I’ve been in Montpellier for almost four days now. The final flight here arrived only a few minutes later than expected, just enough for me to watch the shuttle bus pull away and have to wait for the next one. It’s not the first time that’s happened.
Before I arrived, I had a game plan for the remainder of the first day, which was Sunday. I was going to take a nap, attend a late Mass at 7:15 pm, and pick up take-out for dinner on the way back to our place. It worked out well, except for the nap, which never happened.
I took out from a braised chicken restaurant in the neighborhood, a place Kathryn and I had dined in before, in part because I wanted some fresh vegetables with my meal after 24 hours of airline food. In a miscommunication that was, in retrospect, at least partly my fault, I got home with braised chicken, chef’s sauce, and enough fries for four people, but no vegetables. Everything tasted good, so I’m not complaining.
Things were crazy in Montpellier all day Monday because the Olympic torch was going to pass through the city in the afternoon. I had to take care of some business at our bank, and it’s a good thing I took care of it in the morning because they were going to close early. After initially thinking the torch would pass in front of our balcony, when the final route came out last week, it was apparent I would have to leave the apartment to see it. However, I only had to walk about 100 yards to the next corner. It was festive, and certainly worth the hour’s wait. I’ll probably never have the opportunity to see it again.
The most important objective of this trip to Montpellier is to get the heating issues fixed, and I felt like it wouldn’t happen if I weren’t here for an extended period of time. Tuesday morning I woke up early to greet the heating technician, who was on time. It wasn’t the same technician that came out in January, but it was just as well. After he repaired the damaged flue, which was step one, he had a different and — in my opinion — better idea than the previous technician for how to fix the remaining issue, which is a slowly leaking expansion tank. I’m still waiting on an estimate, which is the next step before scheduling a follow-up visit. Coincidentally, I’m also still waiting for an invoice.
Other than that, there hasn’t been a lot of excitement to report. My schedule of working remotely on Arizona hours, which are nine hours behind France, is messing with the quantity of sleep I’ve been getting, but the quality has been quite good. I think that has something to do with the weather, which has been refreshingly spring-like. Spring isn’t a season we have in Arizona, except maybe for a couple weeks in February. Working from a 16-inch laptop screen instead of a 32-inch monitor hasn’t impacted my productivity as much as I thought it would, although in the interest of ergonomics, I’ve started exploring options to create a scaled-down work area similar to the one I have in Phoenix.
