Mail call

One of my daily activities is checking the mail. The mail boxes are along the outer fence of our apartment complex, so I have to walk through the parking lot and go through the gate to get to them. This means I usually take a shower and get dressed before I check the mail, and I always go hoping we'll have something interesting.

No luck, just the La Redoute catalog. B's aunt bought us something through La Redoute, our water filter maybe, so now we get the catalog. What a waste of paper. The clothes are all for des poufiasses (kind of like bimbo). I can't imagine a suit that costs 35€ will fit right and last long. Due to my mother, I'm a fasciste (B's word) about buying natural fiber clothing. I do have polyester and ramie and viscose clothing, but I buy 100% cotton t-shirts instead of 50/50 cotton/polyester. I might have convinced B that higher thread-count cotton sheets are more comfortable than his old cotton/poly mixed ones that pilled like crazy. So, La Redoute: the clothes are so cheap, I can't imagine the fabric is any good. The shirts and sweaters are all oversized and droopy and mixed with polka dots. They sell some pointy-toed high heels and call them "raffiné et citadin", refined and city-style. For 14€50, I think they're more like "fabriqué en carton et donne des ampoules" (made out of cardboard and give you blisters).

Today I have to write une attestation for the PACS. I printed out the example a few days ago and said to B "Here, this is easy, we just fill in our names and sign on the bottom!" He looked at me and paused, "You know we have to recopy it by hand, right?" Which reminded of one of the dumbest things I've seen in France so far: when we rented our apartment, B's parents were our guaranteers since we didn't have much of a work history. They each had to recopy by hand a long paragraph about the renting rules and how they promised to pay the rent if we ever should not be able to. It took about a page of space. I could recopy something in hand in German, but that wouldn't mean I understood it, just that I practiced my handwriting. I would say that writing a summary shows better comprehension, except that I'm also really against the French obsession with summaries (compte-rendu). You'd think that with all the misbehaving kids do after they copy a sentence 10 or 20 times, the French would realize that you don't always change your behavior because of something you wrote.