Our lives in boxes

This is what our house is beginning to look like, a collection of bowes in various places, empty looking walls, and a general sense of disorder is lurking about.
We're moving!
Alex and I made the decision to move back up to St. Denis to be closer to his job, the commute has been killing his back and the time spent going to and fro everyday is a waste of an hour and a half. We've become accustomed to living here in St. Gilles, and love it so much that we're sad to leave. However, we're contemplating the idea of buying a small place near the sea to be able to spend our weekends at the beach here. It's a good time to buy, and since we're only looking for something small, (but in a great location so as to sell it later when we're ready to buy a house), we think it's a good investment for us right now.
Meanwhile, monkey has been doing all kinds of cute things. He does this great spin move now, where he goes in one direction, seems to rethink his strategy, and ends up doing a 360°. Hilarious. He's also begun to use a spoon! At first it looked like this:

He made quick progress to this a day later:

We're such proud parents!

Anyways, this may be the last post for a while since I don't know how long it will take to get our internet and phone set up in the new place. Hopefully, it won't be an 8 week long fiasco like last time.
Peace and Happy Holidays to everyone!

Petit Papa Noel

Listen to this song while you scroll through these pictures taken this past weekend at a holiday event hosted by Alex's work.

Finally! A great picture of the 3 of us together

"uhhh, who is this chick?"

He is SO not interested

I love his little pointed finger.

Gift idea: rocks!

The world might end tonight...

...if we don't find a way to retreive Luc's blanket that fell off our balcony and landed on our neighbor's roof....

The Great Blackout of 2009

It all started on Friday morning as I was getting Luc and myself ready to go view a couple of apartments for our upcoming move, and as Alex was finishing shaving in the bathroom. The power went out. No big deal, it was a sunny day, we could see just fine and we'd already eaten breakfast, so no more reason to open the fridge. However, when our power is out, the water goes out too. Alex and I had to brush our teeth like we used to in Madagascar. We all left our apartment, and Luc and I didn't return until about 1pm. The power was still out!
At that point I was thinking; "uuggh, why haven't they fixed the problem yet?", "I can't eat anything but plain pasta!" and "It's gonna be hard to get monkey down for his nap with it being so hot upstairs with no AC or fan". So, we walked around the neighborhood in the stroller for a bit. Which only resulted in him becoming more grumpy and me getting hotter. I realised that the whole neighborhood was out of power. I figured it was due to a construction mishap nearby. After 20 minutes, we shuffled into the car (without AC) and sweated as I drove to find a place where I could gobble up a late lunch. Luc kept trying to throw paper, food, etc onto the floor. We left and by the time we got back, the power had finally returned.
Yay!
But not for long.
It went out again an hour later. It stayed off almost until it was dark. By this time, we'd learned there was striking going on, and entire parts of the west side of the island were going off and on at various times. Only the hospitals were spared. I hadn't had a chance to prepare any dinner, so we ordered a pizza, and I ran to the store to grab some candles. Oh, and a bottle of wine, because what's a romantic pizza dinner with your love without a little vino? Plus, we couldn't shower, so I think the alcohol helped us overlook each other's stinky-ness. Alex even serenaded me by candlelight. What a cutie.

(sorry for the poor quality of these photos, but I had uh, bad lighting)

So, the next morning, I got up and showered off the previous day's stink and downed some painkillers for the red wine. Then the power went out again.
Dammit!
When are these guys going to stop striking and come to some kind of agreement? We had a couple of rendez-vous to see some apts, and thankfully, we came home to power and water. We quickly bathed the monkey, washed dishes, vaccumed, turned on the AC, and enjoyed a few minutes of internet. A pattern of 2 hours on, 2 hours off continued until late last night. This time I was prepared and had cooked up an oven meal to toss in anytime. No candles though, we had power during dinnertime last night.
Now it's Sunday afternoon and I think it's all over. But it was quite an adventure. Not really the same as living in Madagascar without electricity or running water since you know what you're getting yourself into. There was no well to go draw water from here, just a grocery store who probably made a bit of extra money selling 5L jugs of water to people.
Anyways, that was our excitement for the weekend. Hope all of you had a great time, perhaps some of you played in the snow?!