and it isn't even spring

It's winter break, but it feels like it ought to be spring break. All these vacations have spoiled me; after only eight weeks of work, I was pining for a respite. Been a bit sniffly since we got back from England; apparently I picked up a proper cold. But it's all good. It's vacation, we're getting paid in the next few days, and I'm going to Sweden on Wednesday for five days. Hooray! I'll visit my friend Angie in Stockholm and eat a lot of lingonberry jam and get a new stamp in my passport (although I never got one on reentering France, so for all the governments know, I could still be in England). At least I have my carte de séjour now, so I officially live in France. They don't notify you that you can come and pick it up, but Max was going to Lille in the car, so Cata and I thought I'd try. We took our numbers and sat at the prefecture for three hours, doing a little gratis babysitting to amuse ourselves, folding paper airplanes for bored children who liked us so much that their frustrated parents brought them back to us when they wouldn't keep quiet in the room where actual business goes on. Then when it was our turn, the woman interrogated me as I handed over my receipt. "Have you had your medical visit?" Yes, clearly, otherwise I never would have gotten the receipt in the first place. "Have you done this?" I've done everything. "Are you sure it's ready?" Yes? And then I got my card! This whole incident has reinforced the idea that it's okay to tell white lies to bureaucrats, which I'm sure is exactly the lesson I was supposed to have learned.

It was a pretty good week with the students. No one wants to work before vacation and I'd run out of teacher-mandated activities, so we just did the opinion cards and traded tonguetwisters (French children see the words "three free throws" and panic; meanwhile I work my way competently through rhymes about six saucissons qui coutent six sous). I had some sassy ones, but they bent to my iron will. The little brats in seconde 3 insisted they didn't want to read aloud, but they did when I made them do it, so that was an improvement on the last time I had them and I had to send one of them out for boundless exuberance (they bent to my will then, but it was kind of a travesty). They really are so funny sometimes, and their clothes are too. Half of them follow the chav fashions of sports wear (okay, mostly the boys), and the girls are tiny fashion plates. Here are two things that never should have come back into fashion in France: fanny packs and mullets. I swear, the haircuts some of these kids have are straight-up mullets. I have to muffle my giggles every time I see them. "You're not young enough to remember the 80s," I want to tell them, and "your small town isn't the right kind of small town for you to have this haircut." But alas, the hairdressers of France persist in inflicting fashionable, razored, feathered mullets on the teenage girls of France with their jeans tucked into their boots and their bangs swept across their foreheads.

You know you've been in France a while when you develop firm preferences about the bises, the little cheek kisses. I was thinking about this this week because I got the bises from a student for the first time - not one of mine, but one who was in my group for the England trip. I was in the library with my student and we saw him and he kissed her and them me, quite cordial. He had a decent style. What I don't like is when people come over to kiss you and don't even bother to put their cheek to yours, or when they don't make the little noises. My favorite is when the young Moroccan prof comes over and puts both hands on my shoulders and actually kisses my cheeks. But then there's the problem of having to pay attention. I was reading the news the other day when he came over to me and almost turned my face too far and really kissed him. That might have been awkward. It's an interesting phenomenon, the bises. I don't generally do them when it's me coming into a room, and they forgive me my American froideur. There are some people who are good friends of mine whom I hardly ever kiss (all of the assistants, some of the profs) and some people whose names I still don't know who kiss me religiously. Tricky! I'd say they were going out of fashion, except that the schoolgirls are always kissing everyone on the bus and clogging up the aisles.

So after this two weeks of vacation, there are only five more weeks of school. And then Steffen goes back to Germany, and Michelle goes back to England to prepare for going to Spain, and Anna goes back to the U.S., and Katie goes who knows where, and I try to get in a bit more traveling before heading back to the U.S., and Matthias and Cata stay here for a bit longer and then go back to Austria and Costa Rica. And the little white house will be empty. Sad to think about. But for now we're making spinach lasagna and I'm subtly influencing the television preferences of the house by watching West Wing and X-Files and Sports Night, and getting the girls hooked on Bollywood. I win the culture war! Although Michelle had a head start - I already love British tv. So perhaps she wins.

The weather here's been really typical Northern France lately: chilly and rainy and foggy. Yesterday half the sky was storms (dark, foreboding storms), and the other bit was bright bright sunshine. And then it all clouded over uniformly, and then around 11 it started raining like a crazy thing. Today it's just cloudy and cold. But at least it's tending towards spring. It's light now when I leave the house at 6.45, or lightening, anyway, and by the time I get to school at 7.30, the sun is almost all the way up. When I come home at 6.30, there's still some illumination for the green fields left fallow or planted with winter crops and the rich brown of the plowed furrows. That's a lot nicer than leaving in the cold dark and coming home in the cold dark past the posh bakery with its beautiful cakes that we will never be able to justify buying. By my birthday, I'm sure it will be light all the time.

Now back to arguing with my computer and trying to convince the programs that aren't quite compatible with Windows Vista that yes, they really are. Technology, eh?