Sunday cuteness: Yesterday I made some gluten-free spaghetti, and left the strainer in the sink to dry. When I returned to the kitchen, this is what I found. (I had the hardest time not laughing at the beginning; it took immense willpower to stop for the video.)

I had no idea until today, but 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy.

The video above is for the sound, not so much the view. It shows the lovely quiet at my place, one of the main reasons I bought this apartment — I’m near Nice city center, major streets, a few dozen yards from a bus stop that serves both Nice and Sophia Antipolis, and yet all you can hear from my apartment are church bells and birds. You’ll need to turn up the volume to hear the bells and birds. (That said, this video does have a car engine at one point, which I barely heard in reality — my phone picks up that range of sound much better than higher frequencies such as bird song.)

As an update for the threatening neighbor, a lot happened this week. First, background I’ve mentioned before but that is important enough to repeat: since I moved in, I tried speaking with the threatening neighbor once (read about it at that link). Because it was clear that she’s irrational and enjoys getting a rise out of people, I have never since engaged her — I never speak to her, never look at her, never even motion to her. In short, I pretend she does not exist. Also, Kanoko and I are entirely shut in: there is a roof covering my entire patio, wood walls on either side, and 1cm-square fencing from ground to roof and side to side. In other words, we cannot leave my patio. She cuts wires that hold my fencing together from time to time (I have witnessed this and have already gone to the police for it) in order to leave things on my patio; I close them back up ASAP.

To summarize what transpired this week, since I don’t want to give the details on my blog for several reasons, I learned that this threatening neighbor does in fact have a history of complaints filed concerning her physical violence and death threats against people and pets in her building, which history spans 18 years. I did not know that she had actually been violent until now. The good news is that with a third party (myself) also witnessing her threats, from a different building, and reporting it to the police, their building management was finally able to lodge an official complaint and request a formal investigation. (Why haven’t other neighbors spoken up? Well, it’s far, very far indeed, from the first time I’ve seen people say nothing when they witness someone else being wronged.) Let’s hope the police investigation is thorough and justice is served.

Also this week, just after the complaint was filed, I found meatballs on my patio two nights in a row after coming home from work. Obviously, with the threats to poison Kanoko, I imagine the meatballs were not just full of good things. Since I didn’t eye-witness their placement on my patio, I am unable to go to the police about it, even though only one neighbor shares and can access the inner courtyard, and that neighbor is the dangerous one. From now until whenever it is safe, I am only letting Kanoko outside when I can keep a direct eye on him. The video above shows what I mean: I sit next to the window and watch him, while reading a book or simply musing. Before, I would let him stay outside while I was on the computer and not necessarily paying close attention, but no longer.

Helpful readers have already suggested surveillance cameras, webcams, walling off the patio. I can’t afford a real surveillance camera; I tried my webcam but its focus is too narrow and I can’t afford a better one; walling off the patio is not an option for several reasons. Mainly, this is what happens when you are faced with truly dangerous, mentally ill people: you cannot entirely protect yourself. Only justice and the police can. You’re safer if you realize this. It’s the first thing you learn in any good self-defense course: learning how to fight is practically useless when faced with a true criminal, a desperate person or a mentally ill one. Your best defense is learning how to run, and run quickly, phoning the police and/or getting somewhere safe. So I wall off my patio? She’s shown evidence of paranoid and delusional thinking (just read about the one time I tried speaking with her or hear her for yourself) and has a history of violence. What’s to keep her from breaking it down or creating holes when she’s already cut my existing fence? I’d still have to scour my patio to make sure she hadn’t done such a thing to leave “gifts”. I’d rather keep my sunlight and be able to actually see what she’s up to. As for a camera, I keep my phone on me at all times now; if she tries anything while I’m home, I’ll film her again.

That was interrupted, as usual (as nearly always), by my neighbor. She had started off by yelling “une belle fille bien baisée ! Va te faire foutre, connasse !” at which point I went to get my camera phone, since Kanoko was also being adorable as I cleaned my patio/terrace. This is what followed. Mostly it’s kitty being funny, then at 35 seconds in, you get to hear my neighbor for yourself and witness what I put up with (though on a small scale, since it’s worse than just these few seconds, of course).

As can be seen, I’m merely on my patio, playing with my kitten. I do not engage her; I never engage her. Today is the first time I’ve dared to try and film. She noticed: she yelled “moi aussi je peux filmer !!” and she did, which I don’t mind, because she caught herself on camera calling me “connasse !” while I remained silent, playing with my kitten. Kanoko and I went inside after I’d finished the film, since I figured the neighbor would come outside. Indeed, the neighbor lady then stormed out and sprayed my entire wall, window, door and all, with her garden hose.

I’m getting pretty tired of this. I forwarded the video to a neighbor in the abusive neighbor’s apartment building so that their management can be made aware, again. (I realize I’ll need to be more careful than usual now, since the filming pissed her off and may escalate things. I’m hoping, however, that seeing how bad she can be — and this is average, not her worst — will help handle the problem.)

This afternoon Kanoko was swatting around a broken piece of ceramic. It was dark red and reminded me very much of traditional Provençal terra cotta tiles, called tomettes. My curiosity was piqued — every so often, you’ll hear a story of someone buying an apartment, pulling up the old floor and discovering tomettes beneath. It even happened to my former landlords, whose floor was gorgeous. Since the parquet in my bedroom was badly laid and I thought I needed to replace it due to the water damage from the adjacent bathroom, I pulled on a corner that was already sticking out.

This is what I found. I jumped; I squealed with joy; I bounded into the kitchen to put on eye protection and returned to the bedroom to pull out as much parquet as I could. It hadn’t been glued, merely laid onto a protective sheet covering the floor. The tomettes are in perfect condition. There’s only one exception: the previous owners broke some tomettes to run… a TV cable. Ugh. (By any chance, do any readers have a few tomettes laying around that I could use to repair this? They’re hard to find. Mine are 11.5cm from point to point; 10cm from side to side.)

Pulling up the parquet brought something else into evidence: the tile elsewhere in my apartment is on top of yet more tomettes!!! Tomorrow I’m going to pull up tile in an out-of-the way corner of my living room to see what’s been done and if it’s recoverable — I certainly hope so. I’m delighted since I had in fact dreamt of redoing my bedroom floor in tomettes, but had to set aside the idea since they’re very expensive. Then today I find that it was already done 60 years ago!

As shown here, my deconstructivist bathroom is coming along nicely. This approach brings to the fore images that evoke universal truths: beneath the persona (paint) and ego (plaster) lie hidden yet vital depths of unconscious communications (pipes) and shadow elements (dark hole in the wall). Cleansing and healing elements also come into play (shower). While modern society would have us believe that humans are two-dimensional, able to be classified and “targeted”, we are reminded of the multitudinous facets in every individual, impossible to contemplate in their whole; impossible to reduce to mere words.

Because my bathroom wall needs to dry before it can be repaired, I decided to tackle paint removal in it today. (I had an extra vacation day that needed to be used, so took today off.) The mold damage before, bubbles after putting on paint remover that made me rather nervous since no such bubbles formed on the same paint when I used the remover in the WC, and the wall after removing the paint but before taking on the plaster.

The photo above shows the bathroom as it is now, with a hole in the corner so that air can get back there and help things dry out.

It seems life has decided that I require a course in different aspects of the French legal system. At the same time. To wit, real estate law and neighborhood law. My personal assignments would be a hidden defect (the shower that caused mold and rot) and a neighbor across from me who shares the courtyard, who threatens to kill my kitten (said kitten is quite literally caged into my patio; he can’t bother anyone besides me), sprays kitten and I with her garden hose, and who has now left excrement and dirty toilet paper on my patio several times.

Yes: excrement and dirty toilet paper. I have photos. I won’t post them, since I doubt anyone wants or needs to be reminded what poo looks like. And no, it was not poo from my cat, since it was far too large, plus I saw her put it on my patio. I could hardly believe my eyes, but there it was, my neighbor woman cutting wires that hold my fencing together while cackling, and then putting her hand through the newly-created hole to drop crap onto my patio.

I went to the commissariat to have another main courante written up, detailing the events I wrote above. (Apart from the dirty toilet paper, because that was what awaited me when I got home from visiting the police.) After speaking with the people in that neighbor’s building (she’s in a different one from mine), their building management was alerted, and is going to bring une plainte before the Procureur de la République, since there’s a long trail of mains courantes preceding mine. This means all parties shall be heard: people from the woman’s building, myself, and the woman concerned.

In these cases I appreciate having my blog — it helps to make such experiences feel less futile. As in, at least I can share my experiences in a way that others can learn from and/or relate to; there are plenty of people in France (just as everywhere) who have neighbor problems, so likely some of them are immigrants/expatriates, and it’s nice to know what actions can be taken when it gets serious. I’m lucky to have neighbors who have lived with the threatening woman for several years and so who were able to guide me; others aren’t that lucky. That said, I do wish it were never this serious. I’m getting sick of having to be on guard every time I let out my kitten; tired of wondering when the neighbor will storm out and start screaming at me when I water my plants; tired of having to pretend I don’t hear her when she does (I refuse to respond to her in any way, it would only make things worse); tired of wondering what kind of insecticide she sprays on her — and thus many of my — plants every two days (that is a fact, not an exaggeration); tired of hearing the foul insults she hurls at all the neighbors; tired of checking my kitten for any signs of poisoning and worrying whether I’ll come home from work to a deathly ill, or worse, dead, kitten one evening because I missed something.

This is a new style of postmodern deconstructivism, which I’m sure will be all the rage soon. It’s my walk-in shower, which was put in by the previous owners. When I visited the apartment in February, just before signing, there was no sign of water damage in the bathroom. I asked about the shower, though, since it looked “homemade”. I was told that it had been built correctly and waterproofed.

When I moved in at the start of June, my bathroom wall was covered in mold, and the walls in the WC were soaked. I called my insurance agent. After much going in circles (the syndic, building management, had to be notified as well), no clear cause could be found. The plumber decided to check beneath the shower, just in case, and last week the plumber finally got the OK from everyone involved to partially demolish the walls.

There’s no waterproof membrane beneath the shower floor. What happened is that the grout began to break down, and water seeped onto the floor and into the walls. As for the visible damage, there are two possibilities: it was so new in February that no mold had grown to visible proportions, or the previous owners had painted over existing mold so it wasn’t visible. To make a long story short, I took on a real estate lawyer and met with her last week. Appropriate action has been taken and we’ll see how things go. In any case, I’m happy to have found a great plumber, and hopefully will soon have “after” photos of a new shower installation to post here.

With the water damage cause finally determined, this weekend I had fun with some small DIY projects, making my WC a bit more civilized. I put in a corner shelf and, finally, a toilet roll holder. Kanoko again performed quality control, checking the shelf frame. This photo shows my full WC once finished. In France it’s quite common to have a separate toilet room, and they’re usually small. A closer (and cleaner-looking) view of the shelves. They sit on fittings and are held to them with socket screws, so they’re easy to take off and put back on, which means it will be a snap to repaint my WC walls as soon as all the water damage is repaired.

This is a video I shot today — mediocre quality and really short because I used my mobile phone camera. It’s just long enough to give a good idea of what was wreaked by the surprise hailstorm that hit Antibes last night! There were no accidents, though as you can see, some people left their cars on the side of the road, due to the icy driving conditions. The male voice you hear? Good grief. It’s a man behind me, who is often behind me, and who often talks very loudly — he’s quieter than usual in these 15 seconds.

A couple more photos, since it’s so rare here (it doesn’t even happen once a year — the last hailstorm this large happened more than ten years ago). I put both on the map on Flickr so anyone curious can see where they were taken:
o Antibes tollgate, first sign of hail resembling snow
o First stop in Sophia, showing lots more

One of the loveliest articles on kimono I’ve seen in a while, on a kimono artist I’ve admired for years: The San Diego Union-Tribune — To dye for:

Itchiku Kubota’s works reach back to a mythic golden age of Japanese textiles.

In 1937, a promising 20-year-old Japanese artist, Itchiku Kubota, paid a visit to the Tokyo National Museum. He saw a fragment of a 17th-century textile with imagery so vivid he stared at it for hours. The technique used to make it, tsujigahana, was lost to history. But Kubota vowed to recreate it in his own work.

“This find seemed like a revelation from God,” he would recall, “and I vowed then to devote the rest of my life to bring its beauty alive again.”

An exhibition catalogue of Kubota’s, and Kimono as Art: The Landscapes of Itchiku Kubota are both available on Amazon for very reasonable prices. A few more online photos of the exhibit can also be found here, where clicking on the thumbnails will open a “super-sized” view that gives a much better idea of the kimono in three dimensions. The Itchiku Kubota Art Museum has its own website, in Japanese of course.

Up close, Kubota’s work is awe-inspiring. Keep in mind he saw that tsujigahana fragment in 1937: “Kubota didn’t have an exhibition until 1977 simply because he wasn’t satisfied with his method until then.” Forty years later. I was able to find a video about tsujigahana dyeing, also in Japanese, that shows more common tsujigahana designs on kimono.

Tsujigahana is a type of shibori, which is among my favorite techniques. Kanoko was named in part after kanoko shibori, for which there’s a video too! (I do believe I’m going to spend several hours watching all of the related dyeing videos!)

Update: I found two videos on shibori that are in English, done by the Nagoya City Public Relations Section (focusing on Arimatsu / Narumi shibori), and which describe the process from start to finish really nicely:
Shibori: Traditional Craft, part 1
Shibori: Traditional Craft, part 2
(Note to fellow kimono lovers: the poster of all these videos, narablog, has dozens of gorgeous videos on all sorts of techniques, including bingata, Okinawa weaving, Edo komon, kurume and san-in kasuri, tsumugi and more.)

Questions you may be asking about this photo:
- Are those potatoes?
- What’s that black thing behind them?
- How did they get there?
- Did you cut that hole yourself?

Answers: Yes, those are potatoes. Ever since Kanoko arrived, I’ve been mysteriously losing potatoes. Since it was only one or two at a time, I figured that I was just miscounting them and had forgotten how many I’d actually eaten. But then, a few days ago, five went missing all at once, and I noticed a rank stench coming from the corner in my kitchen where I’d kept the potatoes. The familiar smell of… rotting potatoes. Looking behind the kitchen, which had been set up amateurishly by the previous owners (the main reason I got my apartment for such a low price), I noticed two things:
1. There is a space behind the lower cupboards that’s just big enough for a kitten to get through from the open area beneath them.
2. There is also a space beneath the particle-board bottoms, just high enough for kitten paws and… potatoes.
The two spaces were not big enough for me to be able to fish around with a pole for the potatoes.

Since the kitchen is indeed mediocre, and I plan to replace it eventually, I started to attempt ripping out the particle board bottom. True to inexperienced builder form, however, it had been put together so chaotically that there was no way I could pull it out cleanly and easily. And so I started to saw. I stopped after an hour, realizing it was going to take more than a couple cuts, and decided to wait until this weekend.

Today I finally managed to hack my way through the particle board and create a hand-sized hole, having to make several cuts due to the nearly-impracticable angle in the small space available. The first potato was visible as soon as I finished ripping out the last chunk of particle board. Ten more potatoes — for a total of eleven in all — were nearby. That black thing behind them? A rotting wooden spatula, shown here in a larger view of the area beneath the cupboards, so you can see what I was dealing with.