A couple cool/annoying things about the grocery

All the little price tags that mark food are digital - at least at the Carrefour down the street from our current apartment. Pretty sweet. I imagine it saves them tons of time/paper. Another not so cool thing is that you have to have your produce weighed and marked while you're in the produce section... so if you show up at the cash register without having done that they send you back to the produce section. Mon dieu!

The apartment. Things are moving along at the moment. It looks as if we'll be moving in on September 3rd, with the power actually being turned on on September 5th. That's a pain in the butt, but it's nice to know that at least we're on schedule to have a place. We also got a nice surprise today... it turns out we don't have to put any money down to rent the place. Initially, they were going to make us put aside a *whole year* of rent as a guarantee that we'd pay; this was because we only have one modest income at the moment. However, it turned out that we'll be renting directly from the owner of the place, and he seems to trust us. This ends up being a HUGE deal... because we would have had to put up something like $25k to as a guarantee. Talk about ridiculous; we could have put a down payment on a house for that amount of money and earned interest on the investment.

Phones. We got cell phones with a plan... finally. We had been using a pay-as-you-go service that was charging an arm and a leg. Now, we'll have something a little more affordable that we can use to call anywhere in Europe or North America. Skype will still be our preferred method of communication, as we only have 3 hours of talk time per month... but it's nice to have the flexibility.

Work. I'm going to try and start work next Wednesday and then take off a couple of days when we are able to actually move into our place. From what I understand there's a ton of stuff for me to do, so I'm sure they'll be happy to get me in a little earlier.

Ok. That's it for now. I think we're going to go see Ratatouille tonight and we need to eat beforehand. Hope all is well.