So it looks like we’re staying here in France for a while longer. First, there are so many travel restrictions and quarantine times that moving across an ocean is even harder than usual. Second, my wife’s employment opportunities in the United States are disappearing. Rumor has it that American universities are asking lots of faculty to take unpaid furloughs. Third, the university here has thrown out a couple of raises and made her a full professor with tenure. Finally, and most importantly, we feel safer here than we would in the United States. I love America, I truly do, and I miss my family and friends terribly, but I think my country is losing its way.

Travel restrictions make sense and so do the quarantines.  If we did decide to repatriate right now, we would have to self quarantine in a city with an international airport.  Obviously we have close friends and family in lots of cities that qualify:  Washington DC, Houston, Miami, etc., but we would not feel good about coming from Alsace which is the hardest hit part of France, knowing with 90% certainty that I had the virus, and taking a chance on infecting any of my friends or family.  So that means that we would be staying in a hotel for two weeks and going crazy.  Fortunately, it’s not going to happen.  We still have business in America that has to be dealt with.  We have a $300/month storage fee that won’t disappear without me going there to get rid of everything that we should have already gotten rid of…   But I cannot do anything about that until these restrictions are lifted, so maybe I can delay that until I have a new grandson to visit anyway.

American universities have been struggling with a loss of federal funds since the Bush II recession.  Scientific research has been really hurt which is one of the primary reasons we ended up in Europe in the first place.  South Korea is still funding at decent levels but I understand the food here better.  So now we have this Covid-19 thing going on which puts a further financial strain on absolutely everybody except mask producers.  The universities are in freefall with very little faced-to-face interaction.  They are rumored to be cutting faculty to make ends meet.  To me it’s obvious that if lectures become virtual, all of your “audit” and 101 classes can be handled by one professor instead of a slew of them so let’s go ahead and make the human beings redundant.  Also, since we are either in a pandemic or a Democratic hoax designed to alienate MAGA rallies, it makes sense to eliminate as many biomedical scientists as you can during these times when you need biomedical expertise. Shut up and take your hydroxychloroquine and Lysol injections while the state universities cut real research positions for people that have PhDs in irrelevant things like pharmacology and neurobiology.  I realize that the news I get is even further polarized by what the French (and even the English) say about America, but this all just seems insane to me.

Gee got her new contract today.  It’s open-ended tenure.  Our residence status was set to expire this fall, but we’ll get five-year cards instead and will be eligible for EU citizenship during that last year.  That’s a way out in time, but we are proceeding as if this is a permanent thing and not an extended vacation.  She’s also going to be made a full professor (it’s in writing) at the end of her current contract in August.  That’s a big check on her professional goals list and apparently it’s just a BFD period in academia.  I’m crazy proud for her.  She also got a nice raise immediately and another raise to come with the promotion to full professor.   It is enough money for us to live on but it’s not nearly as much money as a full professor would make in America.   It’s a lot more than I would ever make as a school teacher in the states…

Making a little less money here is made easier by socialized medicine.  I had to have an emergency crown removal, three root canals, and a temporary filling done Friday night.  I had to pay full price up front which came to €140.  I’ll get 70% of that back from social security and around 20% from Gee’s supplemental insurance.  So yeah, I had all that work done for €14.  The dentist office had even nicer equipment than even the ritziest dentists I’ve used in the states with the exception of there is only one chair and my appointment began at the scheduled time.  I may feel differently by the time my new crown is made and fitted, but I am optimistic about the process.  We are also in the process of scheduling our physicals, so I’ll let you know what that process is like.

We paid a deposit on a camper today.  Only European citizens are allowed to own big things like that here, but we are allowed to own a corporation (societe civile) that is allowed to own big things and purchase insurance, etc.  It’s a German-made 6.75 meter motorhome on a diesel six speed Fiat chassis.  It’s actually every bit of 7 meters with the bike racks on it so that makes it about a yard longer than my Tundra Crewmax truck was.  Seven meters is the cut-off size for a lot of the cheap and free camping here so I’m happy with that.   It seemed like the right compromised size between exterior mobility/economy and interior comfort/features.  It has lots of bells and whistles.  We bought our American camper trailer about thirteen months ago (for sale, anybody?) so I thought we were pretty current on technology on these things, but it’s just different here.   It will take about a month for our articles of corporation be completed and I am having some upgrades installed like solar panels, extra locks and alarms.  Plus it is in Burgundy at a dealer 455 kilometers from here and we are only allowed to travel 100 kilometers from home during this stage of déconfinement.  You are allowed further with a letter from your business, so it may be that we can write ourselves a letter from our societe civile giving permission if the restrictions haven’t lifted by the time the camper is ready for us.

It’s a small camper but we still considered going full-time in it.  That’s not actually legal here and there is also the very real risk of a second wave confinement which would make that scenario even worse.  We have begun the process of looking for a smaller apartment with suitable parking for our camping-car.  Hopefully we make that transition by September.  We have liked living in the center of Strasbourg but want to see more of Europe too.  We especially liked this giant apartment during le confinement but feel like we could be OK in a smaller apartment if we one of us could sneak out to the camper for the occasional quiet time (or to play Minecraft).   Realistically, we plan to live in the camper for as long as Gee is working in a virtual environment because even if the borders remain closed during that time, there are a few things I would like to see in the Vosges, Alsace, Lorraine, and Champagne.