SSS BLOG

A Little Bit about a Lot of Things

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Meanwhile, the Presidential Election in France Goes On….

The first stage of the French presidential election is in April, and so far the moderate-right candidate Nicholas Sarokzy has a growing lead over the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal. Although Ms. Royal is perhaps the most photogenic politician in the history of the world, she has stumbled in her campaign several times by making ill-considered remarks that mark her as, perhaps, not-ready-for-prime-time. Mr. Sarokzy, surprisingly, seems to be doing well […]

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Obama and The West Wing

Suzie and I, a little behind the times, recently watched (for the first time) the entire seven seasons of the excellent TV show The West Wing in a period of about 2 months. We even managed to get the boys interested in it. The article below, in my old college-town newspaper, reminded me of the last season, when the Jimmy Smits character (Matt Sanchez) started his campaign for the Presidency. […]

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Jumping Back into the Blogging World

One of my new years resolutions was to start blogging regularly again. For the last year I was teaching a class at Sonoma State University, which took up most of my spare time, leaving my blogging (and my guitar playing, and my French lessons) languishing. So I’m going to try to blog at least four times a week. We’ll see if that happens. I’ve also switched the blog to WordPress, […]

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Trying Out WordPress

I’ve set up this blog to try out WordPress. We’ll see how it goes.

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Our Perfect Weekend in Bellegarde

S’est dommage — this will be the final blog post from France this year. We are cleaning up the Barrands’ house, we bought our last batch of chocolates and other goodies to take back with us, we got the car washed and vacuumed it, checked the British Airways site for the latest news (today, both of our flights were OK, and it looks like some of the restrictions will be […]

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Food Photos

My sister-in-law Yvette has requested some pictures of food we’ve had. I haven’t taken many pictures of food, it seeming odd to me to aim the camera at a plate, but it turns out I do have three, one of a salad plate Suzie got one evening, one of the dark pancake-type thing filled with ham, cheese, and egg, whose name I now forget, and one of two sweets. Were […]

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The Caves of Sessenage, the World’s Most Beautiful Hydro Plant, and the ‘Cinematic’ Tennis Coach

Since we’ve had to get up and get the boys to their tennis camp by 9 am each day — which requires us to go down the mountain, then across most of Grenoble — we’ve started to feel like regular commuters. It’s a pretty commute. First you pass this sign: Then you continue down a winding mountain road, with views of Grenoble below: Even after you come out of the […]

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Photo Site Links

I think that I’ve changed my settings now so that it should be possible for you to get larger versions of the photos from either my Photobucket site (click here, or paste this into your brower’s address window: http://s58.photobucket.com/albums/g266/ssshupe/) or my Flickr site (click here, or paste this into your browser’s address window: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ssshupe/). As I said, some of the pictures really benefit from being seen in a larger view.

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Italy, Post No. 2

Better late than never … now, where were we? Driving, sadly, from Camogli to Asti. As I may have mentioned, we had such a good time in Camogli, and thought it was such a perfect vacation spot, that we were very depressed to have to leave. It didn’t help that it rained heavily during part of our trip, or that we had difficulty finding our hotel, or that we couldn’t […]

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Road Rants, Etc.

OK, I promised some rants, and here they area, all relating to driving. We have driven over 1200 kilometers in France and Italy, in big cities and small, small villages, and I have yet to see any road in as poor a condition as almost all of the roads in Sonoma County, especially those in the unincorporated area. Maybe I’ve become more sensitive to it because I’ve started bicycling more; […]

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