Critical Updates

     Matters of great importance have occurred in recent days.

     Ford made a lemon tart.

  

     We brought the lemon tart to the house of our friends, Anne and Laurent.  Did you know that French people eat all of their desserts (cakes, pies, tarts, it doesn't matter) with a spoon instead of a fork?  It's true.  It's an inferior method to be sure . . . . you want to be able to stab your dessert at times, not balance it on a spoon.  Seems pretty obvious to us . . . . but when in France . . . .

     After we ate the tart we went to the movie theater to see Marsupialami.  This is a French movie.  The theater was packed full to bursting.  It was a pretty bizzare movie about a journalist who travels to South America and ends up searching for a strange monkey-like creature with the help of an animal doctor who also runs an orphanage.  Along the way, a professor finds a kind of flower that helps him stay young all the time so he takes over the local military from the general and then the general has to take it back over by doing a Celine Dion impersonation that hypnotizes all of the soldiers.  Everyone in the theater laughed when the journalist and the animal doctor got captured by the natives and buried with only their heads above ground and then a little dog came and tried to mate with the animal doctor's ear.  The guy next to me was laughing like there was no tomorrow, and he had halitosis.

     Here, Averil and Asha and Ford walk home from the show past some wisteria in full bloom:

     We got a traffic ticket in the mail.  A camera caught Ed going 6 km (4 miles/hr) over the speed limit.  In this photo, Le General is trying to figure out if there's a way out of paying the ticket.  There wasn't.

"Thinking Like a Lawyer"

     Here, Asha is helping to clean the house:

     Here is Asha at a field trip to the college (high school) to see a musical performance:

Her teacher reports that her results are always very good and she is a very serious elf who tries hard.

  

Ford's teachers remarked on his evaluation that his work and results are often excellent.  The rest we couldn't understand and have to get out the dictionary.
    
This is the 92-year old neighbor from across the street, Robert:

     

     He still rides a bike.  And he plays chess and "boules" and walks to and from town regularly and works in his garden.

     We saw a snake in the vineyard.  We think it might have been a Montpelier snake.  It was about two feet long and looked something like this:

 

     Well, that's all for now.  Saturday we head to Spain for three weeks.  We'll check in from there!