We made it!

With Sarah's graduation from Randolph-Macon on Saturday, we have seen all three girls through college and have survived the experience! Not that we ever doubted we would; it just seemed like a long, long road when they were itty-bitty and we were struggling with balancing work and family life, along with worries about day care, school holidays, illnesses, and making sure each girl got to her various activities.

Now our girls are all more or less happy and well-adjusted, and we thank God that despite our mistakes, they turned out to be such fine young women. Chapeau, les filles!

If I wudda knew

If I'd known this was going to turn out so well, I'd have kept filming. As it was, it was totally by chance that I filmed a few seconds of driving under Charles de Gaulle airport on our way to southwestern France a couple of weeks ago. I know: it just looks like a tunnel. But there are runways and airplanes over our head!

See? But the plane on the runway didn't turn out half as well.

Marketing a seed

I don't know why, but this stuff fascinates me. This, dear readers, is the plant that produces what you know as canola oil. It's English name is rapeseed, which is hard to market of course, so the Canadians decided to call it canola, an abbreviation for Canadian oil, low acid. This particular field is outside Tours, in France's Loire Valley (slogan - "It's not just about the wine and the châteaux anymore"). driving through central France and much of Germany, you see vast fields of yellow when it's blooming in the spring. It's gorgeous. Years ago, when I asked a Frenchman what it was, he said that it was commonly referred to as mustard. Turns out it is related to mustard. And to turnips and to broccoli.

The Frozen Saints

Before the Vatican traded 'em in on different models, 11, 12, and 13 May were the feast days of Saints Mamertus, Pancras, and Servatius. Because northern Europeans noticed that there was often a cold snap around this time, the three are referred to as the Ice Saints and implored for protection against late freezes. The French call them les saints de glace, and, Vatican revisionists notwithstanding, modern Belgians are still aware of the folk wisdom and will not put out tender plants until after what they refer to as les saints de gel. Our morning drive time radio announcers were talking about them the other day, as they announced three days of icy temps and rain. It was about 40F yesterday and 42 today. Tomorrow, though, for Saint Servatius' day it's supposed to get all the way up in the low 50s. I plan to go to work in shorts and flipflops.

Noteworthy is that Servatius was the 4th century bishop of the Roman town of Tongeren (Tongres in French), which is now in eastern Belgium and is famous for its weekly antique market. That's where we got the monks bench.

Lies they tell us about Europe - installment 4

In honor of yesterday's 65th anniversary of V-E Day, we offer another installment of "Lies they tell us about Europe."

Be careful calling from Europe. It's very expensive!

Lie. As told by Ma Bell. It's cheap to call from Europe to the States. If, of course, you think that totally free qualifies as cheap. With Belgacom (the former state monopoly and still biggest telecomms provider in Belgium), you can pay a one-time fee of €5 and call any one foreign country of your choice for free on nights, weekends, and Belgian holidays up to a couple thousand minutes a month. Even if you call outside these hours, each call, no matter how long it lasts, is one euro. Even before such deals, it was cheap. In 1998 Rita and I made a series of transatlantic business calls from France--using a hotel phone no less!--and it worked out to a couple of bucks. So forget the rumors. It's cheap.

Unless of course we've never called you from over here. Then it's prohibitively expensive. So don't expect to hear from us anytime soon.

Not quite clear on the concept

We just got back from a week in the Dordogne, a part of France we didn't know at all before this trip. It's part of Aquitaine, which was English territory until the Hundred Years War. We noticed that almost every village had a sister city…in France. That's not normally the way it works, but there may be a reason. Most of the sister cities were villages in Alsace and Lorraine. A lot of people either fled from or were forced out of those two provinces at the beginning of WW II and wound up in the Dordogne, so I guess finding a sister city over yonder was a way of keeping folks close to their roots. Besides, the rest of France considers them kind of foreign anyways.