Montferrier-sur-Lez

I am deliriously giddy with the new laptop. After over seven hours (yeah, whoa) of online desperation with many, many Indian online chat representatives, I gave up in disgust and mentioned my woes to the family at breakfast today. I told them of the pinging, the IP changing, the limited or no connectivity (the new bane of my existance), everything. I mentioned how the Dell guy that Mom talked to said it was just a problem with the password, but that it didn't even make sense since I've entered in the correct sequence about a million times, 1608-1608-08. They looked at me with upraised eyebrows and gently informed me that this was not, in fact, the network password at all. Ah yes, things start to come together. Nina, the fourteen year old, should not be trusted with giving me information ever again. I had to do a system restore, then immediately undo it since it deleted all of my pictures, save all the pictures, and re-restore. It was quite the ordeal, but I am happy to note that it worked wonderfully and I have been a downloading fool all morning.

Lost season three premiere is now sitting and growing in my bittorrent tray, and I honestly cannot wait. Travis told me that it was packed with excitement. Luckily, I've avoided all spoilers and information of any kind, so I hope it lives up to expectations. I'm at 24.3% right now.

Here's a guy that Sam and I had the good fortune to be across from on the tram Friday night after ice skating. I didn't notice at first, but then Sam nudged me and whispered, "I think that guy is throwing up". It was true. And disgusting. The worst thing was that the tram kept making turns and the effluvia slowly made its way to our side. Luckily the Hauts de Massane stop wasn't long after.

Sam and I took a trip to see Katy's homestay at Montferrier-sur-Lez yesterday, and it was beautiful outside. The house itself was gorgeous as well - very spacious, and it looked almost like an expensive show house that no one lived in. We had to take off our shoes before we got to the door, and her host mom hinted for us to go outside after about fifteen minutes. This picture is of one of the two fish bowls in Katy's bathroom.

Near her house is a very old graveyard, and we had a competition to find the earliest birthdate. Sam won, with 1799, and I was close with 1806. Some of the graves had etched information, but many more had placards as the one to the left, which I would have thought would have been exposed more harshly to the elements. In fact, they were better preserved than the engraved ones, pardon the pun.

It was strange to see that a lot of the French there weren't buried, but entombed in giant sepulchers. This one at the left was a large mausoleum example, but most of them were about four feet high by eight feet wide. They usually included several people, it seemed. As expected, there were a large amount of graves dating from the first World War, as well as several from World War II. Also surprising was that they usually had the age of the person at the time of death, while in the United States you usually have to do some complicated subtraction in order to figure that out.


73.5% done, eek!