It’s called progress

Since the beginning of the year we can’t buy the old type of light bulbs. I’ve been replacing old with new low energy ones as they stop working. The new ones are awful, not as strong as they say they are and take three minutes to get up to power. My retired student says that she and her husband have one on their stairs, very dangerous for elderly people (they are both in their 80s). Before we always turned off the light when we left a room, now we tend to leave them on. The worst part is knowing that I shouldn’t have to change them until 2018.

Secondly, our region of France has now switched over to numeric TV. J-M very kindly fixed us up with his old box and an internal aerial. Up until the change over we did have more channels and then they went strange on us, but I discovered that this would be normal in the days prior to changeover. Since the changeover we can get 3 of the old channels (there used to be 6) and two new ones. That means 5 out of the 19 we were promised. We do have an old telly. Fortunately, Rob watches the news and that’s about all. I watch Cold Case (on a channel we still receive) but I can’t watch Medium or N.C.I.S. anymore.

Oh well, there is always ironing to do I suppose.

Me and science

I participated in a scientific experiment last week. I had to finish around 200 sentences and not use pronouns, be grammatically correct and all in French. Needless to say I was hopeless, I was also a bad subject as I’m not a native French speaker. The idea was to see if people used the correct forms under stress, I suppose to see how the subconscious takes over. The sentences were messed around a bit to trip you up and I kept reading qui as que which changed things a lot. It certainly was stressful for me. The only other experiment I’ve taken part in was at the common cold unit in 1984. I had flu and was given placebos.

I took Dom back to the station this morning and collected Olivier from a friend’s on the way back, how’s that for ecological co-ordination? (Or perhaps convenient children)