Enough messing around

Flamant paints

We won't discuss the weekend's color failure. Let's just say that I primed the room -- part of it -- for the third time after a color disaster. Worse than the Crystal experience, depending on your taste, but if you think you might feel oppressed looking at army green (the pot color sample didn't look like that) all day, then you can imagine.

I shudder.

This was the product of my husband's tenderly accompanying me to the store to look at other color options.

"Est-ce que tu viens dans le but de garder un oeil sur moi?" I asked, somewhat suspicious of his motives.

"Mais non! Mais si c'est comme ça que tu le vois, peut-être je ferais mieux de rester."

"Non, non. C'est bon." He was just being nice, after all.

"Mais si tu préfères que je reste --"

"Non, non. C'est bon." I threw the car into reverse, backed up along the street side of the house to back into the old parking space and head off to Leroy Merlin, where we spent nearly an hour and a half considering various paint colors. He was being especially considerate and pleasant, trying to accompany me on another of my paint color odysseys. We ended up bringing home practically exactly the one I thought I wanted in the first place, but returned to the store at the beginning of this project, about a month ago. A sign to him that it must be right. A sign to me that I was lost.

There was a reason why.

The time had come to acknowledge that it was time to stop going to the local Leroy Merlin store and to open my horizons. Just because it's Dulux Valentine's top of the line product, Architecte, in a range of carefully chosen and controlled colors, doesn't mean that I am going to find my bonheur.

Pas de tout.

I went and hunted out my 36 euro fold-out of Flamant's color chips in their line of 147 "authentic" colors. Here is contentment. Here is my bonheur.

Flamant makes paints that are intended to be applied by brush. Serious. They sell the special brushes in sizes up to 5" at some 25 euros, too, and I will soon own one of these. The paint has the quality of old chalk or lime paints, but they can be washed. You can apply it with a roller, but I am going to give the brush a try.

We already know I am a glutton for punishment, and a failed perfectionist (the very worst kind to be, or maybe the only kind, actually).

I am Sysiphe. I can apply paint by 5" brush strokes.

I also got out my favorite poster. It hung in my bedroom in Greenwich (or leaned against a wall; I don't think I could ever bring myself to stick a picture hanger in my beautifully painted wall), and it made the trip across the ocean in the container. Insane for a poster bought at IKEA in Elizabeth, New Jersey (yes, Sisyphe has been to New Jersery, many times, in fact, and most of those trips had nothing to do with large Swedish bog box stores), but I liked it. It made me happy. For a long time, it sat in front of the radiator next to the dining table. Then, my husband grew tired of banging his feet into it, and I saw that it had gotten some water damage, so I scarcely protested when he retired it to face the wall in the junk room, otherwise known as the petit salon.

I lay it on the couch and wiped off the spider remains and dust. I looked at the colors: beiges, pale ochers, grays on a light cream background. It is fragments of print in different languages and symbols, and I used to be able to look at it for a long time. The color was in here. Or, the key to the color was in here. I took it, the Flamant color chip fold-out, my coffee and a camera out to my future office and leaned the poster and color chips up against the only wall that won't change color. I had already given it far too much thought before leaving the dimness of the living room. I gave it too much more thought. I held the color chip fold-out against this wall and that wall, near the off-white wall and the dark wood of the windows, the sisal flooring and the orange of the adjoining guest room, separated by a bath done in wood, like a sauna.

Here is the question I was asking myself: should the walls be a color, like the ocher-beige in the poster, glowing when lit like the orange room, or should the walls be a background that suits the colors like those in the poster in which I could decorate the room? I wanted both. Which did I want more?

We'll skip the interior dialog. I decided on the latter at the expense of the effect of the former. It's a feeling thing. This room I want to be more neutral, quieter. I want the things that I put in it and on its walls to be more important than the color of the room. I want it to feel bigger and airier. I went with Abaca. It's on the page with the yellows, so it has more warmth than another color on the whites, Ficelle, that was similar in tone, in the oatmeal family. I could have ordered largish samples to stick to the walls, or very small pots of each, but I am impatient.

And, I have had enough.



Audouin has begun taking down the storage system in the petit salon, which he labored to build according to his ex's directions and never finished, and where the sofa we bought second-hand from a couple of guys in Paris will go. It's black and simple. It will face the piano. Yesterday afternoon, he was watching television instead of working.

"Tu ne veux pas continuer à démonter le rangement dans le petit salon?" I was trying for my least accusatory tone of voice.

"J'ai un problème."

"Oui?"

"Je ne sais pas où mettre tout ce qu'il y a sur les étagères," he said. Where to put everything that is still on the shelves, after everything else that I packed in boxes to deal with later, is indeed a problem, but not one that can be solved by watching TV.

"Par terre?" The floor was the only thing that came to mind. I know who is going to figure out where to put it all, and now that I have ordered my paint on-line, I know who is going to have the time to do it while she waits for her paint, but beware: I throw things that can't find a home away. I headed upstairs and heard the sound of screws being unscrewed begin again in the petit salon.

I also need to make drawings for the woodwork and maybe some built-in shelving, where we can wedge it into this little space, filled with a big couch and a piano.

We were supposed to go pick up 12 m2 of solid oak flooring I had bought on eBay, but the guy turned out to be crazy and refused to figure out how to use his PayPal account to get the money I paid him. After listening to his temper tantrum on the phone, and using my most calming voice to keep him from going completely berzerk, I ended up having to do what he wanted, and started a claims process against him to get my money back.

Whatever.

There is someone else in Versailles who might be willing to break in half a lot of old oak flooring he is selling. I'll know this weekend. I'd have loved to have it for this weekend.

Anyone have any experience installing flooring? I'm about to cut my teeth.
....

I hate the color

The light blue, by daylight

Do you remember my waxing lyric about the color (Crystal) I had chosen for the other room out in the petite maison? Something to do with it being a complementary color for orange and yellow ocher, the colors of the other room and the house as seen from the French doors? Something else about it being like the color of twilight and something about snow-capped mountains?

Well, not that it isn't a nice color (it is), but twilight is better outside. So are snow-capped mountains.

The first brush strokes cutting-in left me a little cold.

It's always that way. You know that. Keep going and see once the wall is all painted. It always looks better then.

"OK," I said to myself, and pressed on, moving onto the walls with the very most cutting-in possible equals time eventually wasted in the event that I still didn't like it, but I was getting tired and not thinking beyond, "Finish... finish... finish... you can finish tonight... it looks like my favorite color when I was little, sort of a cross between periwinkle and cornflower blue from the box of Crayolas... remember how wonderful it was to open a new box of crayons?"

Yeah. And then sharpening them. Remember how you won that coloring contest when you were like, what? Five? And they disqualified you because you didn't go out of the lines once and they didn't believe you did it yourself? The use of color might have been a little maturely subtle, too.

"Yeah. I think Mom told them off, but they refused to change their minds. I decided that meant I'd really won, and probably would have with the older kids, too."

And your bathing suit. The one with the daisies. Where were they? At the hip? It was the sort of the same color. How old were you then?

"Something like that. Maybe it was the shoulder. I loved that bathing suit. Mom said it was 'my color'. I don't know, maybe 6? I can't remember if that one was before the navy blue one with red trim, but I do remember the red and white striped one I had when I made a BM in it by accident and Grandma had to change me. Where on earth were we that day? I was 2, and I was so embarrassed by what I had done."

Amazing the things we remember. It's OK. Kids do that.

"No shit." We laughed riotously together, myself and I.

You know, those edges of plaster that stay white along the edge of blue, I'm remembering something else --

"The plaster hand mold from kindergarden. It looks exactly like that plaster hand mold from kindergarden. I used the 'boy' color. I don't know if I can be happy in a room that looks just like the plaster hand mold I made in kindergarden, only very slightly more gray-violet."

"Salut. Comment ça va?" My husband was home and joining the conversation.

"Ca va, mais je ne sais pas --" He was waiting for something to be wrong; there was plenty of that, but the color was on my mind. "Je ne sais pas si j'aime cette couleur finalement."

"Quelle couleur?", he started to ask. I shot him a withering look. He looked around him, "Oh. Je n'avais pas vu. Bon, c'est pas si mal. Peut-être ça peut-être un peu plus marqué." He could see that it should have more punch. Myself joined me in nodding in agreement with him.

"Faut voir par la lumière de jour, je suppose, mais je ne sais pas," I shrugged and looked back at the powdery blue that would look a lot better on a VW Bug. "Je peux toujours la changer." Not that I wanted to paint the blue walls again.

I wanted to be done.

Now, I have seen by the light of day, and this isn't working for me, only I can't make up my mind. Maybe I'll just paint the whole thing Marble for now, the sneaker and sailcloth color of the big wall and ceiling, and make up my mind later, when I have my mind.


....

Unbearable rudeness

My heart is breaking for my son, and for myself.

Why is everything so difficult here? is the question that keeps running through my head, only I do recognize that it might be the wrong question. I have heard my friends in the United States anguish for their children, who cannot find their place in the public school system, who have to find a way to pay as much in tuition each month for their education as they did for their care so they could return to work, or not if it cost more than they earned after the rent or mortgage, utility bills and groceries. I know that anguish is universal, but France seems to come up with one uniquely insufferable and breaking experience after another for children to survive before they are damaged enough to be considered competent and worthy adults, ready to begin the humiliating, agonizing, breaking process all over again on another crop of fledging human beings, destined to be culturally French.

I have bitten off more than I can chew in that lead paragraph. I cannot tackle an analysis of all the ways children are hurt and how French society bears its scars in a finally cracking ignorance. Some parents do see what is being done to their children in the name of educating them and preparing them for their future as law-abiding, income-producing, useful adults. It's nearly as ubiquitous a topic at most dinner parties as the usual May and June round-up of which children in each family are passing the year and which are repeating. All I can tell for today is another story, this one about my son's driver's license exam.

It started inauspiciously the evening before his 8 am appointment yesterday at the Salle Jacques Brel in Mantes-la-Ville, the socialist part of l'Agglomération de Mantes-en-Yvelines, which also comprises Mantes-la-Jolie, on the other side of the train tracks leading into Paris and out into Normandy, with its gouvernement de droite and the largest public housing project in all of France, le Val Fourré.

(It helps to have a right-leaning government with a very large poor and immigrant population. Actually, I am not really joking, which might shock some of my progressive and liberal friends in the US (of whom I consider myself one), but that's another subject for another post. Suffice it to say that a sufficient number of those actually living in the Val Fourré vote right, although not extreme right, even though some probably do. After all, they bear the worst brunt of the consequences of immigration handled disastrously.)

It is from here that all driving tests begin, and it is here that they end.

Sam was deemed ready to pass his test at the end of his 20 hours, before he even began the 3,000 kilometers of accompanied driving with his step-father (next to never) or I over the span of one year minimum. The cost of this program is about 1,450 euros, payable in about 3 installments. There are home second mortgages available to help parents who are a little cash strapped.

There ought to be, anyway. Actually, it should never cost so much to get a license in the first place. I'm not sure their elaborate program saves any lives over those of countries whose driver's ed programs cost a fraction of theirs.

At the end of the first "trimester" session back with a professional driving instructor, he was considered to be doing fine. Maybe there was a kink or two to work out, bad habits acquired over about 7 months and 3,000 kilometers already of driving.

At the end of the second "trimester" session back with his instructor for another hour of driving, with me present (again), it was judged that he was driving somewhat too fast in situations that call for a lighter foot, such as slowing for an oncoming car when there are cars parked on both sides of the street, and Sam thinks he can get by without striking the other driver's side rear-view mirror just by easing his foot ever so slightly on the accelerator. That and approaching a right or left-hand turn a mite too fast. Easy stuff to correct.

It was time for him to pass his test in three weeks' time. His instructor would call him with the date, and they'd schedule his last hour of driving together. I asked if it might not be wises to do two, since he was changing from the car he had driven for his 20 hours to one he had scarcely driven, something that made him feel uncomfortable. His instructor agreed.

Cha-ching for the driving school. I thought it was 40 euros an hour. No. It is 48 euros an hour.

I was to meet him at the driving school to pay right after his two-hour driving session, scheduled the evening before his road test. Waiting at the light at the intersection just above the driving school, my cell phone rang.

"Mom?"

"Hi, Sam."

"Where are you?"

"I'm right around the corner, Sam. I'll be right there." It was 6:53 pm. The school closes at 7 pm, which means no one is in the establishment at 6:55 pm. I heard the edge in his voice. Everyone in France is scared of everyone who sits behind a desk or a cash register shortly before closing time. This is partly why the French smoke a lot (less, but) and take more sleep aid medications that any other country's citizens. Stress runs high in France, and everyone has their part of the population to terrorize.

The light changed, and I didn't get to move forward. It didn't register until the second time this happened. The minutes were ticking by. My cell phone rang again.

"Hi, Sam."

"Mom, are you almost here because they are getting nasty." I felt for him. I knew just how he felt, and now my own blood pressure was shooting upwards.

"Sam, there's a problem with the light at the big intersection. Only three cars are getting through before it changes directly back to red at every green light."

"Please, Mom, just hurry." I considered leaving the car there with the warning lights on and sprinting around the corner. Tant pis for everyone behind me. Instead, I counted red lights before I was the fourth in line. There had been about 6 or 7. Granted they were fast, but it was now 6:56 pm. I was plain out of time. The light turned green, and my foot was playing with the clutch and the accelerator already. I scooted under the light just as it changed over my head, parked illegally in front of the building next to the driving school and hurried inside, the special format envelope Sam said at the very last minute we had to have, the kind, he said, the school sends things in (like bad news bulletins scolaires), and which I found inside a folder dedicated to psychological-educational testing and the horrors that have come regularly and consistently over the years from his schools, in one hand, the other pulling out my checkbook. Sam took the envelope from me, his name already written on it, and set it on the secretary's desk. I tried to catch my breath to greet the normally charming woman, who would, at that very instant, turn into the Nurse Ratchet of driving school secretaries.

"Ca ne suffit pas de tout," she snapped, as though we had just handed her a dead fish, and not an A5 envelope, "Et je ne peux pas accepter votre chèque," she added with a flourish of satisfaction in the dizzying height of nastiness and loathing she had just scaled. I was a) overwhelmed with surprise and confusion, b) still out of breath from the experience of simply getting there, and c) left speechless, trying to comprehend what she was trying to tell me and how to reply, when she saved me the trouble, for the instant, by adding a helpful word of explanation, "il n'y a même pas d'adresse et pas de timbre."

So there!

No address and no stamp? These made my envelope insufficient? Was it not possible simply to ask me to write our address and provide a stamp, and if I were lacking the latter, suggest that I return the next morning with a stamp? So many questions flew through my head that I could barely concentrate on her frowning face, the rejected envelope propped against a stack of papers on her desk, my son looking anxious and helpless and the checkbook, lying limp in my own hand still. I collected myself enough to ask, trying to remember that I actually can speak French, as well as understand it (unfortunately) a question to help my state of confusion.

"Mais, ça n'a jamais posé un problème avant d'écrire un chèque. Pour quoi ça poserait-il un problème ce soir?" Why, I asked, if it had never posed a problem in the past to pay by check could it possibly be a problem this evening?

"Il passe son permis demain. Vous ne serrez plus ici après," she snapped again, speaking very distinctly and as though there were very great reason to be very aggravated by me. He will take his driver's exam tomorrow. You won't be here anymore, was what she replied. I was still very confused. It seemed that she was worried that our check wouldn't be good. But she had more to say, "Je ne vais pas aller à la banque," and here she glanced at her watch for added effect, to draw attention to the advanced hour of the evening, "ce soir." Of course, they had no way to know my check wasn't written on insufficient funds, rubber. She wasn't about to go to the bank at this hour to make sure my check was good.

I thought I was hallucinating. My blood pressure told me otherwise.

"Mais j'ai écris pas loin de 1,500 euros de chèques et jamais a-t-il eu un problème? Pour qoui ne serait-il pas bon cette fois-ci?" As though I would write a bad check the very last evening, taking full advantage of the fact that I would not have reason to return to their establishment to pass a bad check. "En plus, je viens de passer 10 minute à un feu qui ne marche pas correctement et qui ne laissait passer que 3 voitures à la fois --" but it was stupid to even point out that I hadn't intended to arrive 3 minutes before closing. I had arrived before closing, and the place was still full of people, both secretaries still working, the several driving instructors still there leaning against the outside wall, smoking.

They all smoke. It's like a job qualification.

"Ce n'est pas moi qui décide. C'est la politique de l'établissement pour le dernier paiment. Ca doit être en liquide ou par carte bancaire." And how much easier would all this have been if Miss Ratchet had silply said, "Bonsoir Madame. Alors, Samuel est prèt à passer son permis! Vous avez amener l'ennveloppe -- ah, il faut simplement l'adresse et un timbre, s'il vous plait -- et le dernier paiement s'éffectue en liquide ou par carte bancaire, si vous pouvez le faire. Merci!"

I handed her my bank card, thinking If only she'd just asked how different would the entire tone of the interaction had been, and sat down to write our address on the envelope and get a stamp from my wallet.

"Combien de timbres faut-il?" I asked in my iciest of polite voices.

"Un seul," she said, as though having to reach into her vitals for the will to reply. That did it. Not even a s'il vous plait. I wasn't going to hold back. I wasn't going to hold my tongue. Not this evening. I could feel Sam draw what he must have been sure was his last breathe as I drew mine to let her have it.

"Votre manque de courtoisie ce soir est affligeant. Personne ne doit me parler comme ça jamais," and here I made the fateful decision to tell her exactly what I think not just of her, but of nearly all people in her position in this country. I told her that not only was her lack of courtesy appalling, but that this is endemic to this country, and it is the single thing that I cannot tolerate in France. She looked at me as though unable to believe her French ears. What she didn't know is that I am also a citizen of this country, and like other citizens of this country who are not naturalized but born of French blood on French soil, I am aghast at this behavior, but unlike many, I am going to call it out every time I am met with it now, "Allez voyager un peu," I suggested, "et vous verrez ce que je veux dire. Vous ne rencontriez ce genre d'attitude que rarement car c'est inacceptable ailleurs."

Go and travel, I suggested, and you will see what I mean. You will run into this sort of attitude but rarely because it is unacceptable elsewhere.

It makes people mean here. Everyone, right down to the last secretary, becomes her own little Napoleon, wielding what little power she has over those unfortunate enough to have to do business with her or never be able to pass a driver's license exam. She looked to her papers and started to go on about the 70 students she'd had to process that month alone, and I cut her off, "C'est votre travail, Madame," and I don't want to hear about it. She busied herself with having me tap my pin code into the little machine and giving me my receipt, making sure Sam knew what to bring and had his instructions.

I knew what Sam was thinking. He said it to me in the car when we left, "Mom, you shouldn't have done that."

"Sam, let me tell you your [French] aunt would have done that. She was rude, and I am sick of people feeling it is their right to treat people the way she treated me this evening." I will spare his aunt the pain of appearing in my blog by leaving her name out.

"Well, that doesn't make my aunt right, and you were rude by speaking back to her, and if I don't get my license, they can blacklist me and make me wait six months to take the test again."

After explaining that they don't have the right to punish him by putting him perpetually at the end of the list for exam appointments, I launched into an explanation of why exactly it is not rude to point out to someone else his or her own rudeness and let them know that you will not accept such treatment before the exchange exploded over the absurdity of what it costs to get a driver's license in France. At least in the Paris metropolitan area, implying that he had better pass after another 96 euros for 2 additional hours of driving to make sure everything was bien comme il faut. I hurt him. I hadn't intended that. I was angry with the system, not with him. We'd managed to get into a fight between the driving school and the train station, and they are not that far away.

Near the mosque, not far from the hospital, he let out a breath and said, referring to what the secretary had felt empowered to do to me that evening, "Well, that's what I go through every day at school, and I can't say anything."

And that was all I had been able to think about while my own integrity was disrespected by a woman who thought she could do it with impunity to an adult. Imagine what it's like for young people.

Imagine.
....

Throwing in the trowel

Plaster's still life
And the plaster's still alive.

You cannot imagine how long I have been waiting to be able to use that line. Throwing in the trowel. As in, "That'll do, Sispyhe. That'll do. Time to throw in the trowel."

[Sispyhe beams up at her Farmer, who looks back upon her with satisfaction in a job well enough done.]

I can barely type, that's how much the right side of my neck and shoulder blade hurt, but that won't stop me from trading in my trowels for my brushes and lugging the giant pot of universal primer down from our bedroom, where I left off painting the last time with our French door, and out to the soon-to-be Crystal Room. What shall we call Crystal (the name of the paint color)? It's a very, very light blue with a tinge of violet, like twilight.

I also considered Jungle Green (not yet ruled out) and a very strong free-range hen egg yolk yellow, but this color spoke to me. It is peaceful and serene, clear and delicate like first and last light on mountaintop snow and glaciers.

The French door. Remind me to tell that story, too.


....

One more thought

Or, they are trying to clean the latrine.
....

Further Mouse droppings musings

I thought about it some more.

The styrofoam pellets are actually the insulation whoever built this travesty used inside the concrete blocks.

The plastic tubing is not that at all. There is a small gray tube that runs through the equally gray concrete block to thread the wires to the outlets. The outlets are lined with a red plastic cup that actually seals the space off from the cavity of the concrete block.

In the case of this particular outlet, the back of the red plastic cup has been chewed away. Because it is not there, the insulation and the pellet poohs are free to pass into the outlet area and drop onto the floor.

Clearly, the mice are trying to escape.

This is the only escape route they have tried to date.
....

Outlet outhouse

Mouse merde

Sometimes there are just no words. I can feel the enthusiasm for my home and visiting me here dropping off like, well, mouse droppings.

This makes one mystery sort of explained of about a million.

Some nights, when I was particularly aggravated and aggrieved by my husband (oui, hélas, ça arrive), I would sleep out in the guest room, which was, at that time, in this room. I have since slept in the orange room and enjoyed that, too (much more). After vacuuming the largest of the spiders and and checking for them in my bedding, I'd turn on the bedside light and sink into the down quilt and soft mattress, pillows piled against the wall, and complain in my journal before cracking open the book I'd chosen to lull me to sleep, waiting for the familiar sound of something alive in the wall.

"Scritch... scritch... scritchscritchscritch...," and so it would go. The game was to put off the moment I turned the bedside light back on to make absolutely sure it was actually inside the wall.

And not just behind my pillows.

Now, when guests arrive and I take them through their painstakingly prepared room, pointing out the fresh towels, the clean spa terry robe for their personal use and comfort, and how to work the plethora of light switches, I'd also be sure to add an offhand warning about the sounds of animal life in the walls late at night. An extra winning smile would usually do it to throw them off just enough that all the appalled guest could manage was a brave smile and "Oh! You needn't worry about me! I sleep like a log!"

Kind guest, but I know the truth.

And now, I really do know the truth. When I pulled the outlet cover away from the wall, I noticed what appeared to be pellets of styrofoam spilling out onto the floor. It could not, however, be missed that there were also some suspicious dark pellets mixed in.

Oh, don't think I only noticed this today. No. I noticed this days ago. I just didn't say anything while I considered the implications. But, just now, I poked at the cover plate a bit with my trowel, wiggling it vigorously, as piles of pellets of styrofoam and of mouse turd poured forth, making a nice large, gross pile on the plastic floor covering. Dégueulasse.

Where, I had been asking myself, was this coming from? Was the mouse (or mice) using the outlet as an outhouse? If so, why? Why there, specifically? Why not anywhere?

Watching the turd flow, it struck me. The wall is solid. It is made of concrete blocks covered on the inside in nothing more than plaster (more on that in a bit). Mice cannot run around inside it just as they please like they could were it made of two by fours and sheetrock. No. There is forcémment a plastic tube snaking through the concrete block for the wires, and it is this particular plastic tube that has been serving as a highspeed rodent network. Given that there are several outlets, each with its own wiring, there are certainly several plastic tubes.

Conclusion: Mice do not like to relieve themselves just anywhere, they prefer to choose one place for that purpose and keep their mouse house tidy.

I suppose, if you want to look at it that way, that this is actually good news. They can't get out onto your pillow.

Now, I need to get the vacuum cleaner and see just how much crap there is in there. Ugh.

Remind me to tell you about the other miserable discovery that shouldn't have been one were I not trying not to see the obvious.
....