RoBoTNiK

Besides eating and drinking, what do you do in Paris? Well, museums. Mostly art museums, cause that's L's thing. I wouldn't go to many art museums without her encouragement, but she's a great person to see them with, offering a funny and idiosyncratic little art appreciation course with each trip. "The Bayeux Tapestry is not actually a tapestry, Rob, it is an embroidery," she says, apropos of nothing, saying "Rob" like Coach McGurk says "Melissa", in a tone of voice that shames me deeply for ever having thought such a thing. Even though, on reflection, I'm pretty sure I never thought about it one way or the other. And even though we aren't even looking at the Bayeux Tapestry when she says it, or any tapestry at all, in fact.

( Here's the big museum roundup, LJ cut because what do you care, ya philistines? )

We're back!



France was fantastic. I had vague visions of blogging the trip, but les cybercafes have not penetrated pastoral Provence as thoroughly as the techno-globalization triumphalism of Wired or MSNBC might lead you to believe. Plus there is the matter of the French keyboard, which, if you've never used one, is almost a QWERTY keyboard but not quite: the Q and A keys are switched, as are the E and the O, the period and the comma, plus a few others, and you have to shift to get numbers and unshift to get symbols. This diabolical contraption makes Anglos in France type like they've had a stroke (or are jeregenest). So instead I recorded my impressions with notebook and pen, a crude technology which somehow reduced my brilliant and moving travelogue into so many chaotic point form scribbles. I will try to convert them back into spun gold, or at least mildly diverting journal entries, before my memories of Paris and Provence fade beyond recall.

But in the meantime, we're back in Boston. We'll just be here for a couple of days (though I believe we're free if anybody around here wants to get together tomorrow, Tuesday, or Wednesday night-so get in touch if you do!), then off again to Wolf Lake for one last summer weekend. I have mad dreams of trying to make a flying Toronto visit this coming weekend too—to celebrate Pete & Jane's engagement, to see everybody (there's even a rumor that Derek might be in town)—and then back home next week, off to a wedding in Amherst on Labor Day weekend, and then, wham-bam-giant-sentient-clams, what do you know but one more summer will have given us the slip.