time at the gym! Today I was back in the bathroom, priming all the walls with moisture resistant paint, and painting the radiator. Fun! Hopefully by tomorrow afternoon it will be all white.

Merry Christmas!!

O Christmas Tree

Now that school is done, the holidays can officially begin. We bought our Christmas tree today, from the Christmas market at Nation (and got ripped off, I later noticed at the grocery store. Oh well!), and spent the afternoon drinking Baileys and trimming the tree.

Also, it snowed on Thursday! And again on Friday! And it's supposed to snow again on Sunday! And it's freezing cold!! Winter is truly here, and the snow is actually sticking around, the first time I've seen that since we've been here, and even I have to admit that it's quite pretty. No picture, I keep forgetting to take one until it's too dark outside (not only is it really cold, it's that fun time of year where the sun disappears at 4pm and doesn't make another appearance until late the next morning when you're already inside working).

And lastly, and maybe most importantly, can anyone guess what our lovely tree is standing in?

Alex and Antonio's Visit

Last weekend Alex and Antonio came to visit us. It was fun having them around. Aside from the icy cold, Canadian style temperatures, we had fun exploring Paris together.

We discovered the parc de la butte de Chaumont, a great park not too far from where we are now. We climbed all the way to the top of the butte and enjoyed the views before heading down to check out the Canada Geese.



We drank lots of hot chocolate.


And of course no visit to Paris is complete without a visit to the Eiffel Tower, at night. It was pretty cold, however, and our visit lasted about five minutes, the duration of the sparkling lights, before we high-tailed it to the nearest cafe for hot chocolate. It's not like we haven't seen Eiffey before!


Other highlights of the visit included the Chanson du Dimanche concert at the Elysee de Montmartre, followed by a fantastic dinner at the Cloche d'Or. So much food, but so so so good! We also managed to squeeze in a visit to Laduree for hot chocolate, and ate macarons from Pierre Herme. It was a very delicious, and fun weekend.

Perhaps a case can be made for having left the wallpaper up?


Is this not the most grim, depressing bathroom you've ever seen? Hopefully a nice coat of white paint will help.

In other news, can you believe that it's already December??? Two more weeks till the holidays!

Also, we have been seriously invaded by fruit flies. We can't figure out where they're coming from. We have refrigerated all the food that we can, and are constantly leaving traps, and they just won't leave us alone. I just looked over and noticed one perched innocently on the edge of my glass. Gross! Any tips or ideas? We never had them at our other place, despite regularly leaving fruit out on the counter.