Ikea Dreams and Paris Journeys

Le Floris Brasserie, 44 rue Jean-Baptiste, Pigalle 75009

Paul and I went here to kill time before an appointment a couple of weeks ago.

Greetings everyone! It’s Tuesday again, a day that is becoming my “default day” to try to post something. Still trying to find my rhythm here on An Alien Parisienne. Sometimes the only way into a rhythm is just to jump in, huh, so here I go. *SPLASH*

Today I thought I would go through Flickr and choose some photos to show and share some stories. There is no central blog topic that is itching to be written about inside of me, although I have a couple of Paris Walks I’ve done in the past month, one with PJ and the other with Peter of Peter’s Paris. I’m just not in the headspace nor do I have the time to really do either justice in an all-out post right now, though, so I am going to just touch on where we went very briefly and recap some of the things I have done in recent weeks, since Easter weekend. I may be able to do something more comprehensive later. I hope I do. I want to make all the little Google map images with stars marking the places to go and so on. I like doing those! It’s not for now, though.

In addition, as you may recall, the fMIL is arriving, hopefully at the end of the week, depending on how flights have recovered from Eyjafjallajökull’s (say that, three times fast) ash cloud, which froze air travel for five days as fears of airplanes’ flying though the plume and getting silica in the engines and crashing were justified. Hopefully her flight will be on track by that time. I’m glad I don’t work in the airline industry right now, though. Ugh. What a mess…

I’m still in cleaning mode, too. Laundry has been washed for the week (one small load of whites remains), the tub has been scrubbed, I’m hopefully finishing the floors this afternoon, and the toilet and sink will be cleaned tomorrow, after PJ shaves, which always leaves gunky junk in the sink. Not criticizing — just saying. Those of you with dudes in your life who don’t wear beards and therefore shave know what I’m talking about. Just a part of life. Even in Paris. Imagine that — toilets and sinks need cleaning, even in a place like Paris. Can you imagine?! (That’s all oozing with sarcasm, just in case you were taking all of that seriously. *snort* I am rolling my eyes, too!)

What I am getting at is that I just need to POST already, as I have other things I want to get done.

A Little Spring Cleaning

Spring arrives in Paris at the Jardin du Palais Royal

Hello all. I hope that your week so far is going well. Mine is doing all right. Some things have been wonderful this past week; other things have been very, very difficult. You know. Life is usually that way: a bit of extremes at both ends that somehow blends into something middling. That was my week.  We had a fairly uneventful weekend this past one. One thing I accomplished was giving the girl child’s room a good cleaning. We went through old things, dusted and vacuumed, tossed, and reorganized.

Girl child is going to be 13 at the end of the month, and her grandma, my future MIL, is coming here (arrival is Friday the 23rd) to help her celebrate. Grandma came out for the boy child’s 13th birthday a couple of years ago as he was being Bar Mitzvahed and so she is doing the same for girl child’s special day of saying good-bye to childhood and hello to the teens (no official Bat Mitzvah here, though. They aren’t the thing in France the way they are becoming in the States).

I want things to be clean for the fMIL. A woman of good midwestern stock of Anglo-Saxon descent, she makes me want to clean, you know? Some of you know what I am talking about. There’s never anything said outright, but there is this kind of standard that you know you are living up to  just by the subtle things she says and does. Or maybe it’s all in my head… I don’t know. There is this thing with being a ([an] almost) daughter-in-law, however, that some of you will know: there is the kind of mom (every mom?) where you know as the woman in her son’s life you are being watched closely. On the surface of things she may totally have a “live and let live” attitude, but you know that somehow inside of her there are judgments being made as to your suitability for her precious boy. It’s never overt. Confrontation is completely out of the question (it’s a midwestern ideal of folks of a certain generation to avoid that elephant in the living room, right?). But you sense and know as one female animal to another that the pecking order is being established, and we all know that cleanliness is next to godliness, even if we are pretending that laissez-faire housekeeping is okay. So you clean.

What I Did This Weekend

AKA Monday Annoyance that I cannot get everything accomplished that I wish to. One of the things I had hoped to do was FINALLY finish the post about the Rue de Mouzaïa, where I walked with the wonderful Peter of Peter’s Paris last DECEMBER (!) — photos here . It’s a charming little area tucked away in the center of the 19th arrondissement about which I have been meaning to blog since he and I met and had our adventure over three months ago (!!). But dirty floors and dishes called, and then I noticed the toilet really needed a good scrub. There were emails that needed to be written and a few posts read. Friends to be called. Food to prepare. All kinds of things which have interfered with my sitting down to knock out a post about the journey. I kept thinking to myself, “I want to post once a week!” and here I am, a week after my last post. So, I am going to do a quick (for me) post (go grab that cup of coffee or glass of wine. See you back here in a ‘sec).