This trip is driving me crazy!
The other day I practically had a nervous breakdown with trying to find a place to stay in Paris. Every place that I looked at was missing a day in the block of time that I am going to be staying there. I finally decided to stay at a hotel Mom, Gary, and I stayed at 10 years ago! Apparently it has changed hands and has been completely made over so it will be nice to see it for the first time again. I love staying in the Rue Cler district of Paris (that is the 7th) for those of you keeping score of the Paris districts). Jonathan will be visiting us in Paris, but will be staying elsewhere. I wanted to get this groovy apartment that we found on a web site, but in the end it proved too expensive and you have to pay in advance. It was over 1400 bucks for 7 nights – no thanks to the lousy mileage the dollar is getting vs the euro.
At any rate, I am looking forward to our time in Paris – I will get to reconnect with some friends I made from Disneyland Paris when they were visiting California as well as getting to see Jonathan for the first time since 2004 in Japan. As an added bonus, I found out they have tickets to the new Most Haunted Live special that will be airing in the UK over the 5 nights we will be in London and in Cardiff. Hopefully, we will get selected for tickets to the show. It is one of the things that Daniel and I wanted to do while we were overseas.
Added to everything else, it is my birthday next week and I am actually celebrating this year! It is not the fancy parties of a decade ago, but it will be a nice dinner at the Magic Castle in Hollywood thanks to my friend Lev. I do wish Susie, Mark, Alex, Matt, Wendy/Mice,.Cooper, Kibble, Nathan, and Jonathan were around locally so they could be part of the fun. I miss the good old days when we were all in the same area.
Completely unrelated – I have signed up for the USGS Earthquake Notification Service. I know it is super geeky, but I love the fact you can set what magnitude quake will result in a text message to my cell phone. I can also get a HTML email, but I like getting the text messages. I have it set for 4.0 for the US and 6.0 for the World. It seems to be the right balance so I get interesting quakes and yet do not exceed my texting allowance for the month.