Be careful

The receptionist at worked was mugged about a week ago, near her home coming in from work. She's basically OK, but did have to go to the doctor, who advised her to stay home this past week. Then today, we found out that temp receptionist was mugged last night! And that the wife of someone in the office had just been mugged as well! Scary scary stuff. I lived in NY for 10 years and never knew anyone to get mugged, then it happens to 3 people I know of in a week! I'm pretty careful as it is, but will start being more vigilant.

Vote early, vote often

I just mailed in my absentee ballot. Don't think my pick Hillary for Senate will have too much trouble re-gaining her seat, though she'll be plotting her 2008 presidential bid for much of her next term.
So if someone outside the States can remember to vote, you better not forget! Unless you're planning to vote Republican in a tightly contested race. Then you can just stay home. Just kidding...sorta...

game set match

If you recall, tennis is one of the many activites I have going on this fall/winter. And i LOVE my tennis lessons. The first class I went to was on a Monday, but it was too high a level for me, so I had to choose a new day/time. None of the weekday options worked for me, so I had to pick Saturdays. I wasn't too happy about it since Saturday is my run around and do errands day, and also if I ever want to go out of town on the weekend, I'll have to miss class.

But then I took one look at the instrustor, and didn't mind Saturdays so much anymore! The following are the reasons I'm loving tennis

1) The instructor is gorgeous.
2) Forget what he looks like, can he teach? All i know is, his forehand explanations make sense, and I'm finally hitting forehands over the net in bounds, instead of bouncing way out of bounds to the left, or hitting the ceiling - well, they still do that sometimes, but a lot less often!
3) The instructor is hot (see reason 1)
4) Small class size, so we get a lot of work.
5) The instructor is dreamy (see reasons 1 and 3)
6) After the past few years, of which my exercise has consisted of running, biking, swimming, or cardio machines, it's fun to do a sport which involves running and moving all around, always changing direction.
7) In case you didn't know, the instructor is gorgeous!!

i have returned

Well, I guess the petit pause wasn't so petit after all. It's been a very busy past 4 weeks since I last posted. The last 2 weeks of September were vacation. Then no sooner was I back in the office for a few days, but it was off to NY for a friend's wedding. My 6 days there passed in a blur, between seeing friends, my sister, and workind 2 days from the NY office. The weirdest thing about being back in NY? It wasn't weird at all! It was like I had never left.

However, all my traveling (and one of my days in between vacation and NY I had to go to our Brussells office) was really started to wear me out and I was glad to get back home to Paris. Between dealing with a cold, getting up at 4:45 some days to watch live the end of Mets playoff games on the internet, along with my normal busy schedule, I was just always too tired to sit and blog. But i'm over the cold, the Mets are, very sadly, not in the World Series, i'm finally caught up with laundry, and i spent the last 3 hours cleaning up clutter and paperwork and I can finally see the top of my hallway table!

I plan on doing soon a longish post about my France biking trip – it was FANTASTIC – but for now you'll just have to be content with these photos. The one on the bottom is a town that we stopped at in the middle of a nice long hill descent, the one on top is Beynac, we stayed there after the first day of biking. We were bikng along, went around a curve, then that was our view. It was incredible. Thankfully our hotel was near the bottom of the hill, not near the chateau on top, so we didn't have to bike up! Though we were to do plenty of hills that big and bigger during the week.