First of all, i have been paid! Woohoo! I feel positively affluent :)
Second, i have another new piece of furniture, a chest of drawers from Claire. It used to belong to her youngest son, Simon, and the drawer fronts had stickers telling him in which drawers he could find his clothes. So, i took the drawer fronts off, covered the drawers and the top with Contact paper, and replaced some missing knobs (i'm getting to know Mr. Bricolage intimately). The contact paper is a kind of strange blue woodgrain pattern, but it's pretty. The new knobs are a dark metal filigree pattern. I took the old fronts off only because the screws for the new knobs weren't long enough, and i didn't want to go back to Mr. Bricolage again. I must go in there at least twice a week.
I think it looks pretty good.
Yesterday (Monday) i spent the day with Claire in Le Havre. The city has a reputation of being rather unattractive, because most of it had to be rebuilt after World War II. The center of town was designed by an architect named Perret, and he constructed everything primarily out of concrete. Comparisons have been made between his style and mid-century Soviet architecture. I happen to think the buildings look quite nice, and much less block-like than some others i have seen in France. I tried to find some good pictures, but the ones online don't really do it justice. I think people don't like it because it doesn't look like Paris.
Claire is great; i'm so glad i have met her. I had told her i didn't have anything in particular in mind to do in Le Havre, so we could do whatever she wanted. When i got there, she rather apologetically asked if we could go grocery shopping. I agreed, and so we spent quite a long time walking around an enormous Auchan hypermarket talking about what we thought was weird about the French.
Claire grew up in Sale, just outside Manchester, and (for those who don't know) my parents grew up in Stretford, about 5 minutes from Sale. Occasionally Claire would say things that would remind me of my family like "give over" for "stop it". It was quite comforting in a way. She also has a great sense of humor, and we get along very well.
On the way back from Le Havre, she took me on a quick tour of the Port Jerome industrial zone. It's a bunch of chemical plants just a few miles from Lillebonne, and at night the lights are very pretty in a scary, poisonous kind of way. We then stopped at Notre Dame de Gravenchon (on the industrial zone's doorstep) to pick up the chest of drawers from her old house. The house is under contract to be sold, but there are still a few things in it.
That's it for now. I'm going to go put some things in my newly acquired drawers.











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