Cars, Balls, and Photo Dating

Unfortunately, we got a parking ticket the other day. We forgot to put any money in the meter. Actually, we didn't even realize we had to on a weekend day. We should have checked. The interesting part was looking at the ticket and seeing which are the seven most popular car makes in France (the ones for which the officer only has to place a checkmark, rather than having to write out the name). Ours, a VW, made the list. The other six were Renault, Peugeot and Citroën (of course, since they are all French companies), Fiat, Opel and (get this) Ford! I have been surprised to see so many Ford cars here in France. There are very few Toyotas and even fewer Hondas here.

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Time for some French vocabulary.

- BAL means ball
- BALLE means ball
- BALLON means ball
- BOULE means ball

All clear? Okay, okay, let's try that again.

- UN BAL means a ball as in a fancy dancing occasion
- UNE BALLE means a ball as in tennis, ping-pong or golf OR a bullet OR slangily one Franc, the old currency
- UN BALLON means a big hollow playground-type ball (e.g. to kick around) OR a round wine glass OR a balloon
- UNE BOULE means a billiard ball OR a snowball (boule de neige) OR a scoop of ice cream

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I finally changed the time zone on my camera. It took me many months to figure that one out. I.e. that photos taken too early in the morning here were dated the previous day in iPhoto (since we are 9 hours ahead of California). What clued me in was that David's birthday breakfast photos didn't seem to be taken on his birthday, as I was certain they were. I've got that under control now. Looking in David's iPhoto, I see he took care of his camera back in October but somehow I didn't get the memo.