All the modern conveniences!

(From Betsy) Landmark day here -- not only do we have appliances, but they're all hooked up. Finally, we have an operational fridge, stove-top, oven, vent-hood (a "hotte" as they call it... so it turns out anyone can pick up a hottie in Paris, you just need to know where to look!), dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer. No more sandwiches! Ok, well not for a few days at least.

There is a fabulous chain of stores in France called Picard Surgeles that sells nothing but frozen stuff. The stores are very odd looking -- totally white walls and rows of freezers. I'd noticed them on my visits to Paris, but honestly they were a little scary looking, so I never went in and didn't even know what they were until we moved. (And it has nothing to do with surgery either.) The kids and I walked down the street to the neighborhood Picard to pick up dinner while the plombier did the last touches installing the appliances. So for dinner we had red snapper with a butter-lemon sauce, scalloped cauliflower casserole, mixed spring peas with roman broccoli, and a raspberry tart. Cooked on our very own stove and oven! It was pretty satisfying.

So, just a couple glitches in the appliances to be ironed out... the stove-top seems to have some wires crossed (or maybe some short-circuits), so the control knobs don't actually control the burners that match their pictures. Unfortunately, we haven't figured out quite how the wires are crossed. It's not as simple as right/left or front/back being switched. In fact, there seems to be some trick where both back burners need to be on in order to get either one of them to heat up. So cooking on the stove involved a little trial and error. Basically we just turned on two knobs at a time and waited until we got two burners on together. Then I made the mistake of trying adjust the heat, and we had to start all over again... not sure how to resolve this, but as Scarlett O'Hara says "Tomorrow is another day."

The washer came just in time. Calvin had to wear Carter's underwear for the last couple days, and it will barely stay up at his waist. So our first laundry was a full load of Calvin's stuff. Here's a household hint with foreign appliances: don't set the child safety lock if you don't have a user's manual. We succesfully washed our first load of laundry only to realize that we couldn't get the door open... Finally decoded it after about an hour of trying new combinations every time we walked into the kitchen. If Chris hadn't finally gotten it open and rescued the clothes, we were about to set the kids to solving it. Being a child-proof lock, it probably would have taken them all of five minutes to figure it out.

Chris already mentioned that we are back on-line. Losing the internet connection made us realize how spoiled we'd already gotten in our short time here by being able to keep in touch with everyone. Ironically, we finally deciphered what was wrong with the internet by having an on-line chat (with stolen wi-fi). Much easier for me to keep up with an on-line discussion, in terms of translating, than over the telephone help line. Once we communicated the problem, our aide informed us that "vous vous trouvez malheursement sur une panne collectif" -- you unfortunately find yourself in a collective breakdown. That really seemed to sum up the whole situation rather well, and made us laugh.

Anyway, I'm typing this in our little technology corner using an upside-down laundry basket as a chair, so it's not as if we're totally put together yet. But there's soccer on tv, laundry is washing, and we have a good bottle of wine, so it's been a good day. We love and miss you all.