permanent catchup

Three weeks without a post; anyone would think I'd been on holiday, which couldn't be farther from the truth. In fact, I've been working (I'll give a subtler interpretation of this verb in an upcoming post, I think) on a journal paper.

In the interim, Lee wandered down to the south of Spain for a week, then flew back and home to Australia, where she's now settling back into work and cricket. It was good to have someone around for a while. So many things go better with two; cooking a decent meal is more easily justified, conversations work dramatically better.

After Lee left I got an invitation to go and play tennis in an informal mixed doubles tourny out at Chateaugiron with Emilie, a colleague of Liz's. There were four of us who headed out: Emilie, Franck (G, not F or C), Isabelle (another from Liz's school, by way of Germany and England), and myself. We played 5 tiebreakers or so with various partners and opponents, which was fun, although the level was maybe a little below what I like. In between, though, I hit around with Franck, who hits an OK ball, and Philippe, the club president, who was my level or perhaps slightly better. It had been so long since I'd had a good hard hit, and having the Australian open on during the week meant I was really up for a hit, so I had a really great time.

As a bonus, at the end of the day the club put on gallettes des rois and cider. Gallettes des rois is apparently a french tradition based on the gifts of the 3 kings (you know, Jesus and all that jazz), where they eat cake. There's a token somewhere in the cake, and the person who gets the token is king for the day and has to bring the cake the next time. We did it with our research team as well, with more ritual than at tennis.

After the tennis afternoon, Avenir hosted Pleyber for the big rivalry game. This was by far the best game of ball I've seen at Avenir, in all facets: quality of the game, excitement, crowd involvement. I guess it helped that the home side got up. Anyway, after the game there was a big party scheduled, anticipated basically since the schedule came out. I went along, but had a nasty-ass headache basically the whole time, and ended up bailing out early at about 2am. Reports in the following days suggest that frivolity was rampant.

In other news, basketball training has started back up, although numbers have been really low. Last week we were only 4, so we just played 2-on-2 for 90 minutes or so. This week was marginally better, with 7 (4 continents represented: 3 French, 2 Canadians, 1 Chinese and 1 Australian). Again, though, we just played 3-on-3 rather than running any drills.