Retirement paperwork

 

None of the old retired people I talked with so much about retirement warned me of the paperwork. They were all "Oh, it's so great I wish I had done it much earlier! Now I'm going to go drive somewhere to walk around the block again."

But no mention of the paperwork!

We spent all day today on paperwork; paperwork, accounting, translating, filing, bookkeeping. It was a lot of work. Although I will admit, the move to a foreign country really piles it all on. I remember a cute, snarky old t-shirt popular in the eighties, or maybe it's still popular? "Join the Army; travel to exotic, distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them."

A classic, no? And so it comes up in my mind, thinking "Work a full adulthood; save to bravely retire to a fabulous foreign land of harmonious lifestyles, and sit inside all day doing paperwork to stay there."

Not that I'm complaining. Not me. I don't have to drive somewhere to walk around the block, I can do it right out my front door!

And, AND

If I get tired while circling said block there will be a perfectly pleasant cafe to plop down at and have a Negroni, or something.

Or I can once the paperwork is done, I mean, which it is for today.

We'll see what the visa office has to say about it later.

The city in its glories

 

I have more pictures today of the city we returned from, full of old churches, marble streets, flowers and fountains, lovely parks, and the illusion that all is well in the world.

All is actually well in the world?

Oh, okay, my mistake.

I'll do my best to enjoy it.

Primaries

 

Oh, no, you read my title? Not political primaries. My sense of doom is too great for that. For a few moments let us retreat from the end of the world and the incipient doom of Nationalism and Capitalism. Let us sip the rarified air of pure color.

Primaries.

Actually, I am most often using five colors in these pictures, but I think you'll take my point.

Yesterday I showed and talked about the contemporary museum featuring a vast architecturally centered work all in green light. But there was another museum we went to that was built into an old submarine base, where 360 degree projections of moving images wrapped around one, telling the story of Matisse, or Frida Kahlo, or whatever show they have going at the time. The images bounce through the old heavy arches and among the dark still waters of the mirrored and haunted bays.

I don't know why I'm telling you about this.

Somehow that casting of light informed these images as well, though I find I cannot yet explain it.

Here are some pictures of the city we were in for eleven days. This is how it was to me, and maybe all the more now that it feels like a dream. It is the usual moments of a European city, with rooftops and staircases, parks and fish and birds, cathedrals, fountains, and transit. But all, I hope, a little special.

Back home to what may or may not be home

 

We have returned to something like home after finding a city we adored but where we could not manage to find an apartment to rent, at least as of yet. Our search will carry on remotely for now while we perhaps start to ramp up a personal campaign to love where we are a little bit more? After all, this may be it.

Along with many things to be discussed further, I not least come back with a phone stuffed full of photographs of where we've been for eleven days. I have been posting some of these over the last week, while I was on the road, and I would say that I was fishing (pun intended, um, you know, because several of the pictures were of fish) for a new style to convey my feelings about that extraordinary ordinary French city. I feel this flailing search produced some middling results over the past couple of days here, but working on a phone it was harder for me to see how they were coming up short. 

Fortunately, we went to an absolutely fantastic contemporary museum that was in our neighborhood there, and the wonderful main exhibit was all in green light, from where the artist drew much of its power, and it was huge and immersive, making great use of the brilliant architecture that is all over that city and where the museum was set. Apparently this inspiration was what I needed to kick off some relatively simple ideas about colors that have unleashed a new wave of  image modulations that while surprisingly minimal, are exactly the thing I was looking for but didn't know I was looking for.

Before we get probably too far into all that, I will show you the images that started me down the road and let that be enough for today, an introduction of sorts. To give a fair sense of the space I drew from, I am inclined to tell you that these images are mostly only altered in the selective changing of elements to red:

Just a cathedral

 

Sitting here in the shade under a cathedral that started out a thousand years ago, but where most of the work was done about 800 to 600 years ago, and where a woman named Eleanor was married to a king, becoming the Queen of France, who later became the Queen of England after getting her marriage annulled and marrying the King of England, I find my usual difficulties in photographing these extraordinary Gothic cathedrals.

Here’s the best of what I have managed so far.

The pond

 

The other day, in one of the most lovely cities I’ve ever been to, I had the not so common opportunity to spend an extended amount of time wandering at will, taking pictures, with every option before me.

Perhaps in line with my nature, I ended up in a small park next to a museum, spending a good deal of time photographing fish.

We take what comes our way.