Puppy Love

We have tickets! We leave Paris at 7:15 am on June 15th, and arrive in San Jose at 8:30 that night. You might think that sounds like about 13 hours, but it's actually 22 hours of travel, including a 5-hour layover in Chicago. With a (by then) 18-month-old who already won't sit still... We are thinking about asking his doctor if there is any safe way to sedate him, kind of like you would a cat that you took in a carrier on an airplane.

At least we have business-class for the first leg, Paris to Dublin. Oddly, that was the cheapest flight available, but hey, we'll take it! For the long leg (Dublin to Chicago), though, we have two out the three seats in the middle section in coach, which should be delightful for whoever gets that other seat.

We will have to figure out how to make sure the car seat is waiting in Santa Cruz for us, and how to get from San Jose to Santa Cruz. We'll spend a night or two in Santa Cruz and then drive down. Now we just need confirmation on the apartment we are subletting!

Job-hunting continues, though I've kind of lost hope of landing anything till I have a local address. I do have two notifications that people will contact me for the next stage, but no actual contacts for the next stage, so we'll see. Today I applied to a company looking for a bilingual French-English administrative assistant with a lot of writing duties and strong communication skills. If the world is at all fair, and they are at all self-interested, they should follow up with me. But HR departments are really weird sometimes in their ideas of what makes a person suited for a job. We'll see. Maybe I'll end up shamelessly copying Robyn and volunteering at local museums, though in my case it won't be for fun so much as it will be to get museum experience on my resume. Though that raises the question of how we can afford to pay for child care so that I can beef up a resume at my own expense--and the question of whether, in the long term, we can afford not to. I'm still hopeful about getting enough tutoring this summer to pay the bills, at least.

Here's a question, speaking of gazelles: Why don't the French spay and neuter? The number of intact males roaming around is quite shocking, really. As an American pet lover, I believe to the core of my being that pet owners who don't fix their charges, unless they are showing their animals in confirmation or following responsible breeding programs for obedience animals, don't deserve to have them. It's so irresponsible and unethical, just inexcusable on all grounds. But here the standard seems different. What gives? I will say, though, that the French on average are on a completely different level in terms of pet-related responsibility. Their dogs are so much better-trained and well-behaved that it puts most American dog owners, even a lot of the good ones, to bitter shame.