Frost

Frost-sugared rose

I cannot imagine how the fish comprehend winter. It is a miracle of the minor order to see them below the thin layer of ice that gradually thickens if the weather comes from the east and is not slowly warmed again by the Gulfstream's most northeastern tip, the North Atlantic Drift, as they swim about, very, very slowly. They have no warm coats.

We are, right now, feeling the ebb of the Drift and the grip of the polar temperatures, freezing everything from Finland to Moosesucks, which is a hopeful sign, since I just confirmed the reservation for the hotel in Argentière for January and spent an hour or two yesterday researching collapsible, lightweight and relatively inexpensive travel containers for dogs. Baccarat was 2 months older when she made her first hotel stay at l'Hôtel de la Couronne, and the armchair legs felt her teeth despite her Kongs; the hotel instituted a per diem charge for dogs the next year, although they were still more than welcome. We paid, despite her behaving better than most other visitors and restricting her misbehavior to sleeping on Sam's bed while we were on the slopes. Fia will be just 5 months old, and I will be a wreck if I don't find a way to insure that she cannot inflict damage while we are out, which quite ruins the point of the trip and makes the expense of tolls, gas, hotel and lift tickets an additional gall.

It had occurred to me to make her a bed in the bath or the toilet, but in the case of the bath, she'd very possibly set herself to scratching the door and crying or barking to get out and join Rapide. Besides, housekeeping will want to clean the bath, and they'd have to get her back in again. Not difficult, but I'd have to talk with them, and, besides, why should they have to deal with that? The toilet is out. I read somewhere that small, high-ceiling places make dogs crazy. And, how nice is it to spend your morning and afternoon curled up around the porcelain God?

So, I Googled "crate training" and lazily perused various posts. I also wanted to see if everyone agreed that you really have to shut them up for as long as 4 hours at this age. I miss her.

In one, there was a photograph of just such a travel kennel. Encouraged by my new knowledge that such a thing exists, and not wanting a huge, unwieldy wire cage or plastic Vari Kennel I have no idea where I will store once home, I clicked on the ZooPlus.fr icon on my toolbar and went looking. Et voilà, there they were, at the bottom of the page, under all the dog houses, two collapsible, not terribly expensive travel kennels. I got the tape measure to determine the length of a sleeping, full-grown Lab (Thank you, Rapide), and found that I would need the size L of the more expensive one, the size L of the less expensive one being inadequate. Not that she will actually need it full-grown, but what's the use of buying something I will only ever use a very few times when I travel with the very few puppies I will ever have at my age (Fia will likely pass after my 60th birthday. Isn't that a happy thought?)? Now, I just need to find the courage to order it, and the AC adapter from Dell for my laptop to replace the one Fia bit through a few weeks back.

I am sure she did not do it on purpose.

Dogs are not an inexpensive pleasure for the responsible mistress. Either they fly with you (poor dog), get kenneled (poor, poor dog), or you reduce your luggage to make room for them in the car, having the appropriate vehicle for their size and number, and get everything necessary to insure their comfort and your peace of mind (poorer owner). We like them to have the chance to run and play in the snow, too. Labrador Retrievers might be famous for being water dogs, but snow is another passion. They come, after all, from Newfoundland, and unlike the fish, they do have warm coats to protect them from the cold in the water and the snow. They are, after all, not cold-blooded.

Such a concept. Nature is truly worthy of our amazement.

Happily, I do have warm coats so that I can do the work in the garden I ought to have done when the ground was still in the mud state, and not the frozen state. The real problem is the fingers, which freeze stiff when grasping the scissors to finish the pruning of the lavender, and the pruning sheers for all the shaggy bushes to which I still have not gotten. Ski socks in Wellies are quite effective for warding off frost-bitten toes. Log-splitting may be done in minimal clothing year-round, as it warms you up in a jiffy.

You can see how motivated I am to get the drawings done so that we can get on with our various renovation and construction projects, when I'd rather dress like Charlie Brown and get out in the garden in order to feel I have been of some use, and those projects -- at least one, anyway, have become urgent, if not for my sense of self, then to keep the water out of the "petite maison", which the roof, despite the presence of the construction sheeting, is no longer able to do in the least.

Not to mention the water that has been seeping into a corner of the Summer Room (nice name for a sorry room) and soaking the new sisal floor covering and plaster, ruining both. I discovered that the elbow at the end of the downspout had fallen off, directing the water from the gutter directly at this corner of the building. I had been telling my husband for years that the thing ought to be torn to the ground and rebuilt for all it is weatherproof and solid, but as long as he sees four walls and a roof containing space that presently serves a purpose, he cannot abide demolishing the (inadequate) structure and replacing it with (correct) new construction. This is beyond depressing for an architect or builder who knows anything about building.

Here, imagine this. The original part of the structure in question was a small garage, whose walls are made of a single row of brick.

"Mais la brique c'est un matériel de construction. Il y a plein de bâtiments faits de brique," he complains, when I suggest that it is depressing to think of tearing the roof off the petite maison and bearing a new roof structure on walls that aren't even sturdy enough to carry it.

"Oui," I allow, "mais jamais un seul rang de brique pour soutenir non seulement son propre poids mais aussi celui de la toiture et le poids qu'il doit pouvoir supporter."

In other words, walls may be made of brick as a structural material (in the old days; we'd never do it now), but they were composed of more than one row of bricks, and the bricks were laid in both directions, interlocking, to provide strength and stability. Our wall enclosing the garage is composed of a single row of bricks, laid lengthwise along the direction of the wall. The inside is covered with some sort of cement mix, used like plaster, causing the hopeful to not actually see the truth.

He looks at me doubtfully. I know I have not won. I do not know how to carry the argument, except to tear the whole thing down with my own hands one day, while he is at work -- or on duty at the hospital so that I get the benefit of two --, and suffer the consequences later.

There is also the question, though, of the slab. You can be sure that it is not haunched, and building appropriate walls and a roof structure directly on it, as is presently the case, would be unwise.

And, then there is the garage we must have. This morning, my motorcycle failed to start, and then so did his, when he tried it afterwards, and he ended up driving a car to work, leaving late and knowing he'd suffer the snaking traffic all the way to the hospital because the battery on my bike can't stand the cold and the damp. I'd kissed him goodbye and started the coffee machine when he reappeared, putting one set of keys on the wainscoting ledge and taking another.

"Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?" I knew.

"Ta moto ne démarre pas," he said from inside his helmet. I knew he hadn't left the lights on again; I saw the bike when I returned from walking Rapide just minutes after he had gotten home. "Je vais essayer la mienne."

So, you ask, why didn't he take his in the first place, and why had he taken mine the day before? Because that's another horrendous expense in waiting. His clutch is going and needs replacing. Besides, my bike at half the weight and cylinder is better than his in freezing conditions, where you can take the black ice like Casey Stoner entering a curve. He'd be on his side on the ground with his.

Neither of us seriously thought his would start, either, after several days at rest in the bottom garden in sub-freezing temperatures, but he headed off with the keys, only to return and start the bouilloire for some hot water.

"C'est pour quoi ça?" I asked. I knew this already, too.

"Le neiman ne tourne pas."

The starter. It was frozen. I gave him a kid's plastic cup he could leave down below in the event the hot water worked. Neither of us believed it would. I took my cup of coffee and followed him out into the garden to watch from the edge of the top terrace. He poured the hot water on the starter, got on the bike, turned the key and hit the starter. It cleared its throat. He waited, one-two-three, and I heard it strain again. Silence. I counted, one-two-three, and I heard it go once more, and then nothing. He reached for the shredded scooter cover he uses to protect the seats and controls, and I watched his silver helmet bob across the bottom garden and rise up the steps, praying I had remembered to clean up any dog poop Rapide might have left down there. At least, I thought, it would be frozen, which helps.

"On a vraiment besoin d'un garage," he put me on notice.

"Je sais, mais on ne peut pas faire un garage clos et chauffé," I defended, to which he made a sound of deprecation somewhere in this throat. "My ass," he'd have said, had he spoken in English. As it were, I heard that, even though he said something quite different, like "Attends voir," or You just wait and see.

"Au moins ça protégera les motos de l'humidité," he grumbled, seeming now to accept that really, we couldn't build a proper garage with the possibility of even minimal heat. Do they make electric blankets for motorcycles? "On va revendre la tienne," he added.

This did not upset me. I have been saying it for more than a year. It is the world's most undependable motorcycle. The battery fails more often than it functions, and you usually need to hit the electric starter two or three times to get it to turn over, going a long way each time to drain the battery, which then doesn't have adequate time to recharge if you are only going so far as to the hospital for the day. Add freezing weather and damp, and you are screwed.

"T'as pensé à la coupe circuit?" I asked. I never think of the button that shuts the motor off when I am in a temper, either. Especially given the track record of this motorcycle and batteries.

"Ah, je n'y ai pas pensé." He headed back out toward my bike, where he had left it the night before, up by the telephone booth (how quaint) next to our gate, turning his head to see what was behind him as he stepped onto the slab where the new entry pavement is supposed to be installed, and still hasn't been because the new entry has not been built (are you surprised?). He hadn't expected me to follow. I thought he could use the encouragement.

"Quel est le button encore?" I pointed to the red one by the accelerator. "Oh." He hit it, turned the key -- not a light lit up. Dead. I followed him back into the house, where he reached for a set of car keys.

"Tu as besoin de rouler aujourd'hui?" he asked. No, I didn't need to drive any longer distances today. The Fiat would be fine. Besides, I thought, it has a better radio to sooth the savage beast in the traffic he was about to hit.

"Prendre la BM," I said, and closed the door behind his silver, unhelmeted head, watching it cross the lawn again to the gate.

"J'ai du être à l'hôpital il y a 25 minutes déjà," he muttered, not grumpily at all and not turning his head. Merely stating the fact that a garage would be the best way to insure that no one had to wait for the doctor, or that he'd be forced to start the day in the worst possible of ways: behind schedule.

I knew this already, too.

It's time to pick a project, any project.


....

Billowy curtains in the summer room

The summer room in spring

My grandmother would not have shrunk them, even if she washed them exactly the same way.

Neither would they have a spot on them, let alone stains. Wisp doesn't mind, do you, Wisp?

It's almost ready for guests.
....

Un heureux hasard

Putting the brushes down, for now

Ta da!

I cleaned it up just for you. Now, I am about to make a mess of it again, taking everything from the petit salon out there to unclutter the living room, where it's all piled up, until the petit salon is ready to be furnished, which -- by God -- it will be.

I swear it.

I am so happy about this. Really. This room was just awful, and now it is not. It's amazing what some spackling compound painstakingly applied to bumpy, White Mountain Frosting type "specialty" paint in white with bright yellow brushed over it can do, along with a decent color choice (yellow and rust orange are an interior decoration don't). See one month ago today by clicking here. Note especially the open corners that allowed the ivy to find its way inside.

If I want ivy in the room, I will train it on the walls. Merci.

If you click here, you can see it in a much earlier phase of work, back in June of last year, the day I had more flash removed from my second toe on my right foot to make absolutely certain all the bad melanoma was gone.

And, if you are a real glutton for punishment, or really love watching rooms change colors, just click on the tag (libellés) "Guest rooms".

The color was the big issue in this room, and oddly, the color I selected looks nothing like the sample once it is on the walls. You can get an idea of what I mean by looking at the photos. In some, it appears much yellower, which is the color that is closest to the sample chip. But, as soon as I started painting, I saw a light celadon green, which, by the way, appears to have a huge tolerance in its definition, from what I see on Google images.

It looks an awful lot like the fennel seeds you took to Leroy Merlin, when you went with Audouin to pick out a color to replace the light blue.

"I know," I replied to myself. "Strange, isn't it? I couldn't find the color there, I pick an entirely different color, and I wind up with the color."

Serendipity, hunh? Or maybe it was just meant to be, and you knew it, said myself.

"Perhaps. But you know what's really interesting?" I didn't wait to let myself reply, "The fennel seeds are really many colors that give an impression of color. No one of those colors is the color of a fennel seed. But this paint, it manages to capture the various colors that tell me 'fennel seed'."

Myself looked at the wall with me and said, I see just what you mean.

I was so excited, brushing this wonderful Flamant paint on with my 5" Flamant brush, watching the color I had wanted appear on my walls, except -- it wasn't really what I had intended with the print I used as the basis for the color selection. I crossed the room to get it and place it near the freshly applied paint.

It'll do. It's not bad, you know.

Myself was right. It worked.

Then, my husband went out to see it the next day.

"C'est pas mal," he pronounced, before going on, "un peu triste quand même." My face fell, but he had a suggestion, "Il faudra peut-être de la couleur pour la rendre plus gaie."

I thought he'd really like it, myself said to me.

"Me, too," I whispered back.

"C'est la couleur que tu cherchais chez Leroy Merlin, non?"

He noticed!

"I know. Can you believe it?" I asked myself.

"Ce n'était pas vraiment intentionnel," I admitted. "En fait, c'est drôle car c'est un hasard total. Un heureux hasard, je suppose."

He and myself nodded together.

The summer room

Winter morning in the summer room

That's the name that came to me for it as I froze to death painting the exterior wall between the windows, snow swirling just beyond the panes of glass, at the point the farthest from the radiator. The best way to be warm in this room is to remain on the top step of the ladder. The heat is all up at that sloped ceiling. Thinking about using it as an office felt discouraging; all I kept thinking about was the heat bill to keep it comfortable. When it was a bedroom full time, it wasn't so bad because when you're in bed, you have the radiator by you, and you are nestled under the quilt. It's different when you are sitting at a desk, or in a chair.

You're only going to want to use this room when it's warm out, myself said to me.

"I know." I laid my hand flat on the cold wall and sighed.

The Summer Room, myself added.

"You know, I kind of like that name. The color is like summer, too. Bright. Maybe I'll just stay in my own bed in the winter."



I have other reasons to want to just stay in bed. Too many. All you have to do is browse the last couple of posts to start to get an idea, but that would be so little of it. Today is a hard day. If you take the baseline of my quality of life being absolute and unbearable incertitude about whether my son can pass the baccalaureate -- familiarly called "the bac" -- at the end of the year and his feelings about that, how little he does to actually take the situation in hand, or how little he feels he really can do to make a difference in the outcome, and then add the K2 of home renovations with unreliable porters and too little money and too much time alone on the rock face because there really are things you can't do by yourself, the machine that measures the cardiac rhythm of my soul is beeping frantically.

And I am supposed to leave to ski for a week in a little more than one week and enjoy it. I know I am going to be fantasizing about finding a little apartment in the valley and building chalets and new stores for the city, until it starts to rain and reminds me how awful a valley enclosed by high peaks can be in dismal weather.

That's life, right? Just ask them out there in Whistler.

And then there's the Tea Party, which we are asked to consider taking more seriously as a political movement, the legitimate flip side of the Obama movement. Those who believe in the individual and no government to help govern a complex society, and those who believe in the power of the individual, too, but feel the necessity of a wise and mature government to help regulate and govern society. With Greece's self-wrought melt-down (the Americans of the EU by personal debt standards and Tea Partiers for all their ways to get around the need to pay taxes and declare income), Europe is having a similar debate.

But this is only making me feel worse. Much worse.

How do all these people stay calm talking about it on France Inter? I tuned in, and there was Joseph Stiglitz being interviewed this morning with an excellent simultaneous translation. Really. Listening to him, I felt pretty sure his home doesn't leak water, his windows don't run with condensation, the walls aren't crumbling with moisture, the woodwork is solid, and it is appointed with discriminating taste and dusted regularly. It didn't hurt that he's looking pretty good in European eyes for having been the lone voice crying out against banking and investment deregulation during the Clinton administration. And here I was, thinking, Wait! Can't we just blame the Republicans? We have to blame Clinton, too?

I braked to a stop at an intersection, and then crept forward to peer around the cars parked along the curb to my right to see if there was a car coming. At that very instant, a low-slung Hyundai SUV came barreling out past the last car and slammed on his brakes. He was yelling and gesturing before his window was all the way down.

"Mais regardez ce que vous faites! Vous avez un stop!" Really? I hadn't noticed that I had come to a full stop at the big red octagonal sign before lightly touching the accelerator to inch forward, only to have to stomp on the brakes or be knocked into the corner garden wall. I pressed the electric button to lower my own window and shouted over the top of his epithets.

"Monsieur, si vous ralentiriez vous auriez déjà moins de problèmes."

But, he didn't want to hear about the speed at which he was devouring this residential street. He didn't have a stop sign, I did, and to hell with the fact that it is not possible to see if a car is coming as fast as he was if you don't move forward a bit. I and anyone else who might have the misfortune to be in his path could wait until hell froze right to its very center without budging an inch or risk the consequences for their vehicle.

The car behind us beeped its horn. Still yelling, his window rolled up and his car moved off. The car behind him waited to let me go, but since I had the stop sign, I gestured for him to go ahead. The car behind him was absolutely not going to not let me go. I waved and moved on through the intersection, wondering how much more most of us can take.

I know I am right at the end of my frayed rope, and I hadn't even welcomed the workers, due at the house in an hour and a half, back for more misery. Worse, my cell phone was up next to my bed. No way to call my husband, probably sitting next to a woman with a sonogram probe up her vagina, anyway, and cry.

Right on the stroke of 10 am, Baccarat barked and my cell phone (yes, up beside my bed) started to ring. I was finishing the list of items needing to be completed by the renovation company before we could consider the contract satisfied, so I ignored it. Georges' face appeared at the panes of the French door.

Here we go, myself said to me.

"Here we go."

I proposed a cup of coffee, noting that there was no sign of the real laborer, José, and that Georges was moving with his air of not being about to do any work at all. Snippets from our conversation Tuesday came and went in my mind. I didn't want to help him out here. I wanted to make him get to the heart of the matter, which was that he was here to talk and not work, after all, and he wanted to wiggle out of their commitment by any crack open to him.

We looked at the shutters to determine which do and do not function properly and moved on through my list, including the problems with both French doors they had made and installed for the bedrooms, the water that runs down the wall of the end bedroom from the roof when it rains, the two decorative window rails they have let sit out of doors and unprotected since September, 2008, the drooping gutter that sends a torrent of water to collect at the corner of the house, the gate that rubs against the brick pillar, the missing door handles and lock. The list was long, and most of it puzzled him. How could it be?

"Bon, Georges, normalement si on veut qu'un projet soit réussi, il faut le finir rapidement. Si non, tout ce que vous faites est abîmé par le fait de n'être fait qu'à moitié."

"Mais, Madame Sisyphe (no, he used my last name), vous savez, ce projet, depuis le début --"

"No, Georges," I cut him off aussi sec, "nous ne sommes pas ici pour rediscuter pour le nième fois le triste parcours de ce projet et son maudit début. C'est fini ça. Nous avons renégocié le contrat avec vous pour en faire un nouveau, et tout ce qui précède ce contrat ne compte pour plus rien. Nous avons pris des choses sur nous pour vous alléger vos engagements et vous donner plus d'argent, et n'oubliez jamais," I looked at him extra fixedly here, "que Joachim est venu voir ce projet avant le premier contract qu'il nous a fait signer lui-même. Que vous dites autre chose ne change rien aux faits, et nous n'en discutons plus."

He started to speak and then stopped and let his gaze drift out to the other side of the gate, to where he surely preferred to be at that moment, and where his partner for the day was hovering. That didn't mean I had been acknowledged right. It just means that Georges doesn't really bother arguing, which is what he had really come to do -- quelle surprise! He looked down at the ground at our feet, where a powdering of snow still remained from yesterday.

"Il fait froid," he said.

"Je remarque aussi que vous n'êtes pas venu pour travailler comme vous l'avez dit mardi, mais pour discutailler encore. Ca veut dire quoi ça?"

"Mais il est gelé," he protested just a little too feebly.

"Oui, mais il y a plein de choses que vous pouvez faire par ce temps," and I began to point them out, one after another, while he wished he could win his point and carry the day. Whatever it was they want, to walk away, to get more money. I'm quite certain it isn't just to have more time to finish, not with the reference he made to the "bands and stuff" in the brickwork on the ground. Hell, I'll end up doing that myself anyway, if it's anything like the brick pillars.

"La brique? Vous voulez qu'on vienne avec la brique?" Quelle question. Of course I wanted him to come with the brick. He had told me Tuesday that he would be coming with the brick. He had told me when he walked in the house that the brick was at Point P, waiting.

"Je sais, Georges. 7 m3 et 2 mètres linéaires d'angles."

"Vous les avez appelé?" he asked. I nodded. Yes, I had called them to verify.

"On va prendre quand même la bétonneuse," he continued, adding lamely, "elle prend de l'eau." As though the cement mixer hadn't been sitting in the wet for going on three months of inactivity already. This was not a good sign, but I didn't see what I could do. We had been considering it a hold of sorts on them. It's the last thing of theirs worth anything on our property, but I couldn't stop them from taking it. It isn't the real hold, anyway. That's sending the lawyer's letter, all ready and waiting at his office, and filing a complaint, which I thought I'd mention again very soon and followed him to the cement mixer. "Madame Sisyphe, on va s'en sortir oui ou non? Oui ou non?" and he heaved a great sigh.

He wasn't giving up. His job is to make me their accomplice, win me over to their way of seeing things. His partner's is to rough us up with his verbal assaults, although having run into a wall on that, they are reduced to Georges' pathetic, but fairly effective, efforts to stonewall.

"Bon, Georges, je dirais que cela dépend de vous. Il n'y a qu'une réponse qui satisferait et c'est à vous de l'assurer par tous vos moyens. Et pour cela, vous auriez jusqu'à la fin du mois de mars et pas un jour plus, alors dépêchez-vous de vous organizer pour pourvoir le faire si non, il reste l'appui juridique." Basically, I told him that there is only one acceptable response, and that is "yes, we will get it done" and that for the end of March, or they will face a lawsuit.

"Mais, Madame Sisyphe, "un procès ne sert à rien."

"Oh mais si, Georges," a lawsuit certainly can be useful. "De vous servir un procès serait fort regrettable, mais c'est le dernier recours et nous n'hésiterons pas de vous amener au parquet si vous ne nous donniez pas satisfaction. C'est à vous de jouer." No. More. Ms. Nice. Woman. Not even noticing that I had lost weight, despite my winter coat and huge scarf (I guess I really did lose some weight), can get them out of a lawsuit if they don't start immediately and finish for the end of March. Two conditions.

He extended his hand, not at all convincingly, "Je vous appele."

"Quand?" He looked a little off-balance.

"Cet après-midi, demain -- j'en parle avec Joachim, et je vous appele."

I accepted his hand, but I also knew that shake had just sealed the start of a lawsuit.
....