After a hard day's work

Here we are at Marie-Laure's having delicious crepes with loads of Nutella and homemade jam.

Introducing the Rats

Oops, it's true; I forgot to introduce the Laboratory Rats.
There's Laars, of course, and Ingmar. And Wenche, and Astrid and Britta. Astrid and Britta are twins; you can hardly tell them apart. And the one with the bent tail, that's Bjorn.

Soirée Disco avec les Rats du Laboratoire!

Jerome made this out of all the scraps and photos we took on the 7th. Alas there is no sound on my computer to see if the soundtrack worked out!

All Shaken Up

Yeah, I know the vortex clip is sideways, but I can't seem to get it turned. Anyway, when you're being vortexed, directions all run together!

Getting into Trouble

Those Laboratory Rats are always getting into things! Here they are in the computer connection box. No wonder our intranet connections are haywire. And then Laars fell into the nitrogen tank and had to be rescued.

Maurice and the Laboratory Rats

Ingmar Experimentation

Oh no, they've captured Ingmar! Maybe that's what they meant by animal experimentation. - the rat gets to be the experiment.

Animal Experimentation

OK, when they say scientists do experiments "on rats", do they mean they are on the rat, or the experiment is on the rat? I find pipetting is a little unstable either way.

Rats in the Tissue-Lyser

This is what happens when you slow your tissue-lyser way way way down and load it with rats. Not exactly an emulsion...

Roundabout Rats

Rotamix Rats

Maurice around Paris

Here we are, riding the RER train around Paris! I love to go exploring, and Anonymous Bug seems to like it too.

At a shop in Paris Nancy found a Pink Cat, just as pink as me.

Beware of the bronze guard dogs in front of the Chinese Cultural Center!

This lock has been here on this fence for 28 years, or something like that.

We're at the Exploratorium! Let's go explore!
What, the sign says "No going"? Are you kidding?

I like the decorated windows in Paris. This one has animated diving teddy bears and jellyfish with lots and lots and lots of tentacles.

Hanging out in Auvergne

Here we are visiting Murol castle. My faithful steed is here with me, but doesn't move very fast. Maybe that has something to do with his legs not touching the ground.

No pennants on the flagpole today. There's a pretty good view, though.

Forbidden to the public? But I have a helmet.

It was awfully cold and damp out there at Murol, so we went home and heated up the house and had a snack with lots of cheese. Those rats. There was hardly any cheese left for me. Darrell got them back, though. Now they're decorating the Christmas Ficus.

Playing on the swings

Hi!
Iris took this little movie of me playing on the swings on our summer road trip. I'm not sure if the link works correctly, but please try it!
http://picasaweb.google.com/autumniris/Summer2008#5267086165127977730

Fun at Castelnaud

Hi! Here we are at Castelnaud having lots of fun climbing all over. Inside they have lots of old weapons and armor, but they don't let you try them out. Aww.

The Anonymous Bug came along too. Here we are looking down from the "hourd" where defenders poured nasty stuff on attackers coming up from below. It's a long way down!

Out in the yard they had a cool collection of cannons and siege engines and stuff. I wanted to try out the trebuchets, but they were all locked up. I bet if I sat in the bucket and Darrell got the aim right, I could make it to the top of the castle tower.

Vacation with Darrell

Darrell is visiting for a couple of weeks and we're going to go all around and see stuff we haven't seen before. Laar and I were having dinner and Darrell thought that Laars was sitting at his place. There was room for everybody after all, and we had cheese and salad and another cheese and bread and weird mustard and duck stuff and pears.

The next day we went off to see parts of France we haven’t seen before. We went to Sarlat-la-Canéda, which is in the Perigord region. It’s a duck and goose-raising place. We never did see any actual ducks or geese except on dinner plates. These are some pictures from around the old city.

I was looking over the free books that people leave behind and they almost forgot to take me with them!

Later we went to La Roque-Gageac, where people used to live in caves in the cliffs above the river and where most of the houses are still built into the cliffside, so you might have a 1000-year old cellar.

They had a really cool-looking castle there and we wanted to go explore but it was somebody’s house and they didn’t invite us in.

But never mind, there are a Great Many castles in this part of France. They’re everywhere. You can stand in one place and look around and see four or five sometimes. We just went on to the next one. Castelnaud was neat, but you couldn’t always go where you wanted. It’s so steep in the town that people tend to sit down on the ancient slate roofs. I guess this one got sat on too many times, but it really does have the best view of the castle! It’s hard to read, but it says ‘this is a roof! No sitting!’ in several languages.

Stay-over at Jérôme's

Here I am at Jérôme’s. He sews a lot. A real pro.

When he went out, Laars and I got to play. Laars was playing with the pin cushion and got stuck in it. He wiggled his way out, but not without a certain amount of difficulty.

Then I found this really nice scissors. Really sharp and shiny.Laars said not to play with scissors, but I think that’s just because his were smaller.

We were having a really great time with all of Jérôme’s stuff. Then he came home and made us clean up. We had to clean ourselves up too, because Laars got lint and bits of thread all over him; here we are drying.

On Wednesday Nancy and Darrell came over and had tea. Jerome served us little cakes and after that it was time to go home.