can't be bothered to think of a title.

G
L



the cold weather is back: i am tucked up in bed wearing my thickest woolly socks and a google polar fleece (courtesy of doodle; if it weren't for google swag, i would have nothing to wear here) over my nightie (which is not google-brand - has google gone into nightwear yet?) and i am still cold. oh well. sun was nice while it lasted.

lunch today at the pub with C, M plus family, Larine, and Head Honchos; the kids ate nothing but frenchfries, ketchup, and chocolate icecream with whipped cream which is actually making my stomach hurt thinking about it (the rest of us had the plat du jour, which was curried chicken). i have also taken to drinking an espresso after lunch when i eat at the pub, in order to combat the afternoon somnolence that sets in after a 1500 calorie extravaganza such as provided by mme. therese (or grumpy husband jean-noel. not actually sure which of them does the cooking. i can't figure out what the grumpiness is about; sometimes he is totally horrible, slamming down carafes of water, cutlery etc., and sometimes quite charming. today he was positively flirtatious, undercharging me for lunch because he said i looked so jolie with green paint on my nose. um. actually i was competing with miniM, who managed to get chocolate ice cream into the back of her _hair_, by some twist of the regular laws of gastronomy and mechanics).

it was good to get out and have lunch with everyone; i am starting to go a little cuckoo from the isolation, i think. it makes me wonder how hildegard von bingen (age 8 to 38 in a single cell in her monastery) managed. i definitely used to be better at entertaining myself. i am staying busy, no question, but the last couple of days have been too much time alone in my own head for comfort. it makes you kind of get how old people who live on their own would get sucked into calling psychic hotlines for $5 a minute. here is my wish list: NPR, a nice coffee shop to hang out in rather than the pub (which has french TV blaring all the time and which smells of jean-noel who smells of cigarette smoke), a direct bus to angers, and the ability to teleport friends from anywhere in the world without jetlag or consequences to their inherent molecular structure. i would take a significant improvement in my painting ability as well, but i'm not picky. now, would that be so hard to achieve? really. ooh, and a cinema that magically catered to an anglophone audience with my taste in movies. there is a cinema here (it's very cute - it's entirely run by the students at the junior high school) but mon francais isn't quite up to cinema standards, at least not without the prop of subtitles, and the fare is either french or crap hollywood dubbed into french. quelle tristesse.

finished 'the portrait' - sort of a serious more simple version of 'the debt to pleasure' - i was right to suspect that all would not go well. the story of a painter living as a recluse on a storm tossed part of the coast of france who spends his time reminiscing about how his life was ruined, and plotting the downfall of the man responsible. this is evidently what happens when you are cut off from NPR, coffee shops, and teleportation services. now re-reading the midnight garden of good and evil, which i am enjoying and really wanting to watch the film of it again; am i hallucinating that it was kevin spacey and jude law? can't be bothered to google it as the network is too slow, but will definitely look it up when i get home and rent it if so. i think the only thing more enticing would be if javier bardem were also in it and there was a shirtless squirt gun fight that i had forgotten about the first time i saw it :) but alas, i think javier was probably still doing grotty repertory theatre in spain or something when that came out, as it was a while (ten years? ish) ago. like all those people who play fantasy football, i should start a fantasy cinema league...

paintings are crap, but never mind. started a drawing today (and also did another two square inches of master copy... - zipping along at breakneck speed :)). two days left of the poses, then a two and a half week pose before we finish. really i have no idea at all if i have improved - i have definitely acquired some vocabulary for how to discuss certain concepts (e.g. cast shadow vs form shadow, terminator, dark light vs highlight) which i didn't know before, and i am perhaps drawing more consciously than i did before as a result, but i dunno. hard to compare just because i have never done anything similar (i.e. have never tried spending more than 4-5 hours on a project before).

okay enough blather. bonne nuit a tout le monde and hasta manana...