The French Connection

I'm really liking Potsdam so far. I never thought of myself as a person who adjusts easily, but I adored living in Cincinnati, I love Potsdam, and I loved Lafayette too. Maybe most places are agreeable to me. Lafayette is definitely number one in the friends and family category, and that is why it's great. However, it squarely comes in third as far as aesthetics, activities, smell, city planning, and zoning. And I might fall out of love with Potsdam really fast- It's going to be 25 tomorrow night and there's a 40% chance of snow on Saturday.

One thing that is just crazy-cool is all the French we hear in in this county. We are about an hour from Quebec, so we get french radio stations and Canadian TV. Oh, also our weatherman has the cutest French accent- he sounds just like this Chinese-French guy I knew at Purdue. I've only heard a handful of people speaking French in stores here, but when we go 20 miles north to Massena for fancy things like Taco Bell and a mall, tons of people are speaking French. Potsdam High's entire foreign language department consists a Latin teacher (I hear he's cute), a Spanish teacher, and two French teachers. I first thought that having two French teachers was overdoing it a tad, but now I understand why the school has them.

Since we're so far North, I've also seen a lot of Canadian political ads, and I even watched part of a Canadian presidential debate. They have three debates like us, but one of them has to be completely in French, and trust me, all the candidates have different proficiency levels in French. As you might have guessed, the ones that sucked at French were the most fun to watch. Here's what I understood from that debate about the candidates: there's Steven Harper, the prime minister, and people think he's too close to Bush; then there's some French guy that everyone thinks is crazy, a lady who never stops talking about the environment, and a bald guy with a mustache. And all four of them are ALWAYS talking about the Kyoto Protocol. I've barely heard McCain or Obama touch Kyoto.

One more thing about Canada- They have a lot of different medical stuff. Just yesterday on CTV I saw an advertisement for a colon cancer home screening kit. I can only imagine the type of sample one has to collect to screen themselves for colon cancer. Gross.

Now for quick tidbit updates-

Tidbit 1- Scout gave me a pretty good injury yesterday. I was cooking dinner and Scout hopped up on the oven hood without me seeing. Well I looked up, and she KNOWS she's not supposed to be up there, so when she saw me, she got startled and fell off the hood. As she was falling to the floor,she stuck her claws out and caught my thumb. But it wasn't just any part of my thumb- it was the very tender crevice between the side of the nail and the beginning of the skin (think of the part when you would get a hangnail). And she ripped a deep, long, vertical gash in that tender area. It bled so much and was so deep that it made me sick to my stomach. I am so tempted to post a picture but I won't.

Tidbit 2- David took me to dinner here for my birthday. I had a pork shank that was so good I wanted to pick it up and eat it Henry VIII-style. For dessert I had two freshly made pumpkin spice donuts with maple glaze and mulled hot cider. And OMG, I've been craving those donuts and cider ever since. The part that impressed me most is that neither the donuts or the cider were too sweet. The donuts were so pumpkinny and the cider was nice and tart. Anyway, my birthday dinner was amazing.

Tidbit 3- Someone just stole our recycling. No joke. We put out lots of cans and bottles in our blue bin, and someone just came and stole them. They left the plastic and the paper. It's weird, but I wanted to tell him not to steal our recycling. But what was I going to say? "Hey! That's our friggin' garbage, buddy! You can't have it because we're getting rid of it!" Probably not. And I know he's going to take our cans and bottles to the same place we intended them to go, but he's going to make a profit. This shouldn't bother me but it kind of does.