Dreary Dreary Dreary

The dreary day matches our momentary expat mood. Our home state is experiencing the worst flooding in recorded history, and while there has only been a thunderstorm or two in our hometown, the major population centers of Nashville and Memphis are underwater. Normally this would not effect us so much, but we learned that Stephen's niece's fiancee's brother lost his life in the first hours of the flood, swept up in its wake. It is devastating: he leaves 2 children. Everyone hoped for a different outcome, a short circuited cellphone, something, the tragedy is very real and compounded with the difficulty if not impossibility of moving around Nashville. Our niece and her fiancee could not even fly into Nashville yesterday from their spring/summer working excursion to Connecticut. Our hearts are really broken for his family.

I can't begin to express how much you miss home when there is an emergency.

The weather turned here as well, dropping to 40 F and clouding over, so today was spent on expenses, email, phone calls and research. I did get out yesterday with the children, in the rain and rainbows, to shop at the street market (I am now calling it the market of ceaseless embarrassments as I stumble through not only my bad French but my increasingly prominent shyness) for cheese and sausage and beautiful beautiful fruit. (Foodies I made lovely porc chops with pears and mushrooms and a side of mango in the evening...not a normal combination but I made it seem perfectly normal.) During the afternoon we hit the Museum of Magic which is in our neighborhood. It was charming and homespun, with some interesting artifacts from the history of magic, things that people were cut in half within, boxes that made disembodied heads, optical illusions, magic lanterns, and it came complete with a "Spectacle" a magic performance which was alternatively delightful and creepy and involved, yes, sleight of hand. The kids bought some magic tricks and have been practicing...