First things first: if you haven’t seen the wedding photos yet, then go look. You’ll be glad you did.
Naturally, though, life has gone on since I stopped blogging to give stragglers a chance to see the wedding photo entry.
For one thing, I am pleased to announce that our gardienne still has her copy of our key, so I’m almost definitely not going to prison now.
Um.
So, sometime last month, I got locked out of the apartment. I knocked on the gardienne‘s door, and discovered that her husband was home alone. Trying to pretend that I hadn’t already heard far more intimate details of his marriage than anyone who doesn’t know his last name generally would, I helped him to (eventually) locate our key. I opened my door, brought the key back, and–well, that’s all I did.
The next day, though, Nick and I took the dog for a morning run, then followed it up with a three-hour afternoon walk. We got home exhausted, obviously, and dragged ourselves to our door, only to find that neither of us had thought to bring a key along.
No one was home at the gardienne‘s, but her door was standing wide open. What would you have done?
“You had to open a cabinet?” Nick hissed on our way up the stairs, when I told him how I had (brilliantly!) pieced together what I had seen of the husband’s search with the geography of the inside of the house. He turned the key in our lock, and then handed it to me.
“Now go put it back.”
It would have been worse to have to hand it to her in person and try to explain that I had walked into her house, opened her cabinet, found the right box, and sifted through it to find my key, right? Please say yes, because I’m inclined to believe that there’s a fairly short supply of things that would have been worse than walking back in, opening the cabinet again, and shoving the key back into the box, certain that they would come back at any second and ask what, exactly, I thought I was doing.
And then spending the next month wondering if I had put it back into the correct box, because…well, there were two.
Anyway, I got locked out again yesterday (must. stop. doing. that.), and she found my key right away, so now I plan never to think about it again.
Also, last weekend? I tried jam made out of beer. And it was delicious. The guy suggested putting it on crepes, but I was having a pretty hard time not just grabbing the tasting jar out of his hands and fleeing to an alley to just eat the stuff with my hands.
What is it with me and petty crimes, lately?
Speaking of petty, the French government is being a brat again. The latest word from my lawyer is that I’ll have to wait until my residence permit’s renewal (read: nearly a year) to be authorized to work (which I still wouldn’t be able to just do; surprise!), even though the marriage should technically have automatically made me eligible.
Apparently, last summer when I was in that near-psychotic state over the visa, we came to a crossroad where I could have either done what I did, or applied for a “reuniting family” visa. It more accurately fit our situation, but the process takes years–so I’d still be sitting in CT right now, but I would be allowed to work in France. Nice.
“Since we did it this way, if we tried to change your carte status now they would say you were just trying to do an end run around the system.”
I say that we could just agree to agree on that point, but I seem to be the only reasonable party to this nonsense. Go figure those odds.