Random (also known as lazy blogging)

Eric cute on his way to work.

Lisa's amazing pigeon encounter. This bird was totally messing with her.

Cookies with skateboarders on them. ??

I made a tart with poached pears. It's not too pretty but it was the best one I've ever made if I do say so myself.

Our man T.J.

The outside of the fabulous Musee D'Orsay.

An ad for something. I can't decide if it's pretty or ugly. I'm leaning towards ugly.

Our 6 month wedding anniversary was a few days ago, and Eric brought me home this squirrel timer. And I love it.

More yard sale...

Okay, so first, look at this hot dog. It's a hot dog. It is really that color. I don't know why. I suspect it's more natural than the color of an Oscar Meyer, but I'm just really not sure what to think. Okay, moving on...

When I say yard sale, I mean more like a flea market, like this.
And this.
This lady had a 50s housewife dream setup. I wanted to just sit down in the middle of the stuff and stay there all day. So lovely.

It's yard sale season!

For Eric to learn about Halloween, which they don't really do here.

Great purse.

Old wooden frog toy. 50 cents, can you believe it?

Laughing cow set.

I'm here!!!

I know I haven't written in a long time so I will make up for it by inundating you with many many photos that may or may not be interesting to you. Beginning with this cute sushi sign.

Cheese & gourmet shop when it's closed.

Our neighborhood's city hall. A lot of these photos are from my first bus ride...Eric and I took a bus across the top of the city a couple weeks ago to go to a great park called Buttes-Chaumont that I had never been to before.

Look familiar?

Ad on the side of a bus.

Chicken Spot! This photo could totally be from any American city I think.

Inside the bus when it's crowded.

And not crowded. It was really fun actually and not scary at all.

I just liked the name of this place. Sassy.

Not a very good photo I know, but we were in traffic. Anyway, it's a high school after it just let out with kids hanging out in front.

Graffiti/Art

Ok, this is in the park now. This is a marionette theater that was obviously closed at that moment. Or puppets, or whatever. You know what I mean.

And games for kids. It was during school time so there weren't many around, but they still kept it open. Pirates!

This place felt like we were completely outside of the city.

There was a waterfall, and this guy was standing in the cave thing under it doing that exercise thing where you move very slow, you know? I don't know what it's called. Of course, you see groups of people doing that in parks sometimes, but whenever I see a single person, I'm always impressed with their nerve.

Action shot.

If you look close you can see this dear little Jack Russell running up the hill with a ball.

Handsome!

Look! There's Sacre Coeur in the distance!

There was this tower thing you could climb up to. Well, not climb exactly, but walk up steps to.

Et voila!

random stuffff

Me in the weird mirror wall thing on the outside of our closest grocery store. Really artistic and interesting, I know.

Street art.

Old friends Sue and Tommy from Long Island, NY, were in Paris for their honeymoon recently. We had the pleasure of going out to dinner with them and also had them over last Sunday for lunch and flea market shopping. It was a lot of fun. One of the many benefits of living in the most-visited city in the world is that hopefully friends will be around somewhat frequently. Congratulations to them on their marriage!

This was a window display in, well, I don't remember what kind of shop. I think it's supposed to be Charlotte Corday, the girl that killed Jean-Paul Marat during the French Revolution. She stabbed him when he was taking a bath because she thought the revolution was getting too violent, or something like that. Makes sense. Then she went to the guillotine.

stuff we're cookin'

This is potato leek soup, the first recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the first one that Julie from Julia and Julie made, and a very simple and very French soup that lasted us for a few days and brought us a bit of joy. It was very nice for the first days of September. It's starting to feel like fall here already and I love it. And I got to use my big pot!

And here we have some ribs that Eric and I made together, in honor of Labor Day weekend. We used a dry rub we made from a recipe on thepioneerwoman.com, one of my favorite food blogs, and had some Heinz bbq sauce for dipping. They only sell about 2 kinds here, but I was just happy to find it at all. I would've tried making my own, but decided not to in the end because I'm not that big into it so I just didn't care that much. This recipe is really really wonderful, by the way. Eric had never had any sort of southern-type bbq ribs at all, and he was very happy and impressed. And we don't have a grill, of course, but this recipe just calls for baking them in the oven, directly on the rack, so that's what we did. Awesome awesome awesome.

This is just a fun salad I made that was pretty so I took a picture.

And here is a scary-looking stuffed eggplant. It was pretty good but I don't think I'd bother with it again. More trouble than it was worth. Although I really like cooking with eggplant, I decided, and will do it more often in the future.

Voila!