Where's my several cups of coffee?

You see, when I was learning to cook, I mastered brioche, but not millefeulle. The reason is pretty simple: if I had mastered millefeulle, I would have made palmiers; palmiers--you might know them as elephant ears--are my absolute favorite pastry treat in the whole world. I guess it's the French version of shortbread, which I also love.

So, you know my secret now. I am unable to resist an exquisite combination of butter, sugar and flour.

Right now, I am eating yogurt. It's not bad, and the lid of the Stonyfield Farms tells you that it's important to participate in the democratic process by voting, but it's not croissant and coffee.

So after my transplant, whenever that is, I'll go. That will give me plenty of time to brush up my long disused French. I studied the language for about 15 years, and you'd think I'd be fluent, but a) that was a while ago, and b) my fluency was never conversational. I wrote verse back then, and my work in French was far better than my work in English, but I was too self-conscious to speak aloud outside of a classroom.

On my trips to Montreal in the past few years I've been able to get by. Montreal is not Paris, to be sure, but it's always struck me as a very French city. Everybody smokes there, everybody eats meat; nobody walks around spouting political correctness. There are places to get a decent cup of coffee and read the paper. So, by "French" I mean "not very American."

~~~~~

So, yesterday at work was eventful. It seems that the contract I'm on may be going away, and that I'd better be looking for another job. Of course, there's also a chance that it's not going away. Very confusing. This is both good and bad. The giant contractor I work for has tons of jobs, and having stuck with them for going-on three years now, I have some small level of senority, enough so that they'd probably like to keep me around doing something. Changing contracts is known to be the only way to get a sizeable raise from them, but they still don't pay market rate unless your skills are highly in demand. Mine aren't, necessarily. They're useful, but hard to define. In my current group, I'm the "person who knows how the internet works."

My point was, several sentences ago, that I don't really have the energy to find a new job outside the company. I probably won't have to, but I might be happier if I did.

before - after