Breakfast

Nothing like a protracted breakfast on a cold winter day, with a mug of nice mocha, baguette, butter and marmelade and, of course, my daily instalment of comic strips on the Ibook, thanks to Yahoo! News :

9 Chickweed Lane, Andy Cap, Bob the Squirrel, Cleats, Dilbert, Doonesbury, For Better or for Worse, Fox Trot, Jane's World, Luann, Non Sequitur, Over the Hedge, PreTeena, Prickly City, Tank MacNamara, Wizzard of Id, and Ziggy.

Coffee is from New Guinea - I'm just having a small pang of guilt right now: probably not that good for the local environment. I'll get Harar next time. Jam is bittersweet oranges or strawberry, seeing that we're all out of my Mother's homemade blackberry jam, straight from the hedges and thornbushes of Brittany.

Smug? What you mean, Smug?

Have a great day.

Georgia on his mind?

OK, now that my French-speaking, daily weblog is close at hand, guess I'll be a bit more present here...

For now, more of the D.C. pictures. The federal capital statuary is not that different from what you'd find in any European capital - except for the fact that there's more of it, and more systematically located. But the most fascinating of it all is, in my opinion, the Sherman statue, right in front of the capitol.

People don't know much about the American civil war in France. They know it was about slavery and that, in that respect at least, the good guys won. Some people probably know it occured sometimes during the XIXth century, but that's pretty much that. They don't realize the trauma, they don't realize the space it takes in the colective memory. This statue is a clear reminder of that memory: William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the foremost proponent of total war, the General who blazed a trail of destruction across Georgia, is riding a horse as if he had just trotted down the steps of the Capitol, a military arm of the American Congress; calmly sitting on his horse, assessing the field; his eyes are steady and they're turned toward the South.

New Location

Yeah, this blog has moved. Not that it has readers or anything, anyway...

The thing is, I wanted to free the URL I was previously using (le-plume.blogspot.com) because I might want to move my main French-speaking blog (www.20six.fr/le_plume) here - 20six is getting from bad to worse and I'm getting mighty tired of it.

In any case, my English-speaking ramblings have moved here, hal a block down the street. Please come in and make yourself comfortable!

Back from D.C.

As I come back from Washington, D.C., I feel the need to go back to my English-speaking blog a little bit more - not to mention the fact that I might very well move my main, French-speaking blog to Blogger as soon as I find a way to transfer all my archives in a clean and easy way.

A week in D.C., then - a pretty good time there: even getting soaked on a rainy Christmas Day, walking around Downtown and the Mall, was sort of fun. More for me than for the guy that was trying to make the model trains to run around the national christmas tree despite the heavy rain, in any case...

Otherwise, the usual when visiting the U.S. : the good surprise of civil servants willing to serve you, the pleasantness of day to day interactions with people - and, God help me, I just love the food.