France update

We still don't have internet at home except on the iPhone, so it has been difficult to find time during the day to post, but here are the broad strokes: Chloe's mom is here helping (a lot!) with baby wrangling / other stuff. We moved into our new apartment in le Fontanil. There is an absolutely mind blowing market on Sundays with *three* cheese trucks, a rotisserie chicken mobile and various other awesome things. We are 20 feet from a fantastic boulangerie/patisserie. The town itself is lovely.

We still have a lot of things to unbox, but things are getting settled. We made one big trip to Ikea for a sofa, lights and other really exciting things like a hanging pan rack.

Alex is not sleeping very much, but is eating well. He had a bottle for the first time yesterday while Chloe was out talking to someone at the CNRS about applying for a position in their lab next year (it went well). He is still sleeping during the day and having baby poop/feeding parties all night long.

Zoe is adjusting well and is enjoying french food. She has a decent vocabulary of french words now, most of which are food related, and I suspect that it will not be much longer before hers surpasses mine. She goes to a nanny during the week and just had her second birthday. For her birthday, Chloe and I bought her a train set. How did we know she likes trains? It's a sad story involving a train set at a toy store and a full arching-back-pounding-on-the-floor-crying-meltdown at the suggestion that we leave. Unfortunately, while she really seems to like the train set, she uses it in unanticipated ways, such as chucking the train cars and tromping godzilla-like through the train circuits that I set up for her.

oh yeha, and chloe and I climbed some limestone routes near us! Only 6a, but man did it feel great to get outside climbing again.

commute

My commute is now pretty awesome: ~22 or so minutes by bike. It's not so great when it's wet out, but I am in the process of addressing that issue. Here's a video of the commute:


It's pretty shaky, and here's why: the camera mount that I devised is simply a seat post clamp with a 1/4 bolt in it. I have the Mino HD mounted on it, and it shakes a lot. I sped things up 4x in Windows Movie Maker(ughh) after conversion from mp4 to avi in ffmpeg. I know there is probably a better way, but I don't have admin privs on my work computer, and still no internet @home. Related to this: I just discovered that the version of iMovie I have (8) actually has far *fewer* features than iMovie 6 (including the ability to slow down and speed up video clips) -- thanks, Apple!!

anyway, things that need improving for the commute bike: mega bright lamp (in progress), bigger rear facing red lamp (ordered), SKS mudguards (ordered), seat that does not crush my nuts (ordered).