Good Morning Internet!

Merry Christmas and all that - I hope you had a good time and Santa brought you all the toys you wanted!

Sorry it's been a while since I last wrote here, despite my newfound good intentions - December is manic for the jewellery part of my life, as people suddenly realise Christmas is coming. But things are more or less back to normal on that front, not least because I'm still on holiday and so the shop is closed.

We're down in Beausoleil for New Year's Eve, and it's gloriously sunny. I desperately need to find a way to move here full-time - any (legal) suggestions welcome! In the meantime, I feel like sharing, so have some photos: yesterday on the beach in Nice during the day, and at sunset, and sunrise in Monaco this morning.


Nice beach yesterday:

Sunset over Nice last night:

Sunrise this morning:

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Paris: Day 1 - Sunset over the Eiffel Tower

One of those perfect evenings where even the weather cooperates. We went for dinner at a restaurant in Montparnasse round the corner from our last flat and then went for a walk back behind the Hotel des Invalides and along to the Eiffel Tower, where the sun was setting. The pictures nearly manage to capture the beautiful colours!

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Rain and assorted ramblings

Our August Exile Flat is very boring when it's raining. I wrote a thousand words or so of my new story (up to 8k now!), got bored of that, had lunch, got bored of that, and then sat there staring at the ran waiting for it to finish.

When it looked like it might have actually stopped for a minute, I made a break for it, only to find that in the time it took me to get downstairs, the sun had come out fully and the whole town is now hot and steaming slightly. Nice.

Below are some pictures from sunnier days.

Fountains in Place Massena. These are a lovely place to go when there's proper summer and it's baking hot; not so much when it's pissing down with rain...

Sunset from our Exile Terrace the other night:

The man who guards the library toilets said I was trop mignonne the other day. This would be fine, if slightly irritating in the way that unwelcome compliments usually are, if it weren't for the fact that a) he's 90 if he's a day and b) he guards the library toilets, which is the only place with relatively reliable, free, internet access I've found in town. (ETA: the library is the place with internet access, not the toilets per se. Just to be clear.)

I cannot wait to move back to our proper flat.

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Sunset

Today's achievements:

- washing-up done
- chicken chopped up and marinating. I hate raw chicken. I may go vegetarian, to avoid dealing with it.
- up to 13, 300 words on the story

So far, the promised Dutch rain has not appeared (the weather forecast made it sound like we should all be out building Arks before the downpour...). It did look cloudy for a while this afternoon, though the cloud cleared in time for what was probably a gorgeous sunset. I only saw it reflected in the clouds:

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