New pipes at Pipe & Pint!

Here's a bit of news - Our local pipes & tobaccos & beer & cigars & wine shop now has their website open and stocked with available pipes.  They even have one of mine, a Talbert ring grain sandblasted freehand from 2007, probably our best year in France (It was a bit odd to see our old "Faite en Bretagne" stamp on one again).  Sharp-eyed folks may notice I've included their logo and a link to their site on our website's home page now, too.

At the moment they are in the process of posting their stock of estate and artisan pipes to the site, so check back with it often as there is new stuff going up.  Also, they're about to have the first new infusion of pipes from our workshop in a long time... Probably since around 2008!  We've finished up ten special Ligne Bretagnes as our re-introduction to their retail shop.  Emily spent considerable time digging through our stock of LBs to find ten stummels, each one a different shape, that were all flawless enough to finish as naturals.  Each one is also fitted with a stem ring handcut from teak decking off of the USS Battleship North Carolina.  I've used this material before (For up-close pics of an example, see here).  Larry, P&P's owner, picked up the material while vacationing at the NC coast and mailed it to me in France some years back, but I haven't had the chance to work with it until now.  It's beautiful material, and between the stem decor and the unstained bowls, these are going to make a special and affordable set of pipes to restart our P&P relations again.  Check out the pics here for samples of a few of them!

The pipes are finished now and I'll be dropping them off at P&P sometime this week, probably Wednesday.  I've talked with Larry about having an afternoon "Meet and Greet" where I would be there to talk to interested folks, and could show off the pipes directly, but we haven't set a date yet.  If you're interested, contact the P&P guys at their website by phone or email!

1840's Village

Yesterday we took our first day off in a very long time, and rode with my parents to see the 1840's Village in Hickory, NC.  It was a full-scale recreation of a settler town, complete with blacksmith, shoemaker, saddle-maker, woodwright, etc, with all crafts and tools on display and in use.  This hand-cranked drill press to the left is a great example of a classic tool still working nearly 170 years later - Say that about anything we use today!  I have posted a gallery of pics from this trip to both our Facebook and Flickr accounts, for those who might be interested in a look at the lifestyles of early Americans, as well as a glimpse of the NC highlands in autumn.  If there was anything we missed consistently and bitterly in Brittany, it was the NC autumn season - Brittany just does not look like this in fall!

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.