Party time!

We had a farewell party! Here are some pictures...

Here's the building where the Krause Gallery, the location of our party, is located:




















Some serious partiers:














Allen and Margo Bohnert:



















Bob entertains Jennifer Dickey:



















A merry gathering of country folk:














More wild carousing:














Scott and Madeline take a breather:














The countdown to our departure is getting shorter: just three more days until we leave. Last night we threw a farewell party for ourselves at the Krause Gallery in Castleberry Hill, a neighborhood just southwest of downtown Atlanta. It was a great success; many of our friends came and celebrated with us. It was also bittersweet because we won’t see many of these people again before we leave.

This past week has been hectic for me (Madeline). I’ve been doing a lot of running around, putting the last few items in storage and taking care of lots of little logistical details, like finalizing our reservations for our French course in Provence (more about this below) and packing and mailing boxes of clothes, linens, books, CDs and other essentials to France.

We aren’t taking a huge amount of stuff, but since we’ll be there for a year, there’s more we want to take with us than will fit in even a large suitcase. Our boxes will go by surface mail and will take 4 to 6 weeks to arrive, but surface mail is so much cheaper than airmail that it’s worth the wait!

Bob had a somewhat more relaxing week; he went to visit family in Florida for a few days. He has an aunt and uncle and several cousins who live in the area around Daytona Beach, and he hung out with them and visited the John F. Kennedy Space Center, which was a lot of fun.

We have a few more things on our to-do list. We’re still trying to find the right sedative for our little dog, Teebie. The vet recommended that he be sedated for the plane ride, which may be stressful for him if he doesn’t have something to calm him down. Yesterday we tested a drug called acepromazine on him, and it had no effect at all! Today we’ll call the vet and find out if we should give him a higher dosage of that or something else.

There are still a few more boxes to mail to France, a few more boxes to put in storage, and a few more things to donate to charity. And there are a few more things we just need to throw away!

About the French class we’re going to take: we felt that it would be helpful to have some intensive instruction in the language soon after we arrive. We both speak French reasonably well, but we’re out of practice. So we’ve signed up to take a two-week class at a language school in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. The course will go from May 8 until May 19.

It’s a combination of three hours of classroom study in the morning and field trips in the afternoon. The theme is “discovering Provence”. We’ll visit various interesting places (Marseille, Avignon, the Pont du Gard), as well as learning about the region’s cuisine and wine. This year is the 100th anniversary of the death of Paul Cezanne, the famous painter from Aix, and a number of the activities in our course will center around him: we’ll visit his studio, and go on a Cezanne-related hike, among other things. If you’re interested in finding out more about this, here’s the web address: http://www.is-aix.com/article.php?id_article=157. It should be lots of fun. Watch this blog for details and photos!