Friday, September 9, 2016

C'est la rentrée

That's French for "Back to school" but it's more than just back to school; it's also back to work or whatever else your life includes. For me, it's back to the monthly AARO lunches. Even if they never stop over the summer, there's still a feeling of starting a new year. In fact, the renewal notices will be going out soon for membership dues. It's back to board meetings.
It's back to taxes. I have sent in the 3rd quarter of US taxes and the final notifications for the French taxes for 2015 are in, telling us what is still due, or not. There's also the ISF payment for 2016 due on Sept. 15. Add in the registrations for painting or whatever other activity starts in September (and that's anything you can think of), September has got to be the worst month of the year. We fill up the savings account just so we can empty it in September!
I did try to keep the printer going so that would be an expense for next month, but I gave up. There are good videos of how to fix it, but nothing worked. I checked for hidden paper jams. I cleaned all the rollers. It just won't pick up the paper any more and hand feeding it wasn't working out too well, as it would mangle several sheets before finally printing one. And the computer wasn't taking any updating because the disk C was saturated after the move to Windows 10. Another September expense.
I haven't signed up for any gym classes. I am continuing with the painting/drawing; this year I'll do watercolor. I won't be going quite as much as in the past years because I think I've got too many commitments on my calendar. I want to spend more time knitting, actually. I still have to wear the wrist brace, though, and that's not helping with the drawing, painting, or knitting. In fact, I'm wearing it to work on this nice new computer. If I don't, then handling the mouse or the pad makes the wrist hurt again. I don't have to wear it constantly, just when I'm doing something repetitive, like this.
The American Library activities have started up. S didn't want to go to Story Hour on Wednesday, so we went to the Jardin des Plantes to the Museum of Natural History, the comparative anatomy and paleontology building, because he wanted to see dinosaurs. It was a bit of a surprise to see that the rooms were filled with skeletons, but he was duly impressed with them. On the ground floor, the comparative anatomy, we compared the skeleton of a race horse with a Percheron work horse and a zebra. There were all sorts of different animals, including a few really gigantic whales. Upstairs, in the Paleontology room, he saw how big a tyrannosaurus rex was. There's also a mammouth among the other animals. Thursday, C went with me to the library for what used to be called the lapsit, but is now called "Toddler Time". Today, I (more or less) finished installing the new computer. For some mysterious reason, I can't connect to my external drive, but I'll save that headache for another day.

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