It’s finally Spring. Sun everywhere, on my cycling commutes just like in our apartment. And I’m expecting to get even more sun during TopScore’s San Diego retreat in two weeks time, can’t wait for this significant change to routine. Effi is getting is now big enough to re-subscribe us to long-abandoned Netflix all by herself, which probably explains her still frequent wake-up cries during the night. Max is getting faster: his second road race with the ESGL crew on Sunday was much fun to attend. And summer is getting closer with family holidays being basically fully planned: one week in and around the Toulourenc river just north of mont Ventoux (including this year’s Tour de France stage), and a second week on the île de Porquerolles.

More work in progress.

Work in progress.

Found it! A long-chased melody has finally being identified, it was much harder and took me much longer than the 2003 doit hunt despite being a pretty obvious and famous reference once I got it. Tough case, as Peter Falk aka Columbo put it in Der Himmel über Berlin. Back in the days when I lived full-time at the cottage I came across the melody on the Radio, believing that this was the signature tune of some bedtime stories for kids. And this is where the troubles identifying that melody started, it was actually belonging to Laure Adler’s L’Heure bleue. Today I closed the case thanks to a Le Quotidien interrupting TV commercial for Chanel’s N°5, and from there everything quickly led to Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo!

One anniversary this is: twenty years ago I moved to France (thanks to a 13-hour ride-sharing trip from Neustadt to Bordeaux all across the country with little to no highways… hail to student budgets). Except for some 6 months traveling around Eastern Europe (2010) and a little over a year of Pittsburgh (2018/19), I’ve been living in France ever since. January 13 has an additional vibe to it, since it turned into my birthday for many years thanks to Facebook’s virality.