T minus seven days

The house is moved: half of our belongings have made the cross-town trek to my mum's house, where they'll be stored until we come home. The house feels like a shade of its former self: half-empty bookshelves, all the art off the walls (we've finally made use of all the B-list art: nice lithos of flowers, laminated photos of jazz greats, less-interesting paintings: stand-ins for our own decor). Anne got up at 1 am last night and paced aimlessly about the main floor, chasing a thought here and there. It gets harder the fewer things there are to do: waiting isn't exactly a task you can do and have it done with. So stray thoughts fill your head and those thoughts turn into work. I sat last night with an old friend over supper and tried to really put myself in the mindset of a man who's standing on a street in the south of France, standing outside of his house, looking down his street, plotting a route into town to buy, say, eggs and butter and a baguette ... and I couldn't do it. I don't know the smells, the sounds of the birds in that air, the feel of the road under my feet. In many ways, I feel like I'm not living anywhere right now.

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This is the fortune that came out of a cookie I opened Tuesday at lunch. I stared at it and told it it had to cough up the Official France Fortune. This is what came out of it: