A rare opportunity

I was going to title this post "The perfect morning", but as I was typing that into the title box, it started coming up via the "auto-fill" feature - you know, where it "remembers" things you have typed before and gives you the option of just clicking on that? Well, that meant that I had already used that title, so I had to come up with something different. But this really did start out as the perfect morning, if you can consider getting up at 5:45 AM on a Saturday the start of a perfect morning. You see, The Spouse had to work today. Apparently, FedEx is expecting a lot of freight in advance of Valentine's Day, so it's "all hands on deck" today - or rather, "most hands on deck," so he was "recruited" to work. The silver lining to this cloud is that he won't be required to work a Saturday again for at least a year, except for the Saturday before Christmas. That's almost as good as getting out of jury duty, which by the way, he also did. He was supposed to be on jury duty in March. They send this questionnaire with it, with a box to check if you've been on jury duty within the past 24 months. Since he is called every two years like clockwork, and I have yet to be called ever in 24 years of living here, I marked "yes". A week later, he got a card saying he was "disqualified" as a juror at the present time. Yippee! It's not that he doesn't want to do his civic duty. He does. It's just that the way they do it here is so bizarre. You call the night before to find out if there is even a trial that week. If there is, you report, often only to be dismissed immediately due to a last-minute settlement in a case. For him, by then it's too late to go to work, so he loses a day's pay. And this goes on for a month. So, yippee.

The perfection began with a call from YS. He was with his host brother, standing outside the home of one of the brother's friends. Apparently, the host brother is in a band. He's the drummer. There are two other boys and a girl in this band. The boys had all arrived and were awaiting the arrival of the girl. They were having a smoke while awaiting her arrival. YS said that, yes, the sterotype of French smoking habits is true. "Everyone" smokes, especially the teens. Fortunately, they don't smoke in the house. YS said that the only time the smoking has bothered him was when he was at the bar with his host brother and friends. They do smoke in bars. His eyes got really irritated. The lingering smell of stale cigarette smoke on clothing is almost impossible to remove. I'm probably going to have throw his clothes away when he gets back. Maybe Febreze will help.

The host families are paid 18 euros a day in return for having the kids stay with them. Of course, that was part of what we paid for the trip, so essentially, we are paying them 18 euros a day to have our child in their home. It's worth every penny. At the end of each week, the professor gives each student an envelope containing this payment - 125 euros - to give to their host family. YS gave his envelope to his host mother, and she told him to keep it, that he would need extra money during his long stay in France. YS called and asked me what he should do, because though he insisted she take the money, she insisted he keep it. I told him it was probably fine for him to keep it, and reminded him that it was money that we had paid, not that Whitworth was paying, but to talk to his professor about it, which was what he had planned to do. When he spoke with his professor, she told him that it was not unusual for the families to do that, and that some even took their students out shopping for clothes and things, and that it was okay for him to keep the money. Next week he will get another 125 euros, so he's got plenty of spending money - almost enough to cover his trip to Italy during Spring Break, but certainly enough to cover lunches the days he'll need to buy them. That was really nice of his host family, and he will use some of the money to buy them gifts before he leaves.

The Spouse left for work at 7AM, leaving me to amuse myself for pretty much the entire day. I have toyed with the idea of going to work myself, but it's 10:25 already and I'm still sitting in my bathrobe on my sofa, laptop on my lap (where else?), cat snuggled up next to me asleep, with no real desire to do much besides blog. I'm so bad. Actually, I have been working for more than an hour. I got called from work at about 8AM. The web site was down. I logged on and saw that the web publishing service wasn't running for some reason. Fixed that. A few minutes later they called to say the self-check machine was out of service. Another service on the same server wasn't running. Fixed that. For some reason, after the backup ran last night, those two services didn't restart. There was a change made to the batch file that starts the backup due to a new product that was installed yesterday. I submitted a trouble ticket to our software vendor advising them that this was happening so they can take a look at things and see what in the newly added command is hanging things up. After doing those little tasks, I spent some time trying to figure out why we continue to have problems sending email to some specific domains. Sometimes it goes just fine, sometimes it hangs up in our queues and never gets out. I can't seem to find a rhyme or reason and it's starting to piss me off. And that's how it got to be 10:30 AM with me in my bathrobe still.

So, I could be cleaning - dusting, vacuuming (Lorraine, Rosemary, any takers?) - but I don't feel like it. I'm going to sit here, blog, watch stuff I have Tivo'd that I haven't had time to watch, catch up on back episodes of Heroes, and then, maybe I'll do housework. I will have to go to the grocery store at some point, but that's not too bad a day. I may even get a chance to read! And YS said he'd call later. He's going to Strasbourg with his host brother and friends after dinner tonight (dinner is usually around 7 PM). I'm looking forward to hearing how that was. Oh, and I'm going to watch Sunday in the Park with George and Les Choristes. I am sure The Spouse will not want to watch either. The former is a musical, and I'm watching it because YS is doing a paper on Seurat and may need some input. The latter came highly recommended by YS after he viewed it in his Everyday French class. Au revoir, mon amis!