1. Le Petit Bateau

My wife and I are spending a year in France, give or take a few months and depending on how long she can get the University to keep paying her to do it. If we had done this a decade ago I'm sure it would have been easier: we wouldn't have nearly the same amount of stuff that we actually cared about and therefore needed to find a safe place to stash for a year; we wouldn't have a cat that we love with the kind of love you usually only see in crazy cat ladies and who needed a loving home while we were gone; and I think our level of expectation of comfort would be different. But regardless, this opportunity came along and what kind of fools would we be if we passed it up because things might not be as comfy, or we might not have as much stuff, or we'd miss our cat more than I'd miss a foot, or I can't speak French? Big damn fools, that's what.

 When Megan finally got the go-ahead for her year in France, I left most of the arrangements to her, especially where we would live in Paris. Any of the apartment-for-rent sites would all be in French and, not trusting Google Translate's ability to grasp nuance, I would need to keep asking Megan what this or that meant anyway. It fell out, though, that one of her French students, a woman that had had her wild student days in Paris in the '70's, kept in touch with a friend there who had a room to rent. Though she (soone to be known as Landlady) said it was quite small and the pictures she sent seemed to corroborate what she said, the price was excellent and the location (location, location, as they say) was superb: right in the middle of Paris, Metro stops just a short block or so away. What did we need with a big apartment? We'd never be in it; we'd be out in Paris! Who cares if our toilet's down the hall? Megan gave the nod to the landlady, we managed to pack a year's worth of stuff (mostly clothes) into ginormous backpacks and we made the Crossing.

Stick along after the break for more details.