One Year On, by Emily

Today's blog post is written by Emily, who may be doing a bit more writing here in future.  There will probably be more chapters of this to come, from both of us, as time permits, since this is far too big and complex a subject to cover in the few paragraphs allotted to a typical blog posting.

It's been almost a year since we left Herbignac.  Even as I write it, it seems strange; I know that the time has passed, but it feels as though we've only been back for about five minutes.  And yet there has been time to reflect, time to remember, time to think about what we've learned -- if we did learn anything!  But how to sum it up, now there's a puzzle.....

For me, it has been very strange to return to Greensboro, the town where I grew up and where my parents still live.  I'm experiencing "deja vu all over again" because so many things are right where I left them twenty-odd years ago.  A great deal has changed, though, and I have been caught a few times by roads that don't go where they used to, or that weren't there at all (I-40/73 bypass, anyone?) when we left.   Entire neighborhoods and shopping centers have dropped out of the sky during the time we were abroad, and former landmarks have disappeared to make way for them.  But enough of the familiar remains to make me feel at home, something I am grateful for after seven years of having to pull out a map (or pull up Mappy) every time we had to go somewhere we'd never been before.

I'm staggered by North Carolina in the spring.  The blooming trees and flowers (and the pollen!) have completely overwhelmed me.  Several years ago a family friend sent me photos taken at this time of year in the Greensboro Arboretum, and while they were gorgeous, I couldn't look at them for very long because they made me so terribly homesick.  I'm profoundly grateful to be able to appreciate the seasonal beauties in person this year.  And of course, the birds!  Hearing and seeing familiar birds is a pleasure I savor every day.  Now I just need to refill the feeders.

I don't mean to imply, by the way, that Brittany wasn't beautiful.  We were fortunate to be in a lovely area, in a town surrounded by a mix of forested tracts and cultivated fields, and within easy driving distance of several beaches of widely varying characters.  As anyone who has seen our efforts at photography will realize, it was an amazing place.  In fact, one of our biggest gripes while we were there -- and a lingering regret now that we've moved -- was that we never seemed to have enough time to explore as much as we would have liked.

At the same time, there is something inexpressibly comforting about being in the midst of an area that we have known all our lives.  We continue to be surprised by familiar pleasures: it sounds completely trivial to say it, but even after a year the excitement of going into a bookstore full of books in English hasn't worn off.  Trever has his driver's license again after seven years without one and is learning his way around Greensboro; so far we have found two traffic circles.  And of course, the fact that we're both within easy driving distance of our parents is one of the biggest enjoyments of being here.

Time has taken its toll; both sets of parents are older, and some of their friends and contemporaries have died, while many of our friends have moved away.  But our American attitude toward travel has quickly reasserted itself, so that driving several hours to visit someone doesn't seem as imposing a task as it did in France.  It is strange to think that it takes longer to drive to my parents' house now than it did to drive to the Leclerc in Guerande from our house in Herbignac!  Distance, like so many things, really is relative.

The immigration process

Legally immigrating to France was a nightmare.  It consumed an entire year, and then a month of every year thereafter, simply to supply each year's requested paperwork.  However, it's not just France - for all our bluster about American can-do spirit and all that, I believe that government immigration workers really are real world versions of the Dilbert accounting trolls:

I just found this article on what it's like to immigrate (or TRY to immigrate) to the US from Australia, a supposedly friendly, trusted country, and there were so many parallels with our experience getting our French visas that I wasn't sure to laugh or cry...

The 5 Circles of Immigration Hell

The Personal Site

When I started work on the new website, I did not know yet what I was getting into.  Many smart people advised me to just pick up a simple web page creator, use a readymade site template, and throw a site up in a few days of work.  But I wanted the site to be more of a personal creation than that - Not just some pics plugged into someone else's layout, but my own creation from start to finish, including all of the graphics therein. 

It didn't quite work out that way100% - There are a few small pieces of clip art used here and there for decoration, and the site code that runs some of the adjuncts such as the Facebook and Twitter boxes was certainly supplied by them, but overall I think I have achieved my goal.  As I write this, the new site is slowly uploading in entirety over our creaky semi-broadband connection, and should be operational by this evening. 

There is a lot of new content in the site - Lots of social networking add-ons to allow people to follow our activity on Facebook and the like, as well as easy links to enable sharing favorite pipe pics and purchases.  I had to fast-learn a lot of new stuff along the way....  The last time I wrote my website, there was no such thing as CSS, for instance!  So, it was a challenging learning experience.  I hope the new site will bring us a bit more into modern times, and hold us well for a few years to come.  It's a great personal satisfaction to know that I wrote my site code from scratch in a text editor, and can work with it in future in nuts & bolts fashion, with a firm understanding of just what underpins everything.

Aside from the dull bits like the code, the artwork and graphics are as personalized as one can get - A lot of our lives over the past few years is literally laid into the graphical foundations of the website.  The green background, for instance, is a photo montage - a multiple exposure of a collection of our photos from Brittany.  A friend came to see us one (very wet) Spring and we had a great visit, touring local sites near Herbignac and going as far as Carnac and the oceanscape nearby.  These photos are laid one over the other, merging into a fine misty unity that collects the dominant colors and imagery from all to create the wispy, foggy background wallpaper.  Look close and you can see hints of stone castle walls, overcast Breton grey skies, and stormy coasts.  It isn't just a random wallpaper thrown together in Photoshop - It's a collection of experiences that we have actually lived.  

The same goes for every aspect of background graphics on the site, from the pipe drawings I've sketched for fun to each of the catalog header images.  The spidery, reddish, dark-yet-colorful background of the Talbert Pipes header?  It's a photo montage of pics from our Autumn Davidson County fair, taken just after we returned to the USA.  The header background for Ligne Bretagne is a photo I took of the standing stones of Carnac, while standing among them (They let you do this in the off season), combined with an old Brittany map and seen through a thin haze of brown Breton sea cliff pictures (again, combined into a multiple exposure and lightened to barely a tint).  The Goblins header?  Multiple exposures of a walk through a Breton forest one damp May evening, combined with half-seen pictures of past Goblins. 

The personalized theme carries to even the smallest details - the "Join our Email List" image is a clip-art postcard lettered with text colored by another montage of green Brittany pics, just to create a texture for the type, and decorated with a stamp of a past Talbert Briar.  I even made our own 404 error page, which I hope not many people will see! 

In summary, our new site, like all our work, is my best attempt to create as personal and enjoyable and distinct an experience as possible.  I hope you will enjoy it.