Surprise Celebration

While I was in the hospital having my broken face looked at, the official publication date of my new novel was happening. 

Guess which one I preferred?

Friday night Rick arranged a celebration party at the Café du Soleil with my writing mentor Susan Thiberghien (life blood of the Geneva Writers Group -- www.genevawritersgroup.org) and her husband, my business partner and his wife, my housemate (whose skeleton photo for the cover, and editing makes her a collaborator in the best sense of the word) and a long-time friend.

The Café holds a special place in my heart. During the beginning years of the GWG we met there monthly. Also it was the first place Rick and I ate when we reconnected. So memories go back 20 years.

Over 400 years old, the café has the best fondue in the city, although none of us chose the renown dish as we ate out under the vines in the courtyard. 

Instead I had the gazpacho (swallow don't chew) and the rest had Malakoffs, which is a fried cheese ball along with a salad. The legend is that a Russian soldier after the Crimean War introduced the dish. It is only a local Geneva/Vaud dish. Dessert was profiteroles. 

My daughter doesn't consider she's in Geneva until she's had her fondue there often nagging me to make a reservation as soon as she has her airline reservation. Any reason, any season is good enough to go there. 

Years ago when my Japanese chins were still alive, we'd meet there at night. The manager would always say, "Bonsoir Albert, Bonsoir Amadeus," a pat on the head to each and then he'd add, "Bonjour Madame Nelson, Bonjour Mademoiselle Nelson" before showing us to our seats. 

For a panorama view http://www.cafedusoleil.ch/

Put creative people together and the conversation was as lively as the food.

Having a broken face doesn't stop me from enjoying life and appreciating my friends and fiancé.

Sleep reading

Rick swears I sleep read. Since he often works late, he will come to bed and find me with my glasses on, a book open and in reading position and a snore (delicate of course) slipping from my mouth.

That I read so much and that it isn't new was confirmed when he was looking through old photo albums for our commitment ceremonial website www.donnalaneandrick.com/ so my friends would know a little about him and his about me. He found photo after photo of me with a book in my hand or books around me.

He's right. I can't imagine being without a book and having at least one other on hand. Sometimes I read two or three at the same time. Mysteries go well with history or politics. French books have to be fascinating. Biographies and autobiographies go down equally well.

There are worse habits to have.

You know the song

You know the song, "I wanta hold your hand?"

I'm singing "I Wanta to Blow My nose"


The problem with a broken face is that I can't blow my nose until the bones heal or the plates are in because that would change the pressure, the bones could shift and cause more damage.

And despite my age, child that I am, tell me I can't do something, and I want to do it.

There's also a special way to sneeze that I've mastered but leaves my nose running. I've heard of snotty-nosed kids but snotty-nosed 70 year olds???

Ah well, I'll continue to dab away with tissues. Compared to all the suffering in the world, this is so minor that it doesn't match an undersized flea on an over-sized elephant. And like the cancer, I'm looking for ways to make it interesting and worthwhile... http://breastisyettocome.blogspot.ch/

Still had it not happened, there would have been no complaints.

The chickens have come to roost

 

When my daughter was little the last threat I would make when she was behaving under-wonderfully  was -- "I'll break your face."  Of course I wouldn't. She was only spanked twice...once when she ran across a busy roadway and once when she started to put a knife in an electric socket.

So my chickens came home to roost when I fell yesterday and broke my face in four places. Don't remember the ride to the hospital, but am fine now except on July 24, my birthday I need surgery. 

I've never broken a bone. Most people break legs and arms, maybe a rib or too...I know I like to be original but original can be overdone.

Hopefully all the swelling will be okay by Rick's and my ceremony, or we can find someway to incorporate it. For example, it may lead to temporary double vision in the right eye.

Well if so, then I can get a patch...A pretty one...and we can give a patch to each guest with paints to decorate them.

Once again I am so grateful for the wonderful medical care at HUG...And I'm sorry I put my housemate and Rick through this...then again I am tempted when we are in group to turn to him as say "Don't hit me again" in a pleading voice... then again maybe I won't.

Whew

Two years ago at this time I was busy with radiation after having a cancer removed from my right breast. It was encapsulated and had not spread to the lymph nodes. I was lucky. People gape when I say the experience was fun sometimes. It was also emotionally strengthening, scarey, rewarding, and a number of other adjectives.

Any hypochondria tendencies I have and there are many are are not about the cancer, but I will admit when the doctor who did the X-rays for my asthma mentioned something wasn't looking right with my breast, there was a major gulp. She thought it was probably to do with scaring but recommended a mammogram.

It did not cause a great deal of worry on my part. I decided to say nothing to my daughter, housemate or fiancé because the chances of it being serious were minimal but I made the appointment for a mammo anyway.

My gynie can do mammograms because he has a colleague, a doctor from Paris who comes to Switzerland to work in my gynie's clinic a couple of times a week. He told me with a smile as I was taking of my bra, that he does not like the name Nelson as a Frenchman, but I told him the origin was Swedish and had nothing to do with Admirals and Trafalgar Square.

Both he and my gynie looked at the results and decided it was scaring --nothing more.

WHEW

Still to all women, get those mammograms.  They can save your life.

When I told my housemate, I suggested that we make the house a cancer-free zone not just for us but for all our friends and family member. Enough is enough.

(The reason I chronicled the entire breast cancer experience is in the hope that those that might go through the procedure might remove a bit of the anxiety.)

The mystery of the walnut shell

I'm a mystery writer. My novel Murder in Paris is out officially tomorrow, although Amazon is already shipping.

The mystery of the walnut shell will not be a novel, but it did spark my curiosity that it should be sitting in the middle of the driveway.

There are no walnut trees around. There have been no walnuts eaten in the house recently and as lazy people we are usually willing to pay a bit more to get them preshelled.

We haven't seen any squirrels lately, although there was an adorable red one hanging around earlier in the spring. In previous years, Munchkin, the queen of the kitty hunters, tended to discourage the squirrels from visiting.

Where did it come from?

Who knows...

Accommodation Emancipation

OFFICIAL NOTICE

Here Ye! Here Ye! 

Donna-Lane NELSON announces to one and all she is through waiting for months for people to make up their mind about this or that date. If this than that than that than this is over. Over the past year people hem and haw, maybe this maybe that and she is left hanging.

From now on, she'll plan her life and if it lines up with others, wonderful. If not, she wishes you well with your plans.

Another day, another cow, etc.

We were on our way to try out a new brunch, but the buses would get us there either a half hour early or a half hour late. 

We decided to go early and browse. 

A few years back, there were cows everywhere in Geneva...not the live kind, but the decorative kind, if that is possible. Outside a baker's there would be a life-size cow with different bread painted on its side.

The butcher's cow was divided into the meat it would become, chops, roasts, etc. A computer company would have a circuit board cow and so on.

We've driven past this cow every time we go into Geneva, or back home. The artist was Caroline Frank and it belongs to an Optician.

We continued our meandering up through the village killing time and talking. We made the brunch just as they were putting out the food. The breads were great, nice assortment of cheeses, a fresh-fresh-fresh seasonal fruit club, a homemade applesauce with an herb I couldn't identify, misc. cold cuts and Eggs Benedict that were plate-licking good, although I resisted--but just barely.

Compared to the brunch at the Penta for 50 CHF which has every food one can imagine including a chocolate fountain, this brunch was more like a German hotel breakfast. At 34 CHF a bit pricey since those breakfasts usually run about half the price of this one. 

Still though, on this beautiful summer Sunday, there was a feeling of warm contentment but then every day is filled with warm contentment.

 

Rick and Scooby make beef stew and dumplings

The ingredients are ready.

Scooby is ready to cut up the meat. 

Be careful with the knife Scoob.

Rick chops and dices.

All done.

Bon apetite

Seeing an icon

There have been icon's I've seen on stage over my life...Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolph Nureyev, both who seemed to defy gravity on stage. And there's been the ordinary concerts I've gone to in the past of famous and some not-so-famous people: Peter Paul and Mary, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Didi Bridgewater, Glenn Miller's band (not the original), Johnny Halliday, Dixie Band, Garou, Florent Pagny, etc., etc., etc. The list is too long to name them all.

However, listening to three hours of 78-year old Leonard Cohen on stage last night at the Montreux Jazz Festival was beyond wonderful.  

 Don't leave me. Take me to the concert, please, please, please. We resisted Scooby's appeal.

 Hallelujah, so long Marianne, Then we'll take Berlin, Suzanne,  I'm your man and he was...

Listening to three hours of 78-year old Leonard Cohen on stage last night at the Montreux Jazz Festival's packed Stravinsky Hall, which holds about 3,500 people, was truly an experience to be remembered from his introduction in fluid French to the last time he skipped off stage.

The youtube above includes the same musicians and many of the same songs to give any reader a flavour of the concert.

Early morning entertainment

I was enjoying my last minutes in bed before starting the day--my ultimate luxury is reading before getting up and I still relish NOT rushing to catch the bus to work. I had a Joanne Harris book with a graphic of a chess king or a pawn marking the start of each chapter and identifying which narrator was speaking and had been transported to the dusty old English boarding school.

Rick rushed in. "There's a crane taking a plate of glass out of a neighbour's house." I left the boarding school and returned to Corsier in seconds.

The crane had blocked my housemate's gate so she could not head up to the village for her morning coffee, but since she loves taking photos as does Rick, the two of them clicked away as did I.

Watching it dawned on me, that the glass exchange probably cost my neighbour more than I earn in a year.

They were getting ready to move out.

But dropped it because pieces are easy to transport, or so they said. Sounds like an excuse to me.

 


Probably before today is over both J and R will have blogged this with better photos than the ones above. Check them out if you wish (they are fun blogs anyway): 

• http://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.ch/
• http://lovinglifeineurope.blogspot.fr/

I asked my housemate what entertainment she'd planned for tomorrow. I doubt if she can top this. I doubt that she will try.

Scooby goes to the lake

Scooby asked to go down to the lake because it was a beautiful day in Corsier Port.

Catching some rays.

Scooby loves feeding the swans. They were eating tortillas.

Scooby mouthed off to Rick once too often.

Before going home, Scooby stops to smell the flowers on the dock's flower boxes.

Honey, I shrunk the table

"The table, it's smaller," Rick called. We'd just gotten back from three weeks in the South of France and were alone in the house. Housemate J was in the mountains, and my daughter was babysitting a St. Bernard named Einstein (not a reflection of his intelligence) and a cat named Newton (a reflection of his intelligence) in Schwyz.

It was gone...The huge table top that one could almost sleep on and instead of the original coffee table shown above was back.

There's a back story. Almost four years ago J, decided to give a much loved painting to a museum in Northern Germany (which led to my writing Murder on Insel Poel, now under contract). To protect the large painting, she asked for the measurements of the car that would pick up the painting and then had a box made to fit those measurements.

Something went wrong.

The painting was picked up but would not fit in the car with the box.

J did not want to waste the considerable sum she'd spent to have the box custom made. Since it was made of pressed wood, it wasn't very attractive, but we decided to use it as a coffee table anyway. The back-up plan would have been to use it as the previously mentioned double bed to sleep on.

Once covered in a bright red cloth it occupied a good part of the living room where it saw numerable celebration dinners and aperos and held bouquets of flowers and decorative candles. The table itself was a conversation piece. We grew to love it--kind of...

Since J is still in the mountains, I assume the temporary table went out in the trash on the day they pick up large objects and electrical thingies. I'll find out later when she comes off the mountain to a dinner and a Leonard Cohen concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

The living room looks a LOT BIGGER with the shrunken coffee table.

SNCF does good PR

I've often said that SNCF schedules are suggestions. Leaving Argelès at 7:34 exactly on time, we were not worried that our train would not be so late we'd miss our connection. It's a much too common occurrence that we have to rush for a train because the first one is late.

What we didn't worry about was that our connection would be late by 1.5 hours. We knew there would be later trains for Geneva than we originally were scheduled on.

Since we didn't have to be in Geneva by any particular time, I used the time to try and learn the smartphone as we sat in the brasserie and ate a hot chocolate and drank tea. Pleasant and no sweat on time.

Once on the train with knowledge of our next train from Lyon where we would change for the last part of our voyage, we sat back and worked on our wedding ceremony.

A conductor, one so tall, he almost hit his head on the rounded ceiling, brought packages around that contained a good salad, apple sauce, a game book, candy, water, coloured pencils, an apology, etc. 

Since both Rick and I are PR people we appreciated what they must have done to call ahead and arrange to have the packages put on at Montpelier.

The Scooby Saga continues

Scooby showing up in strange places is a family tradition.

Tonight he took the bus from Corsier Port to Collonge

Where he ate at our favourite restaurant Marro...

And the waiter scrawled Scooby's name on his order, even if it didn't reproduce too well.

I won't have a nervous breakdown

I won't have a nervous breakdown

I won't have a nervous breakdown

I won't have a nervous breakdown

I have to love this man. And the mess is temporary.  How the flat should be see Rick's blog.
http://lovinglifeineurope.blogspot.fr/2013/06/the-nest.html

I have to love that man: he has to love me.

From the woman who wants every surface clean, if you take a sheet of paper out, you put it away as soon as you finish with it--and if you're really lucky, you'll find it again--who doesn't care what other people do and is very, very territorial in her nest.

The fact that we both laugh about our differences bodes well for our future.