Thanksgiving

Yep, that's a movie poster, but have no fear, you haven't accidentally wandered into our "other" blog, Kentucky Fried Popcorn - Instead, it's a reference to what I want to write about today, which is not pipes but the pipe community and our community of fellow humans in general.  I was thinking about this after spending some time writing a long letter to our French friend Claudie, trying to sum up all the things that have happened to us since we said goodbye in the Nantes train station.  It seems a good topic for a post, but you'll have to pardon me if this is a bit more personal than usual.

Our seven years in France cost us a lot...  We lost a US house to foreclosure, all our savings and a lot of our possessions.  Over the course of that extended struggle we were chipped away bit by bit, losing the expectations that people take for granted in their native cultures, as well as a lot of our optimism.  You don't decide to try moving to another country without plenty of optimism, but by 2008, it was gone.  The world was in recession, sales were down, and that was the time the French government decided it was a good idea to double our monthly taxes (Had we remained, they would have doubled again in 2009).  We sold the house and planned our return to the USA, hoping to at least leave France on a peaceful note, but the buyer broke the contract at the last possible minute, months after we'd closed down our business and let our working visas expire.  We were left with absolutely nothing a mere two weeks before the plane flight was scheduled...  Multiple maxed credit cards, no savings at all, no money to come from the house sale, no way to even afford the train ride to the airport, much less pay to have our workshop equipment and belongings shipped to the US.  Those were genuinely the darkest days of my life.

Now here's where that movie reference comes in... It started with an overseas call from an American pipe collector.  "How can I help?", he asked.  The word went out through the pipe community.  Aid raffles were discussed.  Donations were sent.  Two different people offered us rental houses to stay in, free of charge, until we could get back on our feet.  Checks were mailed.  Bank transfers were made.  I finally had to contact my confused parents in the US to explain why these strangers were sending money to her (as a US postal address).  One fellow shipped me a crate of wood turning tools, buffing wheels, and more.  Another drove down several states to visit and hand me $1000.  Another loaded up a U-Haul trailer with a loaner compressor AND sandblasting cabinet and drove it all the way up here from Alabama.  Someone paid our utility bills for a year.  Fellow pipemakers sent briar.  Others sent furniture, household items, food, you name it.

When we finally turned into the driveway of our new home, it was simply astonishing.  We walked into a furnished house.  Loaners and donated items filled every need... Couch, chairs, someone's extra TV, a kitchen stocked with food, a foldaway bed to get us by, and a workshop spaces stacked high with tools and contributions.  One lady had even provided outdoor furniture for the rear deck!  It's an overwhelming feeling, looking out into a green backyard from safe shelter when only two weeks earlier I was literally facing a homeless life in a foreign country. 

After we'd moved to France, things began going badly in so many different ways, and I spent years wondering what I had done wrong...  Feeling as though some higher power were out there deliberately punishing me by crashing every hope and blocking every attempt to better our situation.  Writing this, it sounds crazy, paranoid, but it's a very real headspace - When nothing goes right for year after year, you really do start to wonder why.  Was it me?  Was I somehow a bad person?  Books and movies tell us that the bad guy always "gets his", but life isn't fiction.  Why did so many terrible things happen to us, year after year?  I don't know.  Why did so many people selflessly give of their time and money and possessions to help us out when we needed it?  I can't answer that, either, because if I was a bad enough person to deserve such punishment, I couldn't be a good enough person to deserve such kindness.  And I'm not a "good person", not really - In fact, I've always considered that to be a particularly off-putting form of arrogance, those folks who smugly nod and smile and think deep inside that they're "the good people". 

I feel like I should wrap this up here with some sort of heartwarming homily that ties it all together in a neat bow...  "Lesson learned.  The End."  Except that there's not any Great Truth out there on the highways of life, no transcendent Zen moment of enlightenment when you understand the universe, no movie magic scene where you become one with the Force...  Instead, what I took from my experience were these lessons:   Listen.  Give.  Help.  Don't be an asshole.  Also, if we're measured by anything in this life, it's not by what we personally accomplish, but by what we do to help others.  That may not be what they write down in the history books, but it's the bond that holds us together between the lines.

I'm thankful for everything that's happened, and I look forward to tomorrow.

Finishing up

What a long, strange.... and often horrifying... trip it has been.  I write this today having just completed the setup of the last workshop lathe that we need for pipemaking, making this our semi-official "Workshop Finished" day.  There are still things lacking (workstation lighting being the main one, as I can't see what I'm doing on several machines and have to carry a flashlight with me!), and I am certain that we will rearrange and modify the setup once we have used it for a while, but for now, we have access to a fully functioning workshop again.  I'd like to take the opportunity to once again thank all the great people who have helped us out with this project - We arrived here with nothing, thanks to our final screw-over by the Herbignac mairie, and our ability to start working again is entirely down to a lot of help, donations, and generosity on the part of pipe friends all across the USA and Canada.  To mark the occasion, here is a new "Workshop assembly" comic strip showing the last steps of getting the metal lathe working, and then a two page tour of the new workshop.  Hope you enjoy! 

(Oh, and for the curious - Don't look for new pipes on the site tomorrow.  With this done, I have five days of email to catch up, a lot of business archiving to do, a starting inventory to finish, a pair of special pipes to make, a house to decorate for the holidays, and a NC driver's license to obtain before I start making pipes for the site.... and THEN that will take a while in itself, since I want to have something nice in stock in every category before we put the new site online with all new stuff.  I don't know how long all this will take, but rest assured we'll be working as hard as we can right through December to get things going again.)

 

 

 

Memories of Brittany

Since I've been on a roll with the comic-style posts, here is a little cross-post from our "Life in America" blog, just to show a somewhat different look and feel. I've been trying to find some way to sum up our seven years in Brittany, and here's a start.

It's already like a dream. This is my first attempt to put our experience into a combination of words and images. Click it for the full-size version.

Talbert Workshop 3.0

We live! Or, at least our workshop chairs do. To the left is the first published pic of our new workshop-under-construction in North Carolina. It's an odd experience, building one all over again from the ground up. On the one hand, it's great to finally be able to lay out my own working space from the very start, instead of trying to retrofit a garage or someone else's shop into something I can function in. On the other hand, thanks to our last horrendous French disaster, we're still penniless and financially crippled - Most of the tools and hardware are borrowed or donated by friends and family to help us out.

Those of sharp eye may have also noticed that the former "American Pipemaker in Brittany" blog has revived and changed titles... and even is starting to have posts again! I thought hard about just deleting it and rolling its commentary into this blog, but in the end I felt it was better to keep the two separate. That way, this blog can remain pipe-focused and those who come here to read about pipes and pipecrafting won't have to suffer my rambles about pork rinds and Hammer horror films, which I can turn loose in "Life in America".

The new workshop is coming together. It's a slow process, which is about to get slower and pickier - The basics are now in place (work benches, machines, etc) and now it's time to get the motors and belts and hardware needed to get all this running and producing pipes and pens again. That will be the tricky part - Motors are expensive, and we need a bunch, so I guess I'll be combing Craigslist and yard sales for any bargains I can find. Still to-do are getting adapters made to allow the shafts to accept our wooden sanding spindles and buffers, and getting the compressor wired to 220 volts so we can sandblast again.

Overall, the new workshop is excellent. It's a drastic turnaround from the Herbignac shop, which was very much a gothic castle laboratory full of dust and cobwebs and foul things lurking in every corner. Our new place is open, airy, bright, and downright cheerful to be in, not least because it has a nice back window view of the back deck and enclosed green backyard.

Yes, green....... No more townhouse views of traffic! I look forward to this as much as anything else. After seven years of parking lot, pavement, roads, tourists, window watchers, teens on scooters, and all the annoyances of trying to do a day's work in the Herbignac workshop, being here is a positive revelation in relaxation. I was beginning to fear that I would never actually enjoy being in the workshop again, a subject I'll talk about in more detail in a future post.

For now, at least, we are here, work is happening, and this blog is alive once more - I'll be charting the evolution of the shop as the project progresses. Thanks very much for your patience in waiting through this long fallow period, and let's hope for happier days ahead!

Home again, home again, tickety tock

We are back in NC! In a mad whirlwind, Em and I departed Herbignac with the cats in tow. Stressed out in their carriers, Loki gave us a blast of explosive cat diarrhea which she proceeded to roll in and lie in during the car trip to the Nantes train station, so we were soooo popular on the train... (Em hauled the cat through three TGV train cars searching for a bathroom that had a working sink to wash the cat off in, but never could find one that funtioned properly, and ended up blasting the filthy cat with spurts of random tap water, while I sat in the back of the car with the better-behaved feline, Freya, and reflected on the joys of international travel)

Tip to those traveling under stress - the CDG Sheraton, despite its excessive room prices, more than makes up for its cost by giving you a luxury room at the airport from which you can simply walk to your flight the next day - no exhorbitant taxi fees, no traffic jams, no racing the clock.

The cats both vanished under the hotel bed and refused to come out, until morning came and human bait and treachery prevailed.

Eight hours and fifteen minutes of flying found us back in the states, where my parents met us for another six hours of driving from Washington to North Carolina. For the past week we have been settling gradually into our new home while friends and family phone and visit daily. English overload! It isn't as bad as I had feared - I adapted pretty quickly to once again being able to follow multiple dinner conversations at once - but it does get exhausting, still. I find it takes very little "native socializing" before I'm worn out, tired and ready to go somewhere quiet and read a good book. Of course, I was like this before we moved, so it's hard to say how much is due to France...

I'll be writing more over the weeks and months to come. We have a workshop to build from loaned equipment, and a lot of setup work to do. I don't realistically expect to be making pipes again for two or three months, at a guess. In the meantime, expect some random rambles about re-culturation into the US lifestyle and the shock effect of being a seven year time traveler in one's own country.

(Note - Good Mexican food is as excellent as I remembered, and even Taco Bell is a marvel after having McDo as your only fast food for years)

The cars are enormous. People have pickup trucks to drive three miles to an office job. Our cola bottles are the size of my torso. We have bags of chips that we could carry a cat in. More to come, but in the meanwhile, Em watches birds from the back deck.

About to go offline

Today is our last full day in Brittany. Outside this morning it is grey, overcast, occasionally raining in cold drizzles, and about 50 degrees. Tomorrow at noon we depart by TGV to Paris, where we will stay overnight and then fly back to the US on Friday. I am likely to be out of touch for some few days, however long it takes to get our new internet connection installed and working, though I may try posting from the hotel if they offer wireless access and it works for us.

Zowie, big life-changing events. Thanks to contributions from very generous family and friends, we were able to ship a lifetime's worth of our Ligne Bretagne stock to our new shop. The funny thing is, while I took enough stummels and stems to keep me busy till age 150, I still leave behind probaby twice what I am taking, and the briar cave barely looks as though anything has been removed from it.

This is the one Snowman, signing off for now. I'm west bound and down!

Keeping up to date

I doubt I will have time to post much (if anything) during this coming week as we rapidly approach our departure date from France. I hope to have a little time to collate and write my thoughts and reflections on the adventure once we've arrived, but for the immediate future this is likely to be a quiet blog. However! Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, those who have an interest in quick, frequently-updated quips and state-of-the-move commentary can follow my regular updates on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm at least keeping a more or less ongoing storyline of events as they unfurl. Seven days and counting...

No Friction Required

Just a very quick note on our progress - We are buried in moving prep. Our own meager personal possessions are mostly packed, but the packing and transport of the business stock remains. Movers arrive next Monday, so between now and then we probably will not sleep. Oh joy.

I wanted to post a quick word regarding blame, flames, etc. I knew there would be some degree of anger over our circumstances in some quarters. The first manifestation of this was from some asshole French poster who thought the best response to the wrenching and extremely difficult circumstances of our move was to post a comment along the lines of, "So, you don't like our country? Go back to the US then, we don't want you here - the US is the cause of all the world's problems and caused the depression that's eating the world economy! Etc, etc..." I read this, shook my head over the idiocy of the poster, and yanked the comment because I knew it would only incite flames from our US friends and in the current situation, I have absolutely zero tolerance for having the blog turn into a flame war between offended nationalists.

A lot of American friends and folks in the business have gotten extremely offended at the French in general over what has happened to us. The level of anger expressed in emails and calls has been high, and a friend even opted to cancel a large order of French champagne over this (I posted a personal reply asking that he reconsider, that none of our misfortunes are the fault of an innocent champagne vendor who probably needs every sale he can get in these difficult times). I wanted to post this quick note to stress that there is no need for either side to get angry on the basis of nationalism - Our problems are not with "The French" in general, but with some very specific aspects of the French system. French people are not all evil malcontents - in fact, most are incredibly warm, welcoming, friendly, intelligent, and great fun. The French pipe club has been incredibly nice to us ever since we arrived here.

No, our problems boil down to three areas that most native, salaried French citizens never encounter -

• Accounting. Through bad fortune, we got hooked up initially with a pack of accountants who are the most useless pack of verminous assholes one could never want to meet, and have had our energies and time drained for seven years by having to flog them to get any results at all, all while struggling to understand a foreign tax system with no help from these shits.
• Administration. The French themselves understand this one very well - It's the overall fixation that the government has on paper, regardless of its impact on the lives of its citizens, and the inane difficulty of getting anything done here, on a business level.
• TPB. Yep, "That Préfecture Bitch" has been such a feature of our lives that she even has her own shorthand initials. The level of paperwork and hassle required simply to justify our residence here, year after year, has been beyond imagination, and this is not even counting the fact that the official in question would regularly lie about what papers had been received, never file anything on time, and required constant hounding just to get her to do her damn job. We've done all we can to live here legally, we pay taxes - HER salary - and still every year it's the same... weeks of lost working time chasing down visa papers plus multiple trips in person to Nantes, because of course nothing will get done unless we actually go there in person. Fax? Email? Forget it. Meanwhile all around us, illegal immigrants live and work unhindered by all of this, and while we pay half our income to support the French state, they burn buses, cars, schools, and entire neighborhoods just for kicks.
  

So, in a nutshell, while I have no control over what rancor may erupt among blog readers on either side of the pond, I just wanted to stress that I personally have no problems with the French citizenry at all, and think they're wonderful people. Indeed, I think living under the weight of the bureaucracy they must endure has helped to shape them into kind and understanding folks with a keen insight into the BS level of "the system". We've met some of the best friends we have in the world here.

Falling towards home

Today we had the big meeting at the mairie, and it was quite a gathering - the mayor of Herbignac himself was there, along with the head of town project planning, translators, etc. I made our displeasure known from the start. Naturally, all parties involved denied any responsibility and put the blame wholly on our "depressed" buyer, but of course they would do. The crux of the problem was apparently that we live in a high visibility spot in an area very shortly to be gentrified and upgraded. Our buyer is the president of what amounts to the local Chamber of Commerce and there was some political infighting over his snatching up such a prominent bit of property in a key location for himself, to the extent that he bailed on the deal.

Of course, I care nothing about this, all we want to do is get out of here. To this end, I insisted on a signed attestation direct from the mayor certifying the limits of usage of the property, that it is open to buy for all commercial entities, and so forth, as well as the limits of modification (The original buyer wanted to do some extensive changes, but structural modifications are frozen till the gentrification project is complete next year).

Overall, it was one of the most productive meetings I think I've had during our time in France, and I didn't hit anyone (which frankly, there were odds towards). In some ways it was oh-so-typical, with everyone involved showing great concern about how terrible our situation was and stressing that, of course, it wasn't their personal fault at all. But in other ways, we did obtain some crucial info and some significant concessions.

Bottom line - The deal is still dead. We should receive at least a small payoff as compensation for their breaking of the contract, which can go towards the moving cost. And there will be a move after all - To our everlasting gratitude, a coalition of family members and friends in the states (including some pipe folks, I am told) are gathering together to help cover the cost of getting us back, and many very fine people have come forward with basic items to loan us to help out, given that we'll be arriving minus a lot of furniture and goods to trim the moving expense.

(It's odd to find myself needing things like a lawnmower and curtains again. But then, if I just leave the yard unmowed, the grass may handle the window covering problem...)

Anyone wishing to help out by donating any funds or goods should contact my parents at their work phone - (336) 884-4026, ask for Glenn or Bonnie Talbert. They're coordinating the bail-out on that end, which will include getting hold of some loaner workshop equipment that we'll need (Motors, mainly, since we have to leave everything electric behind - Thankfully our gear is mostly belt-driven). Much appreciation to all! Emily and I have been literally overwhelmed by the flood of good wishes, emails, IMs, and calls that we have received from people in the US pipe community and abroad. There are some very fine folks out there.

We'll be arriving in late April, to find out if Sharkey has chopped down the party tree back home.

The Plot Thickens

A quick update for today - The head of the realty agency has hit the ceiling over this, and we all have a meeting with the Herbignac mayor on Monday. It turns out that the office of the mairie (town hall, essentially) is behind our disaster - Our buyer himself was willing to go through with the purchase, but the mairie pressured him to back out because apparently he owns a great deal of property in this area and there were politics involved. With Herbignac booming and our shop a prime commercial spot, they feared this fellow gaining such a central location and quashed the sale. They may believe it was just any other business deal, a bit of political jockeying for power, and have no idea how much they have hurt us in the process.

Either that, or they knew how much this would hurt us, and purposefully waited until it was likely the house would be lost to foreclosure, so they could snap it up cheaply for the town government to own. I realize a lot of people may believe this too cynical or paranoid, but that's the shape of my experiences with French officialdom.

I guess we will find out something Monday in our face-to-face with the mayor. We get to spend the weekend with our lives hanging in the balance, oh joy, though truly I have absolutely no hope that this will be sorted to our advantage. That simply is not any part of our experience here. We will probably be lucky if we don't leave France in Indiana Jones style, with me clinging to the retracting wheels of our airplane as petty bureaucrats hurled sharpened pencils and attestations at us.

Catastrophe

As of this afternoon, with less than a month until our scheduled departure from France, the major contract that we were counting on to pay for the move (the sale of our French property) has just fallen through.

The news leaves us devastated on multiple levels. We have closed down our business in France, so we can no longer legally work here. Our visas are soon due to expire, and cannot be renewed without secured employment, yet we cannot restart our business in the time we have before the visas expire. All our travel reservations are already made, and of course are nonrefundable. We can leave as scheduled, or remain at most another couple of months and then pay for the travel all over again. This leaves us with nothing to pay the movers with, nothing to live on after our arrival in the US, and a gigantic lead weight of debt to crush any future we might try to build in the states.

We are probably going to fly back on schedule anyway, but this leaves our financial futures and any future for the pipemaking in serious doubt. At the least, we will almost certainly have to abandon the Ligne Bretagne stock due to inability to pay for shipping - a huge loss of both our money and a good little pipe brand. Though I must say, at this point the idea of simply leaving pipemaking for good, for a "normal" job with a paycheck, has a considerable degree of appeal. If I sound a bit disjointed, it's because I am - We are reeling, once again, from another "French disaster". The past seven years often seem like little but one long stream of knotted stomach, cold sweats, paralyzing worry, and fear of what new and worse surprise may be waiting around the next corner.

So... It is likely that we will still return to the US on schedule, but most likely penniless and unable even to pay for the shipment of most of our workshop stock. Obviously any sort of future plans regarding restarting pipemaking or attending US shows is now totally up in the air. I really can't begin to predict where we will be just a month from now.

Oh, and our buyer's reason for breaking his contract at the last minute, after we'd closed down the business and terminated all our French business and legal connections, thereby leaving us without recourse and financially devastated? He is "depressed".

He should be in this household tonight.

Take what you need, then divide by two

Moving is a pain, no doubt, and moving internationally is an experience I can't begin to describe, but there is one aspect of it that can be very enjoyable - It has a remarkable ability to pare your life down to the bare essentials, and it is a heartening feeling to know that for just one brief month in your life, your "stuff" consists entirely of what you are carrying on your body and in one tote bag.

Right now we are overwhelmed with things to do, all needing attention immediately (I am sitting down to write this for ten minutes just to have a break from crisis planning). I drew myself a two page flowchart just to help keep the various sequences of essential events straight in my head, so we could follow the next steps as quickly and efficiently as possible. It's quite a rat's nest of coordination between banks, notaires, customs, US accountants, French accountants, US business setup, French business shutdown, mover arrangements, shipping notes, packing notes, flight booking, cat shipping, and organized searches for all essential electrics stateside (The NC place will be a mountain of borrowed gear).

It is strange to think that within a month, all of this chaos will be boiled down to just a few items that I carry with me. Our personal goods will arrive six weeks behind us, so we'll have a long period of time when we will live very simply, off paper plates and cups, in the same few sets of clothes, with a few favorite paperbacks between us. This is not a bad thing. Moreover, the things we take are the things that will get set into memory, welded down as part of the story of our trip. When I think of our arrival over here, amidst all the hell that composed our first year, some of my best memories are of sitting alone late at night, feet up in plastic lawn chairs in the living room, reading old Edgar Rice Burroughs books off our Palm Pilot. Or of the brief interludes of fun I had in the evenings, before there was any television, relaxing with a pipe, the laptop, and a bit of gaming in Baldur's Gate. My companions through all this were a set of eight IMP Meerschaums, chosen for their smokability, their durability, and their meerschaum advantage of being able to be smoked repeatedly without souring like briar would.

I haven't picked my travel pipes yet, but the "moving tobaccos" are already open:



Tragically, I ran out of my favorite, 1792 Flake, some days ago and don't want to bother ordering more till we're moved, so these will have to do. And the funny thing is, I know in future years I'll have fond memories of every one of them - Few things hold memory like scents, and these pipe tobaccos will be forever fused into my memory as reminders of Big Move #2.

How do they stack up as tobaccos? Peterson's Sherlock Holmes has long been a favorite aromatic of mine - It has a distinctive flavor, it's always good, and it's (fairly) easy to find. Penzance is excellent. Some years back (late 90's, IIRC), there was an internet rage over Penzance as the "Flavor of the Month", and everybody had to have it. It was damned annoying, because it was always sold out and I couldn't get any, being unwilling to pay the extortionist prices of tobacco scalpers on ebay. I'm much happier today - The tobacco remains as exceptional as always, but the hype has died down and I'm actually able to buy the stuff again. One of the all-time greats, IMO, for anyone who likes a rich and smokey English flake.

Two GLP's are in the mix, Abingdon and Maltese Falcon. This is my first experience with both. Abingdon has yet to register much of an impact on me, though Maltese Falcon is quite good. Like the Abingdon, the Ferndown Yellow and Brown is good stuff but doesn't give me a particular sense of individual identity, per se - My favorite tobaccos all have very strong and very distinct personalities, and so far it's simply an affable and enjoyable blend.

Then there is McClelland Blackwoods Flake from 2000. Exceptionally nice. I've had a difficult time with McC blends in the past, and have found a lot of them bitey, so some years back I secured a few to put away for long-term aging and this is one. I was fond of Blackwoods Flake new, but aged, it is splendid! It still carries that sweet, sharp, pungent flavor (raisin, to me) that seems a McC trademark, but any acidity has mellowed out of it and left only goodness.

The last tin is a mystery! I picked it up at the Rheinbach pipe show in 2007, and it's simply tagged "Latakia Flake". The brand name logo is so small that I cannot read it! It is "K&K-something". I'll have to solve it, though, because it's delicious stuff and I want more.

So there they are, traveling companions of the moment. At least a couple of them may be exhausted by the time of the flight, others will be replaced after, but forever onwards, to me they will always be the pipe tobaccos of the move.

A Note on Forums

A quick follow-up note on that last post's Big News - I have posted the story around to some of the various larger pipe forums on the net, and will try to follow up replies for a few days at least, but I expect that the time crunch and circumstances here will quickly consume all my time and leave none for further forum chat. The only pipe forum I was unable to post the news to was P&T Foundations - I've been so busy lately that my membership there expired without my even noticing it, and I don't want to try and renew it till we're back in the states, since we'll undoubtedly be changing bank cards and all that too, for billing purposes. If anyone in Foundations has any major questions about this, please address them to me by email since I won't be seeing them in the forum, at least not for a while. Merci!

There and Back Again

Biz News - Fans of the more unusual Talbert Briars might want to take a look at this Ebay auction, on an odd piece done a couple years back for a special order. No new pipes from me, though, for reasons that are about to be obvious....


It seems like it has been a terribly long time since I have updated this blog, especially since the days when I could manage new posts each week, sometimes even every couple of days. Not so in 2008 - For us, like so many others, it has been a very difficult year and I have been too busy simply trying to stay fed and sheltered to keep up with my online writing. This may change soon, though, for today's picture is the harbinger of major news -

My wife and I are moving back to the United States!

We've lived nearly seven years in France. It's time. There are a multitude of reasons for the move - some expectedly angry and unpleasant, others fortuitous and perfectly timed. I may tell some harrowing stories in the future, but I don't want to dwell on specifics for the moment. Suffice to say that in one bright swoop, circumstances lined up ideally to enable us to make another transatlantic hop on our shoestring (nay, non-existent!) budget, and we chose to grab the opportunity. I write this sitting amidst packed boxes of books and clothes, and if all goes well, we should be leaving Brittany to return to North Carolina sometime in late April or May.

I depart France with the same jumble of extreme feelings I've had through all my time here. The people are wonderful, the bureacracy is a nightmare. The scenery is stunning, the communication is an eternal struggle. For every incredible vista of ruined castle overlooking rocky seaside cliffs, there are a dozen entreaties to government offices and business administration officials. It's nation where complete strangers will fly halfway across the country to bring you a bottle of their favorite wine, yet you have to literally scream and threaten violence just to get a fonctionnaire to acknowledge a fax. Living here has been like life with a beautiful trophy wife - lovely to look at, yet terribly difficult to maintain. But I know I will miss the place terribly, despite all the hassles, as we settle back into the relaxed, insular, Shire-like rythym of life in North Carolina. I can't help but think of Frodo Baggins, and wonder if I, too, will feel as though I'm "going back to sleep".

One aspect that I'm certain won't go back to sleep is my pipemaking - Talbert Briars will continue and carry on as always, and I look forward to once again being able to compete with the ranks of American pipemakers on an even footing, unhampered by the horrible dollar-to-euro currency imbalance that has dogged so much of our time here. It's also going to be a wonder to really be able to focus on my work again, without the pressures and immense weights of worry we have suffered for so long. All pipemaking will be shut down for the next several months, and our workshop is now closed in France. Some of the French machinery may be sold, some is definitely going with me, but it will take a long time to design and build our new workshop in the US, and until then there will be no new pipes (For those who may be interested, we have exactly two pipes remaining in stock for sale - one Ligne Bretagne and one Talbert Morta. Contact us soon if you're interested in either, before they get packed!)

I know the pipe community will probably have questions for us, but I'd ask that they be either posted here as comments, or held back until I can assemble a FAQ for this move, which will answer some of the obvious inquiries like, "Will Mortas and Ligne Bretagnes continue?", "Are you selling any of your stock and tools?", "Will your stamping change?", "Will your pricing change?", and so on. I have enough to do with the move, I'd as soon not have to type replies to the same questions many times over! And some questions have no answers as yet... The Ligne Bretagne stummels and hardware are going with me, for example, but I have not yet decided if they will change name. Morta pipes may continue if I can secure a reliable source of high quality blocks, but the material is hard to come by, and I am not interested in producing a substandard product. Time will tell...

In the very near future, the website will go offline except for a front page linking to this blog and our "Life in France" blog, where I hope to chart the progress of our move and our reactions to re-immersion in the American lifestyle and culture (Things I look forward to - KFC, good Mexican food, easy talking, and being able to get things accomplished without fifteen notarized attestations from the mairie and the préfecture plus stamped copies of every utility bill we've ever had and our marriage license. Things I do not look forward to - Loud, belligerent people, US non-health care, and Paris Hilton... though I think we have managed to foist her off on the Brits now). People interested in this social stuff may want to add us back to their Favorites for a bit, because the blogs are likely to be more active soon.

And speaking of, I'm currently looking for a good title for the "Life in France" blog if anyone has any ideas, since "An American Pipemaker in Brittany" won't work anymore. I'm going to miss sights like this being outside my front door...