We're finally connected to the internet again!!!

At last! We are once more connected to the outside world! It's been a very strange three weeks. We had no internet, no land line phone, and no cell phones that worked, since it seems our house is in a dead spot for the SFR cell phone coverage. The internet service was supposed to be working as of March 24th! After several frustrating and useless phone calls, we gave up. Even when our (French) estate agent called and argued with them nothing happened. So we decided to forget it and go with another provider, Orange, after first having France telecom give us a phone line. That happened last Friday and then we were just to wait until the internet light on the router came on. It did! On Monday! We couldn't do much with it on Monday since we had the house and garden full of workers. But before describing that, let me tell you why we needed a house full of workers.

Ahhhh, where to begin. Let's begin with the actual move. The move from hell. It all started in Espéraza at 7 in the morning. Or at least it did for us. The mover had said to meet him at the house at 7AM, when they would start loading the truck. We had gone to the mairie the previous week to ask for that section of road to be cordoned off so that the truck could park - standard practice in French towns, where streets are narrow. But no such luck. When we got there the parking places were filled with cars, leaving no place for the truck to park. But, hey, the truck and the mover were nowhere to be seen anyway. But in the course of the next hour or so they arrived, one car moved out of the way and there was just enough room to squeeze the truck into a spot where it could be filled. Here's a photo of John officiating.

After loading everything from Esperaza, we continued on to the house in Ste. Colombe. The first problem there was that the truck was too large to fit around the corner of the small street that runs in front of the house, and had to park next to the terrace, making loading a bit more difficult. By noon or so, our car was filled with last minute stuff, but the moving truck was far from full. Jean and Jim, friends from Fougax, had also filled their car with loose odds and ends stuff and had left some time before. We then took off for the trip to Nojals, leaving the movers to fit whatever they could into the truck. We arrived at Nojals around 4 in the afternoon, meeting Jim and Jean, who had to get back home. So we unpacked our car and waited. And waited. And then waited some more. The movers arrived at 11PM. By this time, they were tired and had no interest whatsoever in putting furniture in the proper rooms, or even putting boxes in the proper rooms. By the time they left, at 3AM, we had one room full of boxes and another full of furniture, floor to ceiling, literally. Here's photos of the sea of boxes and the mountain of furniture.

The boxes, as seen from the stairway to the tower room. Note that the pile of boxes almost reaches the ceiling lamp.

The furniture, as seen from the kitchen.

We've slowly moved bits of furniture and unpacked more than a few boxes. But it's not easy! For a start, most of the boxes are full of books, and most of the bookcases are at the rear of that hill of furniture. And the hill of furniture occupies the room where all the bookcases will go! Some things are more urgent than others. Not unusual, unfortunately, to find a box marked 'fragile' to be under a stack of book boxes! And through it all we keep remembering that the reason we hired movers instead of just renting a large truck was so that we would not have to be moving heavy furniture and boxes full of books. Arrgghhhh. Now we get to move many of these things not once but several times, stacks of boxes and furniture being disorganized things by nature. But we reward ourselves from time to time with - lunch!

Here's my salad from one lunch at the brasserie in Beaumont.

And here's the plat , a local specialty called anchaud, which is pork confit, served cold.

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.