What a few weeks we've had! I've been meaning to post an update for 2 weeks, but forces beyond our control took over.

Panne de Pomme (or Apple failure) & Panne d'Orange (Orange, our internet/tv/phone source, breakdown) created a technology nightmare for Les & me starting June 14. On the same day within 2 minutes of each other, both my laptop (a macbook pro) & Les' I-pnone went black. Luckily, we are close (30 minutes) to an Apple store, so off we went on Saturday morning, to see what Apple could do for us. Luckily, they were able to fix my laptop--it was ready in 2 days, but not so lucky for Les, whose phone was dead. He ordered a new one the same day, & had it shipped here via UPS. It arrived Tuesday morning, left in our mailbox (see picture in the Weeks 2&3 picture album ). We were abe to track it from California to Charleston to Louisville to Frankfurt to Marseilles to here. Unbelievable!

Our Panne d'Orange started immediately after we had our Panne de Pomme repaired. Les, who works remotely from here in the summer, relies on our usually excellent phone service to the states. He'd been having difficulties since our arrival with the internet & the phone fading in & out. Orange has a unique (& not very satisfactory) customer service system. You call, they suggest a "fix", & then you, the customer, buys & installs something to supposedly make the problem go away. So, over the last 3 weeks we have bought & installed: new batteries, new phones, a wifi extender, & finally a new live-box (what we call cable boxes). None of them worked. Frustration mounted--each time you have to enter a password that is about 25 letters/numbers long. At one point we were down to one communication device: my old I-phone 4. It's a bit scary! So after many miles, many euros, many hours on the phone & much frustration, Les finally managed to uninstall the old livebox & reinstall the NEW livebox, with specific instructions from a very patient technician whose very last resort would have been to finally send out a REAL person to fix it. Nobody told us we could actually request, & of course, pay for this service in the beginnning. Next time we will INSIST!

Also, we then tried using our new DVD player to discover that we'd bought one for Region 2, so it won't play the DVDs we so carefully chose & brought with us from the states. Back to good old Amazon, who is shipping us a multi-region DVD due to arrive here on Tuesday. You can't buy a DVD to play a region 1 DVD here. It's part of the new copyright media laws. Duh.....Hope this works! Stay tuned....