PHOTOS

Here's a 'before' photo of the kitchen. That wallpaper will be disappearing. The horrible wallpaper on the door will be going as well. That same wallpaper covers the walls in the hallway, where it's already falling off the walls - as if it agreed with its intended fate. The stuff on the door will be harder to get rid of, it's really stuck on there. That icky light-brown faux-wood trim painted around the door panels will be on my list of things to be got rid of as well. The door itself is a lovely solid wood paneled door. As for the doors on the cabinet to the rear of the door, well, I may just take them off completely. I'm not sure what's under that contact-paper. But the drawers of course will be staying, so I hope it's not too awful.

I'm not sure what color to paint the walls. The woodwork will be white, and perhaps those cabinet doors and drawers as well, or, if the doors get junked, maybe a bright color inside the cabinet. The room faces south, so there's lots of light all day.

IT'S OURS!

SOLD!!!!

It's ours! 10:19 this morning, John's mobil phone rings, as we are driving through Chalabre center, having been to the box factory there and bought 20 cartons. It's Mikaël, our estate agent. 'Are you sitting down', he asks. He continues, telling us we own the house, the money was sent to the notaire yesterday afternoon, the notaire signed everything, and called Mikaël this morning. WOOHOO!!!!! In other news, he also has the plans for the new septic system, dropped off yesterday. We can pick them up when we pick up the house keys.

I ALMOST CAN'T BELIEVE IT!

IT MUST BE TRUE AFTER ALL

Yeah, must be true after all. Wednesday, under the guidance of the banker, we signed many possibly fraudulent statements concerning when we received this loan offer, and he sent them off to the Montpelier office by interoffice courrier. Today, Friday, a huge chunk of money was deducted from our bank account. (Wait, I thought they were giving us money?) This was in the amount of the fees and who knows what for said loan, and the siphoning-off agency was the bank. So any day now, we'll probably own the house. Funny, we have lots of bills that are taken out of our bank account automatically, which is quite the standard thing in France. But all the other takers let you know how much and when way ahead of time. EDF (the electric company) sends us a notice at least two weeks ahead of the scheduled time telling us the exact amount and date. You'd think a bank would do the same.

On second thought, I guess I don't expect anything nearly so rational from them

Anyway, now I can get my life back. Funny how something like this can take over your consciousness, making you forget those other zillion things you should be doing. Like answering email. Now I can get to that! If anyone remember who I am by this time.

COULD IT BE TRUE???

IT'S HERE! IT'S HERE! WE GOT THE OFFER TODAY! Just as I was sitting here at my computer, figuring out how to finagle an IRA withdrawal, and would we get the loan within the 60-day reinvestment period, thus not incurring taxes? And I heard the mail delivery lady at the door, and Le voila! What she was stuffing into the post box was a huge envelope. Not all that exciting at first, since most of our forwarded mail has been ganged into large envelopes. But I opened it and saw the magic name Caisse d'Epargne de Languedoc Roussillon. I immediately called the bank and made an appointment for 3 this afternoon. HOORRAYY!!!!

And here's what's strange - of course there had to be something strange. Remember how yesterday I was informed that these offers are always sent by registered mail? Indeed an online website I saw this morning says that by law these have to be sent by registered mail. This was not. And this bit of strangeness is a sort of companion piece to the piece of incorrect information I got from the woman in Paris yesterday, who said that registered mail is never forwarded. It is, at least according to the La Poste website and according to all the various people in the two post offices we went to this morning. So, people in Paris don't know everything.

Now we just have to find out what date we can sign the offer, because it's not at all clear to me which date on the various papers and envelopes will mark the start of the 10-day 'cooling off' period. And then we'll also want to know exactly when the money will be transferred to the notaire, since that will mark when we actually come to own the house.

I then called our estate agent, the ever patient Mikaël, who himself was getting a bit rattled after he spoke to the banker earlier this morning. He was thrilled! He said I should have told him to sit down first, because he nearly fell over.

No wonder the Parisians think of everyone else as hicks

I have been doing research into the facts of how things work with French loans. A friend suggested I talk to her bank in Paris, which has an international branch - which means I got to speak to someone in English to ask these somewhat complex questions. Anyway, the situation right now with Caisse d'Epargne, our bank in Esperaza, is that the Montpelier office has once more sent the loan offer letter to our old address in Esperaza. Our banker there (a friend has suggested changing the 'b' to a 'w') told us that all we now had to do is to wait for it to be forwarded to us through the post. Well, I asked this woman in Paris if this sort of letter would in fact be forwarded. No, she said, Never. They are sent by registered mail, which is never forwarded. She also said that La Poste holds unclaimed registered mail for 10 days before returning it to the sender. So we are going to go to La Poste in Esperaza first thing tomorrow morning, in hope that they still have this maudit letter!

As an aside, I suspect that this means that yet another bit of information from the wanker is incorrect. By law, when you receive such an offer, you have to wait 10 days to sign it - this is a consumer protection measure. So I had mentioned to him a few sessions back that no matter when we received this offer, we would still have to add 10 days onto the already long delay. Oh No, he said, the 10 days starts with the date the letter is post marked when it leaves the sender. Well, I now doubt it. I strongly suspect that the 10 days starts on the the day you sign the registered post form accepting the letter. We'll see. I hope.

I can't believe it. How can anyone be this stupid?

OK, you've probably guessed that I'm talking about the banker. But first, an interlude with the appliance repairman.

This is a photo of our kitchen. Note that charming addition to the sink - a garden hose. Don't you have one in your kitchen? In ours, the receiving end of the hose is connected to the dishwasher connection under the sink, and the delivering end is in the sink. Why? Because of the dishwasher that is no longer there. The dishwasher that the repairman first showed up to fix on March 5th. Yes, you saw the month right; that's March, 5 weeks ago today, I think. The latest installment on that story was that he was here again on Tuesday, and decided that he had to take the dishwasher back to the shop. He failed to notice that the tap that the dishwasher was connected to wouldn't turn off properly and thus dripped water into the cabinet under the sink. (The fault of some inept plumber? How could that be?) Anyway, the repairman said he would return the dishwasher either late that same day or on Thursday. What appeared late in the day was not the repairman, but the puddle of water in front of the sink. Needless to say, he also didn't show up yesterday, Thursday, either. But we had such fun staying home all day waiting for him. We didn't have to go shopping, we didn't have to go for a walk on a wonderful spring day, we got to sit around looking at moving boxes. So today we just decided to forget about him. We went to Espéraza, to see the banker! What fun!

When we bearded the banker in his den, who said he had not received the dossier and he could do nothing, accompanying this with that wonderful Gallic shrug. Since I was in no mood to just leave, I kept telling him what a horrible situation this was to be in, and he finally decided to call the Montpelier office, to ask why if they had sent him the dossier on Monday he had not yet received it. They of course could not take any time to talk to him and said they would call them back. We sat in his office for about 10 minutes, and then decided we could do other errands while we were in town, and he promised to call us as soon as he heard from them.

So off we went, to find the policeman in Espéraza, the person to whom our renewed Cartes de Sejour (residency permits) will be sent. We are unable to make an appointment with him, since he simply doesn't do that. You just have to wander past his office from time to time and see if he happens to be there, or wander around the streets until you run into him. This used to be easier when we lived a block away. Anyway, these permits are already three months late, but No, he had not yet received them. There is a boring regularity to the inefficiency of absolutely everything that happens in France.

OK, so we left the policeman's office, ready to head home. My phone rings! It's the banker! The Montpelier office called him back and - are you ready for this? - they had once more sent the dossier to our old address in Espéraza! They sent it again to the house we no longer live in! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! HOW STUPID CAN THEY BE!!!!! I could barely keep from standing there on the sidewalk screaming at this guy over the phone. He tells me that the rule is that they have to send it to the address on the loan application. WHY DIDN'T HE ALREADY KNOW THIS! HE'S THE BANK MANAGER FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! THIS MAN IS A MORON!

So, we trundle off home, there to find the dishwasher sitting on the terrace. By this time, I am screaming.

I'm losing the will to live.

The Physics of Moving

For the last few days, I've been reading Lee Smollin's book, The Trouble with Physics. Fascinating stuff, string theory and all that. Fun because I know there won't be a quiz. But since physics is running about in my mind, here's my new view of moving.

The Laws of (Moving) Thermodynamics

The laws of moving turn out to be a special case of the Laws of Thermodynamics. In case you've missed these laws, here's a paraphrasing of them:

First law: You can't win.

Second Law: Everything gets worse.

Third Law: You can't quit the game.

Wow, does that all sound familiar! That's moving! The First Law is obvious and needs no explanation. The tedious, never-ending dealings with the banker are obviously an aspect of the Third Law, but it's the Second Law that seems to be showing off right now. This law is often paraphrased as 'everything tends toward disorder', i.e. entropy increases over time. Here in Ste Colombe sur l'Hers, entropy has taken over. Where's the small cutting board? Is it already packed? Is it in an as yet unsorted bag of stuff that we brought here when we moved out of the Espéraza house? Or is it just misplaced?

Well, as if entropy weren't increasing quickly enough, a brand new opportunity for disorder has been added, and it will bring more disorder in its wake. The date for the move was to be next Wednesday. We can't make it, obviously, so we've cancelled the date. The next available date (here comes that disorder) is May 25th. That's 6 weeks from today! We'll be living in a house full of boxes for 6 weeks. The current state of disorder is all but overwhelming, and it will only get worse. (First law!)

In addition to the laws of thermodynamics, a local variant of another law of The Physics of Moving seems to be at work as well, which I will call

The Clemens Uncertainty Principle: The location of all objects that we own cannot be known simultaneously. This law is true even at the best of times and becomes only stronger during a move. It also has a corollary:

Corollary to the Clemens Uncertainty Principle: If one object is located, another object will disappear.

The latest thing to have an unknown location is my camera. I always put it in my pocketbook, and yet it is not there. I hope it's not the the pocket of some piece of clothing that I put in the washing machine about 10 minutes ago. John reassures me that if this we so I'd hear it clunking and thumping around in there, which I don't. So it's gone into some alternate universe, whence it will return in its own good time. Then I can download some photos for this blog!

Tum de dum de dum; some time passes...

As an example of the above principle and its corollary, I have found the camera, which was cleverly hiding in the car. But I now cannot find the umbilical cord for the camera which allows me to download photos.

The Bank Saga - Chapter 483, Section 37, Paragraph 94.82

Remember the overdraft idea? I suspect it was nothing other than a way for the banker to get the estate agent to stop calling him. Nothing came of it. It was never again mentioned. but while we were still believers, we met with the notaire, signed all the necessary papers, just as if we were actually at the closing. But with no money passing hands, the deal was not yet final. When the money appears, the notarie will finalize the deal by signing for the sellers, registering the deed and letting us know that we own the house. We figured this would be in a day or two.

Ahh, but it's that "when the money appears" that is the continuing problem. Yesterday we stopped by the bank, just to let the banker know we were still there, still waiting for the money thay had agreed to lend us a full four weeks ago. Alors! He had some news! The dossier that had been sent out from Montpelier had surfaced once more, back in Montpelier. It had been sent to our Espéraza address, where of course we no longer lived, having sold that house. (Were you paying attention, monsier le banker?) Instead of forwarding it to our new address, La Poste saw fit to return it to the sender. The banker said we were lucky that it wasn't just thrown away - a disturbing comment on the reliability of the postal service, eh?)

So he sent email to the Montpelier bank, directing them to send it directly to him, personally, at the bank in Espéraza. So we are again - still - waiting, but this time with a new and different story. Stay tuned; we'll see what they come up with next.

Now, I think if I were a banker, and I had clients who were selling one house, moving to a second one temporarily, and buying a third one, the very last place I would have chosen to send the dossier would be to the house being sold and moved out of. It's not like this was not known to him, since documents outlining the date of the sale of that house, the amount of money to be realized, etc, had been provided and talked of in detail.

On the brighter side, spring is here to stay, the orchards in and around Nojals are now clouds of white blossoms. Oh, another little thing. I was a bit sad thinking that when we left Espéraza we would no longer be living in an AOC wine region. But not true! Nojals is in fact in the Nergerac AOC wine region. We learned this at the notaire's office, it being mentioned as part of the description of the location of the house. So we're moving not just from the Aude to the Dordogne, not just from the Languedoc-Roussillon Region to the Aquitaine Region, but from the Blanquette de Limoux AOC wine region to the Bergerac AOC wine region.

Salut!

Soooo, just how large an overdraft can YOU write??

Saturday, Bergerac

While lunching at a Chinese buffet today, John's phone rings. It's the estate agent, who has talked to the banker this morning, to whom he delivered the news that he had not received the magical – and seemingly ephemeral - papers. He tells us that the banker has come up with a workaround solution – he wants to give us an overdraft line for 47,000 euros. Yikes! That's certainly an overdraft arrangement larger than any I've ever been offered. But apparently not unheard of, since the banker says that this is actually over their limit for overdrafts, which is set at 40,000 euros. I am not making this up. But, Hey Ho, why not? It seems that otherwise we could sit here in limbo forever, waiting for the fictitious mailings to arrive. At any rate, Mikael, or agent says that the notaire might possibly be able to fit us in on Wednesday morning. So, instead of trudging back to Ste. Colombe on Tuesday as we had planned just this morning, we will be staying at least through Wednesday. Which means we can keep an appointment with another bank. We're trying to open an account at a local bank, in Beaumont. We stopped in their office on Thursday morning and asked to open an account. Of COURSE this could not be done on the spot. Could we come back at 3 in the afternoon? Yes. But wait, this is too easy and Yes, here comes the hitch - a colleague walks by this woman's office and points out that whoever does such things is not free that afternoon. Much calendar checking ensues. The first available appointment is the following Wednesday afternoon at 5. What is it with banks? What on earth takes up so much of their time that they can't open an account in less than a week? Ah well, we say Yes, with the caveat that we may have to cancel if we are no longer in the region by then. I almost called this morning to cancel that appointment, but we didn't have the phone number with us. Just as well we didn't. So it looks like things may progress. We'll see. I am quite fed up with all this, I must say.

Meanwhile, we went to a local home-decorating store this morning to have a look at possible floor coverings to replace the hideous and grubby olive-green carpet in the tower bedroom. There's a lovely wool pile that looks gorgeous, but maybe it's too light, being an off white. More stores are available.

But maybe we can start thinking that things will work out and that we will actually own this house before too long. (I'm almost afraid to get my hopes up.)

Poisson d' Avril! April Fools' Day!

April 1, the day set for buying the house, at 4PM. It's now 4:25 and where are we? We're taking advantage of tghe free wifi at McDonald's. Why? Becausae we are waiting for those papers from the bank. The latest story was that the originals were presumably lost as an aftermath of the strike at the postal sorting center in Carcassonne, along with 400 other dossiers. (Does it never end? Do the crazy reasons for delay ever stop?) We had to come here anyway, since we had arranged meetings with the electrician, the fellow who will do the plan for the new septic systtm, and the fellow from the gas company, and we had already rented a gite for this week. So the bank thought the best solution would be to send a new set of papers to our estate agent here. We're waiting for them. Maybe they will show up.