That thumbnail to the right is a photo of my new (er, I should say nouvelle) carte d'etudiant! That's right, it's back to school for me, and starting tomorrow I will begin to study French formally so that I'll no longer have to stammer sentences like, "I look for a phone card not to put in the phone but to press the numbers on the phone to use" or "the moon, like the moon and the earth and the plane — the Space Shuttle — that goes there, to the space."

Of course, the idea of actually speaking French properly, rather than concocting it through an assemblage of words and the application of Spanish grammar rules, saddens me a bit. I rather enjoyed walking into the pharmacy this morning (to combat my Camilla hair) with my request, "I look for the thing for the hair whose name I do not know, but it is like this," whereupon I slide two fingers into my hair to mimic a bobby pin holding it in place, "and it is not called barrette." I triumphed again! The monsieur directed me to the magasin Claire, an accessories store, where I purchased said chose.

For those that read megnut.com through a news reader, you may be missing my photos from Paris that I've been posting to the site via Flickr. If you want to follow along on my adventures, you can check out my Flickr photo set, April in Paris 2005. So far there aren't a lot of photos, but as I wander the streets, I'll take more. They're all from my phone, so the quality isn't great. As I get (hopefully) better photos from my digital camera, I'll post those as well.

Last night on the plane to France, I changed my watch and set it ahead six hours pretty much as soon as I got onboard. I like to begin my change to my new time zone as soon as possible. So I was little surprised and confused when the plane began its descent at 6:55 AM since we weren't due into Charles de Gaulle until 8:20. "Aha!" I thought, "the time must have changed already in Europe."

But then later in the day, I was at the UPS store overnighting some documents, and they had those clocks on the walls, and it showed New York six hours behind Paris. So I figured I must have been confused, and maybe I just moved my watch ahead five hours or something.

Then, even later, I noticed it was still light out, even though it was past 7 PM. I checked the weather and it said sunset was at 8:21 PM, which seemed very late for April 1st.

Then I bothered to check, and discovered that Europe had already sprung ahead, because they do so the last Sunday in March (see <a href="http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/b.html&quot; title="
When we change our clocks”>
When we change our clocks). All that's a very long and dull way of saying: it's finally dark enough here for me to go to sleep. I stayed up all day and am now very tired, and obviously the lack of sleep caused some sort of time-related mental breakdown. Hopefully tomorrow will produce better time-telling results and less boring posts.