Anniversary

Well, believe it or not, gentle readers, I have now been living in Paris for exactly one year, and I'm feeling quite sentimental today (so excuse the lack of snark, it will be back tomorrow).  Yes, on the first of November 2009, I arrived in the City of Lights knowing exactly one person.  Well, one year later, I have lost many kilos and gained many friends.  There have been ups (social life, travel, general awesomeness) and downs (love life, money, general difficulties), but Miss K is one incredibly lucky little blogger and I do know it.  There are times when I complain about life here, but it doesn't mean I'm not madly in love with the city - it's Paris and I live here and that's still a dream come true for  me. 

  

Oww, my head...and liver...

How is it that a quiet little mid-afternoon shopping trip turned into an evening of debauchery?  I met Tiny Dancer at 3pm yesterday to pick up a few things we needed for our Halloween costumes and then we went to meet The Redhead and another friend at a café, where we all drank non-alcoholic beverages (honestly, that does occasionally happen).  Then we stopped by The Redhead's place to just have one glass of wine.  Aaaaaand that's where it all went to hell - we finished that bottle, drank another, and had started on a third when we decided to go to Tiny Dancer's place for dinner.  And along the way, we thought it would be a good idea to purchase another three bottles of wine.  I'm not entirely sure how many of those we actually got through, but judging by the size of my hangover this morning, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say we drank most of it.  Ahh, just another Wednesday night in Paris...

Quote of the day

I have been very behind on a lot of things lately, including a zillion or so emails I haven't replied to.  It has made me feel extremely unreliable, so I had a very welcome compliment from a friend today.  I was chatting with The Redhead, and she said: "You are so reliable that if it was 4:30 in the morning and I needed someone to come over and help me dispose of a dead body, you would be the first person I'd call."  Awwwww!  So sweet!!! 

Déménagement

Let's face it, moving is always a hassle.  Particularly so in Paris, where buildings often don't have elevators, where staircases are always curved and narrow, and where streets are usually so tiny that a moving van will block them completely.  Ah, good times.

So yesterday I helped Tiny Dancer and her boyfriend move.  Partly out of the goodness of my heart (yes, my frozen black heart does occasionally contain some goodness) and partly because I am fully aware that I will need help with my upcoming move and I am storing up goodwill and favours like a squirrel storing up for winter.  What?  At least I admit it...

Anyway, I turn up at 11am to help with the packing and, as I've mentioned before, Tiny Dancer lives on a street frequented by ladies who are in a very particular line of work (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) and I must say, I was rather surprised to see the ladies out in force at 11am on a Sunday morning; perhaps it's due to my upbringing as a country hick, but I wasn't expecting that.  So exactly how does this work?  A guy goes to church, gets himself all absolved of this week's sinning, and then gets a quick blowjob on the way home in order to get a start on next week's sinning?  Or perhaps he pays for sex on his way to church?  It all seems a bit odd to me, but then again, I'm not a religious person, so what do I know?

Back to the move - we finish the packing and then, around 5pm, the muscle shows up to do the heavy lifting.  All of that goes well until it's time to move the sofa.  So picture this: three big strong men trying to move one very large sofa down four flights of one very narrow spiral staircase.  Well, you don't need to picture it because I took photos:

The sofa is so big you can't even see the guys

Half an hour later, it was halfway down

Four stories down, it finally got into the van

At the new place - stairs slightly wider but still curved...

And in the grand tradition of helping friends move, they treated us to large amounts of food and alcohol afterward, hence my completely lame post yesterday.  Everyone else was drinking beer, so I had to drink all the wine - yes, a whole bottle on my own.  What?  I'd had a long day...

Filler

Okay,  I totally planned to post about what it's like to move in Paris but my internet connection is crap and loading my photos is taking forever, and quite frankly, as part of my reward (food and booze) for helping friends move, I have drunk an entire bottle of wine by myself tonight.  Normally not a problem but as I've been booze-free for two whole weeks (well, okay, I had three cocktails one night but whatever) it's made me a bit sleepy and I am heading for bed. So I am still trying to do this whole posting-every-day thing but some days you're just going to get what you get. Sorry!!!

Totally crap outfit of the week

As you know, Miss K generally just picks on fashion choices that the ladies make and leaves the chaps to their own devices, but every so often someone of the male persuasion comes along and just begs for a sartorial slap upside the head.  So here we go:  I don't object to a man-bag, but don't carry it like a woman.  I don't object to skinny jeans, but when they're so tight that your legs look like overstuffed bratwursts, you might want to reconsider your fashion choices before they cut off your circulation and give you gangrene.  And worst of all (I'm afraid you can't actually see it in the photo because I have pixillated it out of existence - and rightfully so, just trust me on this one), don't wear a plaited, metallic silver headband.  Ever.  Got it?  Okay, be on your way, sir.

One simple task

Do you ever just need to do one simple task and end up having to do eighteen other things just to make that one simple task possible?  So today I decide to change my sheets.  So I strip the bed.   Then I realize that I have no clean sheets to put on the bed because the others are all in my giant laundry pile.  Okay, so I have to do laundry - simple.  Wellllllll, not so much - for me, doing laundry involves loading it into a suitcase, lugging it down six flights of stairs, dragging it five blocks to the laundromat, waiting around for it and then hauling it all back again - an extremely inconvenient and time-consuming affair.  Particularly today, because I don't have a suitcase available.  Why?  Because I've been pretty much packed and ready to move since the beginning of September, which now looks like it won't happen until the end of November (more on this another time).  But the point is that all my suitcases are already full.  So in order to just do laundry, I have to completely unpack one of these suitcases, which I do.  

So I go off to the laundromat.  When I return, I unpack the clean laundry onto the half of my bed which is not already occupied by the contents of the suitcase I had to unpack in order to do the freakin' laundry in the first place.  Then I start re-packing the suitcase, but I decide I should put those clothes into one of those groovy space-saver bags that you shrink down to nothing by sucking the air out with a vacuum.  Then I realize that there are clothes in another suitcase that could also fit in that bag.  So I unpack that whole suitcase as well and transfer those clothes to the space-saver bag, too.  And of course, this whole genius idea of mine necessitates me getting out the vacuum.  Sigh.  You see how my day went?  So I used the vacuum, repacked suitcase #1, repacked suitcase #2, put away my laundry and finally, finally put fresh sheets on the goddamn bed.  That was my day, people.  One simple task that took nine hours.  Even in Paris, that ain't fun.