Trump and the right-wing MAGA media sphere are spreading the lie that the recent civil unrest in France was caused by immigrants. It wasn’t. The protests began with high school students. They were protesting the lack of resources provided by the French state to education. A legitimate issue: As in the US, French teachers are underpaid, and the physical condition of schools has deteriorated over the past 20 – 30 […]
It occurs to me that I’ve posted lots of material about our trip on Facebook, but not enough material for the loyal readers and subscribers to this blog. So here are some visual highlights from the beautiful days we’ve mostly had since we’ve been here. Ride down the Canal de Marans: Pre-foot-break, a pretty ride along the canal leading inland from La Rochelle’s old port: Pictures from a Sunday afternoon […]
Trump’s Department of Justice has sued California elections officials, claiming that “over 20,000” registered voters in California are illegal aliens and ineligible to vote. The suit seeks to enjoin California To understand the legal, factual, and logical problems with this suit, some background is necessary. First, while “over 20,000” sounds like a large number, it represents a tiny fraction of the 23,164,977 registered voters in California — 0.000863, or 0.0863% […]
Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? In fact this flowery language translates as “The special meeting of the Homeowners’ Association for the Apollo building.” Much less impressive in English. (Our building is called Apollo because it was built on the site of an old movie theater with that name.) We couldn’t attend prior meetings of the HOA meetings for our building, because they’d been held when we were not in La Rochelle, […]
Trump recently announced a “deal” with Putin’s Russia, under which the U.S. will ignore its own law imposing sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine and purchase specified amounts of Russian diesel fuel. Ostensibly the reason for this “deal” (I use quotation marks because history shows that most of the “deals” announced by Trump never happen) is to reduce sky-high diesel fuel prices in the U.S. caused by Trump’s unnecessary, ill-thought-out […]
Trigger warning: May be TMI for some. Look at the map and pictures instead. Ooof … a bad day on the bike. Since Suzie was at the gym, I wanted to go on one of my favorite bike rides here, out to Chef du Baie and back again. By the time I got going it was 10:30, and the clouds that had brought rain and thunder during the night had […]
Our friends Alain and Isabelle treated us to a wonderful afternoon yesterday at their house on the Ile de Ré. A delicious, long lunch followed by a short nap (!), then a walk on the beach and through the village of Le Bois Plage. Perfect weather, perfect company … elle est belle, la vie!
TLDR: An easy trip, but some surprises awaited in La Rochelle. So, two-and-a-half long travel days. The first was an 11 hour overnight flight to Paris, which was bit delayed, but otherwise perfect. We’d sprung for business class seats, which meant that the food and service were excellent, and that it was possible to sleep acceptably well in the lie-down seats. We got to Paris at about 4 in the […]
Suzie and I are back home in Kensington and settling in after a lot of packing (mostly Suzie) and unpacking (same). It’s a glorious day here (75 and sunny) and we celebrated our return with a lunch at Barney’s on Solano with Suzie’s dad Paul, burger and fries while sitting outside. Yesterday we had a meeting with my Stanford doctor, and she had more good news. The results of the […]
Excellent news today: Yesterday, unbeknownst to me, one of the blood tests done was measurement of my Kappa light chain proteins, which is the primary marker used to measure the amount of myeloma cancer cells I have in my bone marrow. My particular type of myeloma doesn’t put out as much of these proteins as normal, but nevertheless they can still be used to gauge the relative level of myeloma […]