Sunday, May 02, 2010

Telephone St. Sulpice Laurie Fox PESSEMIER Acrylic on canvas 4 x 13"
Scooter St. Sulpice Laurie Fox PESSEMIER Acrylic on canvas 12 x 12 inches


Red Jacket Yellow Folder Laurie Fox PESSEMIER Acrylic on canvas 6 x 10"

My easel arrived this week. The acupuncture doctor relieved my sciatica. Amazing result with rocks and pins. Super good weather I painted outdoors. The jazz club has new management (just as I was getting used to the “old”). I cooked a roast in wine. Harika and I both think it’s great.

I’ve been reading a book called “six word memoires” after Hemingway’s shortest novel:
“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” I am not sure any of the sentences in the paragraph above qualify, but how about: Living in Paris hip hip hooray!

We went to the flea market today and bought a table for the balcony (ten euros – very solid old rattan). We’ve one chair and will make do with the stool until another seat makes itself available.

The good weather and long days lured us to the grassy field near the Louvre where Harika can run free, just before sunset. If there are other dog owners present, they are a lighter, less nosy crowd than at the Luxembourg Gardens. Yesterday she ran around with Enzo, a ten-month-old King Charles Cavalier (the owner spent a lot of time telling me the different between just a King Charles and the King Charles Cavalier, and I must have looked dazed, because she offered to repeat it in English. I smiled, enjoying the breezy sunshine.)

On Thursday, we had a business lunch at a restaurant near the Gare du Nord. During the forty-five minutes we had to kill before our reservation, we sat on a bench in a church courtyard where cherry blossoms fell on our heads. Later on, I enjoyed looking at us bedecked with pink petals – no matter how serious business might be, we’re all human (spoken like a true salesman). The scent of lilacs and lily-of-the-valley permeate the air in Paris, as we celebrate the May Day holiday.

It was a Bretagne style restaurant, but with interesting variations on traditional dishes: I had salmon marinated in the manner of herring, delivered in a glass canning jar beside a plate of mache (lamb’s lettuce). Roast pork followed, cooked perfectly, not dry, but the real coup de grace was the “Paris-Brest” dessert – a buttercream and nutty crunch filling in a round puff pastry. Although I am not a big dessert eater, with a restaurant meal “all’s well that ends well”.

I was delighted to hear an outsider’s point of view on Paris. He saw the Gare du Nord neighborhood as diverse and interesting, easy going. Formerly, I’d thought of it strictly as the train station, a bit offbeat, a place to buy electrical replacement parts and Indian spices. As our guest pointed out the things he saw, I saw them that way, too. It is such a good argument for having guests. I hope you will come visit ; show me something I have overlooked.


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