Yes, no wine at the picnics. It was mostly lukewarm water out of battered metal water bottles. For French people, they weren't much into drinking. We'd have a single bottle of wine for dinner, split among four people.
We were mostly in the Italian Alps, and also in the French Alps for some of the time. We stayed at little inns and hotels along the way, places that they had already stayed at before, and liked. We'd generally stay in each place anywhere from two to four nights. We also spent a couple of nights at their house in a village outside Grenoble, France. It's a 250 year old farm house, with a large, incredible garden, with mountains all around. There is a huge stone barn with very large 250 year old beams and timbers inside, held together with hand made joints and wooden pegs, each timber looking like some kind of sculpture. Yes, it's true that they were well dressed when they went hiking. The guy was wearing a short sleeve button-down shirt and nice slacks, but they were made of high tech wicking material. I told him he should get a necktie to wear when he hikes, made of wicking material. I couldn't quite tell if he thought that comment was funny or irritating.
Supposedly we had the right adaptor for the ipad, but on the first night we used that adaptor on a little electric alarm clock, and the clock stopped working after a few minutes, so we figured something was wrong and that it would be pretty risky to try it with the ipad. Plus, a lot of the places didn't have wireless connection, or they didn't have very good connections. Peggy took the adaptor in to the store today to find out what was wrong, and it turns out we were also supposed to have a "converter" hooked up to the thing. Good thing we didn't plug in the ipad. Europeans seem a lot less interested in using electronic gadgets... we saw very few people using iphones or computers. And yes, we used Euros everywhere. It was pretty convenient. In the places where we were, things seemed comparably priced to what we would pay here, maybe even a little less. Except for gas, which is about $6.50 a gallon.
Too bad the hiking trip never came off. I was looking forward to hearing how Chris would get beaten up. I was figuring it would probably you that would do it, that the two of you would get drunk, and he'd start in with all kinds of nasty, belittling remarks, and on and on with that, until... POW! I know that you have a certain line of tolerance for that sort of thing.
Yes, mice are amazing for the way they can squeeze through incredibly thin spaces. It's like they are able to temporarily liquify their bones or something. That's really something that you have gone to such lengths to try to protect your house and gear from the mouse, without hurting it. Most people would just go out and get a 99 cent Victor mousetrap.
I will be interested to hear what you're thinking about the book, Self Therapy. I got a lot of good out of it, though I have to say I bailed out at the very end, when it started to seem like there are endless complications of "exiles" and "protectors" engaging in such diverse ways that I got a little discouraged. It was starting to sound like I had to become like the mayor of New York in order to manage the chaos of various personalities interacting inside me. The author would probably say that it was just another "exile" -- the Discourager -- that got me down, and that I'm a wimp, but that's okay. I learned a lot of useful stuff from the part I read and took to heart.
--edward
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