…can you smell the smoke? That smell of smoke is coming from my camera. I have been using it like crazy the last six weeks or so taking photos of bags for a catelogue for Lollipops. It has been rather challenging. We found that we had to have really good lighting, along with a white box sort of thing to really light up the purses well after taking the first batch of photos against a white wall.

 While it is rather satisfying to see photos of a purse that I took myself on a page of a catelogue, it does get to be hard work, sort of like working on an assembly line, I imagine. Now whenever I am looking at a magazine and I see the photos of objects for sale or things to buy for Christmas-that sort of thing-I think about the poor photographer taking them. It’s not the most stimulating thing I’ve ever done. Those purses and shoes just don’t have that much personality and there are just so many angles and positions you can take. I did try a few creative things here and there. And those lights are really hot. I had to bring an old tshirt to work in. I thought about bringing workout clothing but didn’t. The best part was seeing the creativity behind each purse, belt, scarf or pair of shoes. I wanted them all.

 I did enjoy working with the young people at the store where I was taking the photos. I liked seeing how the girls dressed and how they interacted-being my alien self again, seeing how the natives interact. I especially like observing one girl. She wasn’t one of those skinny things with her nose in the air. She had fullness and boobs. She wore the cutest clothes and I loved her boots. Her hair, an interesting shade of red, was often in two low little pony tails behind each ear, her eyes were enhanced with a line of liquid eye liner above each set of lashes and beyond like Barbra Streisand used to do, and she sometimes wore cute black eye glasses. She and another girl would take the photos I took and do the photoshop thing with them and make up the catelogue pages.

 I wished I could take the really fancy photos used by Lollipops with several bags or belts on top of giant, green wet leaves with water drops sprinkled here and there but I don’t have the equipment, to begin with and I don’t think I am at that level, but I’d sure like to try. And also with a model. I think that might be fun. I’m sure it would stress me out to no end. Just the purses was exhausting. Anyway, it was an interesting look into a world I’m usually not part of.

 So, if you are interested, here is the location of the new Lollipops e-shop- Lollipops e-shop. You can’t buy it in the States yet and it’s in French, but you can look at the photos and think, “I know who took those!”

A view of columns near Palais Royal

 Sometimes, especially when I really miss the space and view of our home in Provence, I start getting a little cranky about our small apartment here in Paris. I grumble as I trudge up the stairs with the groceries and I feel a little claustraphobic when sitting in our really small living room. So, we decided to look around in our neighborhood and see if we could find something roomier and with an elevator. The very first place we looked at was really nice. Very clean, elevator, freshly painted and it had a bath tub, something I don’t have here. They have a really large asking price, though. We can probably get the loan but do we want to have that loan to pay off?

Art Deco lamp outside a Paris Metro

 We looked at another apartment on a really cute street near us that we like. In a word, it was horrible. Many French apartments have huge halls with rooms going down the line. So when we entered this apartment, there was that long wide hall with six closed doors. The first door was to the kitchen which wasn’t too bad but the window there looked right onto a gray concrete wall-the one containing the elevator. The next door was the room with the toilet, then a bedroom, a closet at the end, another bedroom with the only bathroom and then the dining room. Notice that there isn’t a living room. The dining room which contained a huge table also held the TV and this was where they came, I guess, to “live”. It didn’t appeal to me at all and I didn’t like the tile in their bathroom. Also, on the first floor-second if you are an American-was an office for a dentist so people would be going in and out of the building all day and I could see that the stair carpet was really dirty, so there goes that apartment, not to mention that they were asking a really high price for it.

 Two benches in the sun on Pont des Arts near the Louvre

 So, we may still hear from the people in the first apartment that we like. I’m sort of leaving that up to the fates and not putting alot of emotion into the results. If they accept our offer, we will move. If they don’t, we decided to knock out a wall in our apartment and make our living room more livable. Of course, that will leave us with only one bedroom but we don’t have guests pouring in to see us anyway so it wouldn’t be a hardship. And maybe someday we will get an elevator installed. I’m just hoping I won’t see the walls through my kitchen window. We are going to be happy just where we are.

 A reflection of some buildings in a puddle

 Except for a few cold days after Christmas, it has been an incredibly mild start to the winter. We have had a few shower off and on but many days there are sunny blue skies. Here are a few photos to prove it:

 I rounded the corner the other day at the Louvre and instead of the rather mild fountains that are usually seen, there was one practically exploding. There was a service truck there so maybe they were working on it. The fountains haven’t been working much in the last year.

 Isn’t this pretty? It the frame for a stained glass window found inside the gardens of the Hotel du Sully.

One last brave yellow leaf

 A shot of one of the fountains near the pyramid at the Louvre which isn’t working-but you can get some great reflections.

 On a totally unrelated note, I have been taking photos for Lollipops, an accessory store, which sells shoes, purses, scarves, etc. Yesterday, I took some photos of a collection of purses which had the Virgin Mary on them. This somehow led to a very vivid dream that night in which the Virgin Mary, while still a teen-ager and still a virgin before the whole virgin birth thing, somehow was transported through time to the present day where she lived with me and some of my children. She was exposed to American Television, video games, young love, movies, the whole thing. I had to prepare her for her trip back to her time and really worried how she would handle being the mother of Jesus after all of her experiences. Isn’t the mind funny? I think I may have a movie somewhere in there if I only wrote scripts.

 I didn’t write about my New Year’s Eve due to, well, a hang over. I know better than to mix champagne, white wine and red wine but I did it anyway. My husband had one glass of champagne and white wine only and did fine. He always says you can mix red and white if you start with white wine and then move on to red, but never return to the white.

 Well, what can I say.

 When we arrived at the apartment of our American friends we were presented with kir royals, a really great celebratory drink. Our friends are from Louisiana and they had visitors also from there. I really love their accents, especially of the one man who introduced himself as Frank Mouton-and he pronounced his last name as the French do. Mouton is a very old French name and he can trace his ancestry back to France as could my friend (it also means sheep in French). As the evening went on he would say old Louisiana sayings, Cajun sayings, in French and Maurice could understand him perfectly even though the French has really changed over the centuries. I could too. I loved hearing it in a Cajun accent. They talked about the Creole French as well, a totally different thing. I don’t have a Texas accent, even though I was born there-I was raised in the Southwest-but, I can do one. So they had me do my Texas accent and there was really a difference. Things like that facinate me.

 Our dinner was fabulous. We started with pate, plain foie gras and one with black mushrooms in it. Choucroute is out for sale now, being a great meal to have on those cold winter nights. Maurice and I buy it occasionally but all I ever do is just microwave it. It is ham, sausages of different kinds, potatoes and sauerkraut. I did once cook the sauerkraut in some white wine which gussied it up and tasted great. My friend added wine and, I think, some chicken bouillon, added the meat, some hot dogs, some slices of apple and potatoes and then baked it as a casserole for hours. It was really tasty. If I get the recipe, I will post it here. It was Cajun Choucroute, really. Her husband bought a fabulous white wine from Alsace to go with it and it was perfect. We had a salad, forgot all about the cheese, and then ended with a galette du Roi, a King cake, with a little prize baked inside. The one finding it gets to wear a crown. My new Cajun male friend won it.

 There were two French people there: my husband and the husband of a friend. I saw them, a couple of times, sitting there quietly like I do when everyone else is French. The daughter of the Louisiana couple was here in France teaching English in a very small town, which I thought was really brave of her, right out of college.

 So it was a great way to bring in the New Year, hang over or not. I like celebrating things like that with friends.

 I love it when I go out my apartment day to take someone around for photo taking and there is a blue sky and sunshine. Paris often has gray skies in the winter but when the sun is there, incredible light make photography a joy.

A lovely sqaure which should, I guess, be called a “round”

The exquisite mosaic tile floors in the Galerie Vivienne.

 A solitary walker (and two dogs) under the trees at Palais Royal

 I’m always taking photos of the metal green chairs found in the parks of Paris.