My Own Personal GiggleFest

Today, class, I'm not going to teach you anything that I learned on the field trip except that the US was involved in WW1 but we came really late to the party and no one really bothers telling anyone that we were here.  I have lots of pictures and I can bore you with my interpretation of history, but I'd rather show you what made me laugh today.

So first, this is a mall, but it's what you have to go through to get to the big grocery store.  They have lots of small convenience stores on corners and they have some small grocery stores in town, but if you want absolutely everything you can get your hands on in one place, you have to drive out to Leclerc or Carrefour.  This was where we went to Leclerc which is like a super Walmart or a super Target.

Only in France have I seen people sit down when they scan your groceries.  And they don't bag them for you.  It's your job, not theirs.

This was from the war museum today.  There were lots of posters from of war propaganda from France, Germany and the Brits.  This made me laugh because there's a song called It's a Long Long Way to Tipperary but there's also a funny joke in my family about it because of a Mary Tyler Moore episode and a joke about a rary.

At the museum today, you were not allowed to bring your bags into the museum, so everyone had to put them in a special. place.  This cave, actually.  They had all brought their lunches and had them in bags, so they brought them into this cave and then when it was lunch time, they opened the door and I was shocked to find tables, lights and heat.  I know of nothing like this situation in the US and can only say it's just one of those French things:  you bring your lunch on a field trip and eat it in a cave.

While your teachers pour a glass of wine for themselves during lunch.  So French!

Since we were out the country to look at trenches from WW1, I should not have been surprised to see a tractor driving down the road.  But I was.

And it appears that rednecks are everywhere.

This horse had me cracking up because when the whole group of students was walking down the road, he came CHARGING over to us where there was only a barbed wire fence to keep him in and he was happy to let people pat him.  I thought I got a video of him racing over to us, but no such luck.

The best part of the day was when we had to walk through some mud which was all limestoney and slick and thick and sticky.  I have never seen mud like this.  There was no alternative once we were walking through it and people went bananas.  Screaming, shrieking, flailing, and of course, someone had to fall and get covered all down one side with mud.   There is nothing better to cause hysteria than to make teenagers, French and American alike, get their nice shoes/uggs/sneakers stuck in mud and potentially ruined.

Angry French feet.  And maybe some American ones.  At this point, they had mostly scraped their shoes but they spent te next 20 minutes not listening to the guide and instead, trying to find leaves and sticks to  clean their shoes.  Mine were quite mud spattered too but I was wearing shoes that were ok to get dirty.  The bus driver must have loved us when we got off.

And after all of my raving about the beauty of the French pastries, I had to laugh when j-ster showed us this.  She didn't go on today's field trip because she had the other half of our kids here in town and they learned more about where we are.  They were done around 4, so she made supper for us working women who dragged our muddy feet home at 7:30.  She bought a pastry for dessert that is sort of like strawberry shortcake with a little pudding like substance and there are 2 macaroons on top.  She wasn't especially careful as she brought it home and this is what happened.  Doesn't look so pretty now, does it?  I had no trouble digging my fork into this one since it had already been blemished!

Ok, you can go now.  Bring your notebooks tomorrow for a serious history lesson,  sparkling style.

I Didn't Expect to See YOU Here

Bonjour mes amis!

Yesterday was Sunday our first full day in France and our first full day without our students.  They were the responsibility of their host families yesterday, so j-ster and I went to Paris and this is what we saw:

The Velib bikes which are great in the city.  You subscribe for a reasonable amount of money and then you just wave your card at the stand and take a bike and then when you're done, you return it to any stand in the city.  THey have this in Boston now too.  It was too cold for biking but in the summer, I would want to do this as a tourist!

The buildings that make you think of Paris.  I like the beige stone that they are made of and the style of the architecture itself.

This is the monument at Place Bastille which is where the Bastille prison was located.  Today, the prison is gone and the French celebrate Bastille day as their independence day on July 14th.  This is a tribute.  There's a gold statue at the top.

This a new opera house that is right near the Bastille.  They still have the old Paris opera house, which is where the Phantom of the Opera was set, but this is a more modern building.

I look at this kind of building and know I am in Paris or Washington DC.  I'm sure some of you know the style of design, but I just like to look at it!

 There were two guys doing some chalk drawings on the ground near the Centre Pompidou, a cultural center named after President Georges Pompidou.  I didn't love th picture but it was quite detailed and they were working hard and it's supposed to rain, so it will be a lot work for little reward!

Right outside the Centre Pompidou is a fountain called Firebird which is a tribute to Stravinsky's composition called Firebird.  I love this fountain and I've never seen it empty.  Since it was empty, people were walking through it, so I got up close and personal with some of my favorite pieces in the fountain.

These lips actually spit out water when the fountain is on and I think it's hysterical.   I also thought it was pretty hysterical to be running around inside the fountain.

This is the actual Centre Pompidou.  It was considered a monstrosity when it was built, as anything new in Paris first is.  Today, it's considered a piece of art itself and they've gotten over it.  The pipes are all exposed as you see and they are colored for the purpose they serve.  Inside is a library, theater, exhibit hall and maybe a cafeteria, I forget.  We didn't go inside yesterday.

We went to this boulangerie twice.  First, to get j-ster a quiche for lunch and I got a sandwich.  The sandwiches here make me laugh because they are made from a baguette (the long French bread) and are usually ham or cheese or both.  YEsterday's selections mostly involved mayonnaise to which I have a very strong aversion in France because I believe I ate some bad mayonnaise here once, so I had to search high and low for non-mayo.  And had to get ham and cheese and butter.  Which sounds British.  But I was starving from all of the walking, so it was quite tasty.

We went back a while later so j-ster could buy a croissant and I took tons of pictures because you know how I feel about croissants.  These pastries are ridiculously pretty.  I just look because I can't imagine buying and digging in to such a pretty thing.  It helped me not gain 45 pounds the first time I was in France because if I'd eaten one each time I'd seen them, well, that would have been ugly.

This is the Hotel De Ville which is Paris town hall.  They put up an ice skating rink just in front and I thought it had already been taken down.  I 've always thought it was just a free for all but it's actually quite organized and you can rent skates.  They have people monitoring the ice and everyone has to behave. And you have a limited amount of time because people are waiting.  We might take the kids there one of the evenings that we are in Paris together.  We have several ice hockey  players with us and though I haven't skated since 5th grade, I might give it a whirl.

I had to take a picture of this stretch Hummer because a) my sister e-ster loves them, b) k-ster loves them and c) it's the last thing I'd expect to see in Paris!  It's so tight driving there, I can't imagine!

Notre Dame.  We will be going back with kids, so we didn't spend too much time there.  You can see the Paris grey skies arrived by the time we got there and it got colder and darker as the day went on.  This is the first time I've seen Notre Dame without scaffolding because they've been sandblasting it each time I've seen it!

See, I really am here in Paris!

We stopped at a cafe before taking the train back to e-ster's and this picture is quintessential Paris cafe.  We just had coffee and tea and it was too unpleasant to sit outside, so we sat by the window.

As we were about to leave the train station for the 30 minute right back to e-ster's, I heard a kid yelling MADAME MADAME and running toward us but I thought it was just a French kid.  Lo and behold, it was 4 of our kids with their host kids taking the train back with us!  THey'd been in Paris for the day, getting a whirlwind tour and they had had a blast and were very excited.  The French kids have been so nice to them so far and seem equally thrilled to have finally met them.

Earlier in the day, I told j-ster it would be funny if we ran into some kids as we were walking around, so it wasn't such a shock that we ended up seeing some in the station.  We figure a lot of kids probably ended up in Paris with their host families or the hosting student because for French kids to run off to Paris for a few hours is no big deal here.

This is the RER train which is the Metro for the suburbs.  There are various versions of trains that service this line and the morning train looked to me like an old TGV which is the high speed train.  This one here is a typical RER train which is a 2 decker subway.  I actually preferred this one to the one we took in the morning.  I found it more comfortable.  We didn't sit with the kids, in fact, we think they were in a different car all together, but as we got off, we checked in with them again before we all went "home" for supper and better sleeping last night. 

I think that's a memory they'll have for a while:  running into us in Paris!

Ok kids, class dismissed.  Let's meet again tomorrow for more!

My First Successful All Nighter

In college, I was a night owl, which meant that among my friends, I was usually the last to go to bed.  Maybe 2am would be the latest.  But I was never one of those people who could pull off an all-nighter.  I never needed to because I actually did my stuff on time. 

The one time I tried to stay up all night was the night before I left France to go home after my semester in Aix-en-Provence.  We had to get a taxi at like 4am, so I just decided to stay up all night and figured I'd sleep on the plane.  Instead, I was miserable for the entire day because I was exhausted and had a headache and felt like d-e-a-t-h.

Generally, in my life now, I have no reason to stay up all night because I never have THAT much homework to correct.

I go up at about 5:30am on Friday because that's what I've been doing every day for a few weeks because the trip was on my mind.  I went to school and then we left for the airport around 2:30pm on Friday.  I am not a good sleeper on planes, but I expected maybe I'd sleep for an hour or so.  I was really careful not to have any caffeine after my morning tea.

That made no difference.

I was up from 5:30am Friday until 3:30am FRANCE time on Sunday, which by my calculations was 40 hours with no sleep.  And it was weird.  I wasn't a zombie.  I wasn't shaky.  I wasn't giddy.  I just didn't have the ability to sleep.  We intentionally took 2 long walks once we got situated and I was tired a few times but figured I would just crash once I went to bed.  No such luck.

Once I went to sleep, it was great and the room we are staying in has metal shutters that make it dark enough that we slept until 9:30am France time.  I hope I'll be more on track by tomorrow because I am not good without enough sleep.

We arrived a little late into Paris but by the time we got our bags and took the bus to the school to drop off the kids, we were actually there at the time we had asked parents to arrive, so someone had the good sense to know how late we'd be.

J-ster and I went back to e-ster's apartment, where j-ster lived for the year she did the Fulbright Exchange and got settled.  HAving lived there for a year, she felt very much at home.  It has GREAT light and it had a big enough living/dining room that we can put 2 twin air mattresses on the floor and still move around.

This was the view when we were "allowed" to open our shades on the plane.  They told us so firmly to shut them after they served dinner that I don't think anyone dared keep them open.   Once they served breakfast, I felt like I wouldn't get my hand cut off if I opened the blind and this is what I saw.

At Charles de Gaulle airport, you do the old fashioned walk down the staircase to the tarmac and to a bus. That's a story for another post, but here are some of the kids and j-ster getting off the staricase.  It was exceptionally cold yesterday and I actually enjoyed my too warm jacket for the first time this winter!

The Concorde no longer flies, but one is stationed at Charles de Gaulle airport, so the bus driver drove by it so we could take pictures.

This is the school where e-ster works, where we dropped the kids off to meet their families.

This is the Seine river in e-ster's town, Melun.  Yes, it's the same Seine that goes through Paris.

I like to see produce stands with all of their fruits and vegetables out front.

I always look at the bakery goods,  but I never buy them.  They seem so complicated to buy and eat.  Too pretty.

We managed to eat 1 of these for lunch and then another for supper.  This is what it looks like when you buy it.  They don't wear gloves, they wrap the middle in this waxed paper and then you carry it around and put it directly on the table.  When in France...

The new Fiat.  If you watched the Superbowl, you saw this little baby introduced.  IT's cute! This was like a light powder blue but the sun was going down, so the color isn't quite right.  By the way, it was a 7pm sunset!!  7pm in FEBRUARY!!

I have no intentions of eating snails while I am here, but I couldn't resist this cute little sign.  It pretty much means Snail Alley.  It was a cute little paved path between some streets.

More pictures to come, stayed tuned!!

Into the Wild Blue Yonder

Well, actually it's night, so it's the wild dark yonder. 

And it's just Paris, so it's not wild and yonder.  More like that busy city over there.

So, I've worried, freaked out, gotten excited and now I'm kind of in this surreal state because I'm waiting to board Air France to jet me over the pond to France.

For 12 days.  With 14 kids and another adult, j-ster.

At this point, I am usually FREAKING out over things.

I am rather sedate, actually.   I think k-ster slipped me some valium because I'm very blase about everything right now.

The flight is delayed and I've been sitting in the airport for 3 hours already.  I've taken about 5 trips around the terminal, trying to keep myself from sitting still for too long.  And they have these great rocking chairs by the windows, but people keep sitting in them before I can get there!

Maybe my calm is because it's the first time I've flown to France with someone I know.  In fact, with 15 someones that I know.  Ok, I didn't know 2 of the boys until today, but I know everyone else because I either taught them or took them to Quebec in 7th grade, or both.

It's so different to travel with familiar faces, isn't it?  All of this entertainment ware that I brought for myself suddenly seems unnecessary because I have someone to talk to.  That will get old after a few hours though, I am highly equipped with a kindle, some trashy magazines and a word puzzle book.  You would think I have raging insomnia with the amount of things I brought to busy my mind when I can't sleep.

I expect that when we land, in the morning, we will be dead tired but we know better than  to go to sleep.

We'll drop the kids off with their host families and go to our host teacher's house and then j-ster and I will walk ourselves silly and force ourselves to stay awake until the evening.  We both know this is the way to deal with jet lag,  and it's so easy to say right now, but at 8:30 France time, 2am my time, my body will have very different ideas, I know.

And it's cold in Melun, France right now.  Not as cold as poor eastern Europe right now, but colder than usual.  Like in the teens.  Farenheit!  That's not normal.  I left 50 degrees at home today for much colder weather for this trip. 

So, I am off to see what happens when I chaperone 14 kids to France. 

And to see how long this semi sedation will last.

The Weird Sisters

Nope, I'm not talking about my sisters, although I suppose we are weird.  Who sits on wet rocks for family pictures?   

This is a paid review for BlogHer Book Club and I received a free copy of the book.  The opinions expressed are my own, you can all thank God, because if my opinions represented the masses, we'd all be in big trouble.

The Weird Sisters I'm talking about are 3 sisters in the book by Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters.  I had seen this book a while back and forgot about it and when the BlogHer Book Club asked for readers and I was lucky enough to be one of the fast responders, I was excited.

Excited because I've never read a book for money and excited because I had wanted to read the book and now I had to!  And most excited because I MADE IT!  I never get to respond to the book club offers in time because I don't have a smart phone and by the time I respond, it's already full!

One of the first things I liked about the book is the cover.  I am all about covers.  I really do judge books by their covers.  I often look at the cover after I've read a book and suddenly realize just what I'm seeing.  There are often little things that are subtly woven into the cover that we don't bother to see.  I feel bad for covers, actually.

So, upon opening the cover, I was a little dismayed to read the foreword because they talked about how they were a strange group growing up, and their whole family would speak in verse by Shakespeare.  They were a very intellectual family and didn't have a TV.  They read incessantly.  I thought this was a little too weird for me and I almost didn't want to read it because I though these little snippets of verse were going to be annoying.

And at first they were.  But then, she either stopped having them use as much verse, or I got used to it because after a couple of chapters, I could not put this book down and the verse didn't annoy me.

The 3 sisters are called weird in the Shakesperean way of having almost otherworldy powers and knowledge, like they should be sat in awe of.  Not weird, like they didn't have a tv and they were so weird.

The book is written in the first person plural so you are constantly seeing 'we' and 'our' no matter who is telling the story.  And you never really know who is talking because they are all telling the story, except, of course, when there is dialogue.  I really liked that twist.  I've never read a book from that perspective before. It almost makes me think it's non-fiction, like they are sitting with me and telling me their story!

The girls are all adults and have come home because their mother is sick.  Again, when I found this out, I almost didn't want to read it because I'm tired of everyone in books having cancer nowadays.  While this is the whole reason they have reunited and it's a very large part of the book, it's almost like it's in the background and you just say "yeah ok, but then what happened?"  Brown does a great job of telling us just enough about their mother's cancer without making it all doom and gloom.

The two younger sisters, Bean and Cordy, each have come home with a shocking secret.  Rose, who has already been living in their parents' town doesn't have a secret but she is carrying her own burden.  And they don't really talk much to each other or share secrets, so they have somewhat of a cold relationship.  Not mean, just not all hugs and cheer and sharing of everything.

Throughout the book, we see each character share her burden with the others and they all figure out how to deal with them, but in their reserved, not close kind of way.   They deal with their mother's illness, their father's bizarreness and each of their issues in a very dysfunctional but seemingly normal family, in my eyes, anyway.

I really enjoyed this book and I'm ready to read some more of Eleanor Brown's books.  The plot moves along nicely and leaves you wondering what will happen next, and I really had trouble stopping when my eyes were closing every night!  She does a great job of setting the scene and I truly felt like I could step into Barnwell tomorrow because it seemed so real!

Head on over to our discussion on the Blogher Bookclub page and see what everyone else has to say about it!

This was the first book I've read on a kindle.  My sister e-ster let me borrow it to take to France.  I kind of like the idea of the kindle and it was so easy to borrow the book through my library.   I still love a book in my hand, but I am not so opposed to the kindle right now.  However, with the basic kindle, I won't see the covers anymore and as I just said, I do kind of like to see the cover of a book.....

How I Got Kicked Out of Gillette Stadium on My Birthday

Way back in October, I went to a technology conference at Gillette Stadium, home of the Patriots.  You know, the guys who are playing in the Superbowl this very day?  AGAIN?  Yeah, those guys.

It's the first, and I assume, last time I will ever be in a professional football stadium.  Because I just don't care.  SORRY.  I just don't.  Football is lost on me.  Most sports are.  I'm a girl.  I was raised with ballet and crafts, not balls and bats.

After I graduated from college, the football and baseball bandwagon stopped by my house and while everyone else was jumping on, I missed it.  I was probably doing this or maybe this and I wouldn't be surprised if I was doing this.    But I definitely was NOT doing this.   Anyway, the bandwagon pulled away and there went my mother, my sisters and even my father.  But he only had one leg in.  He can't be fully invested in sports.
While I continued to live in a world where I didn't know one Manning from the other, Tom Brady's name really just made me think of the Brady Bunch and Ochocinco impressed me only on Dancing With the Stars, my sisters were busy following the Patriots, getting my mother a jersey to wear (was it Vinateri?  did he play baseball?  do baseball players wear jerseys?) and scoring tickets to games whenever they could.

That's right.  My family that didn't watch a single sports game in my entire childhood suddenly had to put everything on hold because it's 1pm on Sunday and there's a game on.  I walked into my parents' house to find my mother, and sometimes my father, so engrossed in the game that if I had burst into flames, they would have waited until the end of a quarter to put me out.

Going to Gillete Stadium to see a game when she came home for a visit was suddenly not beyond a-ster's plans.  Getting excited to have friends over to watch a regular season game was probably the reason e-ster bought her own house.

So back to my conference.  It was a tech conference for teachers.  They had an opening welcome in a swanky restaurant thing (I am so out of touch, I have no clue, but I think only certain levels of ticket holders can go there) and then the mini sessions were in the boxes.

It should have come as no surprise to me when I sent my sisters this picture:

...and they immediately wrote back WHAT ARE YOU DOING AT GILLETTE??

Seriously,  I didn't even have to show them the name on the building.  I never thought we'd be the kind of family that could name a stadium just buy looking at the glass.

So, the boxes were kind of nice, but for a conference, they were too small.    I guess if you were seriously going to watch the game with friends or clients, this would be an exciting way to do it.  But it didn't impress me much.  They have their own bars and TV screens and seats facing out.

They each had their own bathrooms.  That did kind of impress me.

See how crowded we were? One was kind of hot, too and I felt trapped.  I got to this first picture  early and got a seat but then realized the presentation was NOT out on the field, so I had to stand to see what was presented.  DUH.

 

 

I was late getting to this session, so I had to cram in and stand at the back like a lot of these other fools.  

This was the view at some level, on the way over to the other side to get to our lunch that they served in that same restaurant.  I wasn't too impressed with that but it was included in the registration.  I forgot to take a picture of that, but it wasn't worth it, really.

I was amazed at the screen.  When you get close to it, like this, it's really just a bunch of lightbulbs.  And it's a huge screen.  Ridiculously huge.  And it was playing stuff the whole time.

This was the view from one of the boxes.  I actually made me a little dizzy and I'm not one to be bothered by heights.  I think if the stadium had been full and people had been on the field, I might have not noticed the dizziness.  See the wire in the middle top?  I have no idea what it was, but it went from there to the end zone on the right.  I spent a lot of time imagining that it was a zip line.  That made me even more dizzy.

The conference wasn't as awesome as I thought it might be.  The freebies weren't so great because there was a lot of pressure to listen to the people talk about their product before giving you the free post its or pencils or whatever teachers want to take back to their classrooms.  I'm used to foreign language association conferences where they give so much free stuff I have to bring another bag home.

And I got in trouble.

A friend of mine had driven because she knew where it was and I thought it was like a million miles away.  Turns out, it's not as far as I thought.  And it was nice to have a chauffeur.

About halfway through the day, the Patriots came to practice, but out on a practice field.  There was a warning in the conference guide that if they came to practice, you were not to take ANY pictures AT ALL.

So I didn't.

We noticed a huge increased in "security" when they arrived.  Lots of people standing around in suits, especially near the gangway that went by where they were practicing.  They weren't as covert as they'd like to think they were.  But I had no intentions of taking pictures or videos and I certainly couldn't steal any secrets because I care so little about the game.

As we were leaving the building, we noticed 2 suits near the escalator we were taking down.  I noticed one of them on a phone and noted that if I had wanted to, I could totally have taken a picture at that point, but I didn't care.

We exited the building a little further down from where we had entered and we were a little discombobulated.  We were leaving slightly early, so we seemed to be the only people leaving.  We were very engrossed in a conversation about a cool thing she had seen about video taping kids and having a green screen and we were contemplating how to get a grant to get this little product.  We were headed toward her car which was about 3 sections of parking lot away and we started to cut through.

A man who looked like a parking attendant with a golf car asked us if we knew where we were going and we explained that our car was just over there.  No, we didn't need to be driven over, we could walk, thanks.  Just right over there, by the portapotties.  And we kept walking.

And he was like "you can't be in there, you can't be in there, you need to get out of there, get out of there now" and we were both kind of stuck in confusion.

My friend was slightly further behind, so she just walked around this fencepost thing, but I was kind of trapped, so I saw an exit like one car width away.  I kept walking and the guy was like "ma'am get out of there now, you need to get out of there NOW" and I was like "really, you expect me to squeeze between these fencposts?  It's like 6 inches wide" and he was like "YES NOW."   and my friend was like "sparkling, just get out here!"

My friend jokingly said "what, is this the players' parking lot?"  and he was like "umm yeah".

As we crossed to the building side of the lot so we could get to her car in a more appropriate manner, we noticed another suit had just come out of the building and another was waiting up on one of the levels near the escalator we had just come down.

SERIOUSLY?  Two teachers were going to destroy a player's car?  There were no signs.  They didn't have a "special" part of the lot like I would expect.   No "reserved" signs.   Nothing would have indicated that these were players' cars if that big mouth hadn't said anything.

We're teachers for God's sake!   We were talking about TECHNOLOGY we can't afford for our classroom, that we want to get a stinking $200 grant to buy!  Not plotting bugging Belechek's car.

Wait, then we could have sold the secrets and bought enough equipment for the whole school to video tape kids!  We are so dumb!!

How I Broke A Cardinal Rule But Didn't Get Excommunicated

 You might have read about my aversion to boxed cake mixes.  In fact, I've probably touted my faith  in the made from scratch cake in about 80 of my posts.  I just don't like cake mixes and I feel like it's a failure to make one.   Yes, I judge you that harshly if you  buy a cake mix, a brownie mix, or GOD HELP ME, those cookie mixes in a a tube that you just slice.  I can still be friends with you, but I can't get past that little flaw.  Sorry.   It doesn't take much more time to make a cake from scratch than it does to buy the mix, get the eggs, oil and water, mix them and put them in baking pans.  It's the same mess either way.

But, I also explained in this post, that I am bad yellow/white cake maker when I make them from scratch.  I can't explain my issue other than they are heavy and not great.  I've tried a variety of recipes and a variety of oils and still, they just suck.  I can make a chocolate cake like it's my job, but not yellow or white from scratch.

Enter my brilliant idea to make a cake to celebrate 5 years of my French group, Table Française.  I didn't want to buy a store bought cake because those from the grocery store are even more foul tasting to me than what I can make.  I find them very salty.  Anyone else?  I didn't want to spend crazy money on professional cakes, so I decided to make my own.

So I did this dirty deed.  The giggling little bastard was on sale for $1 per box.  So I had to choose this one.  And there was PUDDING IN THE MIX!  A whole CUP!  Gag.

 

But I had a reason that I needed to make a white or yellow cake.  Recently, I saw this recipe for making a rainbow cake and I realized I simply had to do it in the colors of the French flag for our celebration.  

You take boxed cake mix, you spoon some out into bowls and add the food coloring of your choice to each bowl.  Get a bundt pan (mine is of questionable teflon or a substance like it and I need to replace it) and start putting in your colors beside each other.  They will run together a little bit but they don't all merge into one big mess.  If you look here, you'll see many more colors than I did.

When you bake it, it looks kind of gross on the outside, but as you slice it, it has lovely colors.  I don't love the outside of the cake, seen here, but it wasn't about me, it was about our 5 year anniversary, right?

I broke so many rules that night, I think they cancelled each other out and it's a draw but I could not completely cave and buy canned frosting, so I made a lard/powdered sugar delight with a touch of mint.  Sadly, no amount of red dye would give me actual red, so as I look at it now, it looks more like a baby shower cake with pinks and blues.

Given that the average age of this group is about 75, they probably had no clue that I was trying to be cute and do red, white and blue for the French flag.  They probably thought i thought it was pretty to do pink and blue.  I think they find me to be a little on the bizarre side anyway.  No wait, I find THEM to be the bizarre ones.  Anyway...

It tasted... like a boxed cake, but it fit the need and all were pleased.  The pictures I took of what the slices looked like didn't come out, so this is all I have.

The slices were red or blue or white or a swirl of any of the three.  It looks pretty.  I would do it again.  But I really need to make it from scratch next time.