Dear Friends,

For the first time in a number of years I will be spending the Christmas holidays in Europe, or more precisely in the UK, as I am working in France at the moment.

I have been living in Tucson for 11 years since arriving there in late 1996, and eventually obtained my "Green Card", i.e. permanent US residency, in 2004. Since being based in Tucson I have at most been out of the USA for a month on vacation at any one time. However, this year I spent half my time working in France for the Centre de Recherche Astronomique de Lyon (CRAL) based at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS) in the city of that name in east central France for the first three and last three months of 2007, with most of the rest of my time in Tucson.

Last Christmas and New Year were spent in Tucson, as in many previous years, and I enjoyed the Christmas light show at Winterhaven. I had an invitation to work at the ENS for three months from the beginning of the year, but getting an available seat on a plane at a reasonable price had to wait until the holidays were over. In the event I worked in Lyon from just after the middle of January to just before the middle of April, so I could get back to Tucson and file my 2005 US taxes by the deadline. Working in Lyon was quite a change from working in Tucson, and the French have been paying me a reasonably good salary in Euros, compared to my previous job with the University of Arizona which was very badly paid. The work in Lyon, which is currently still in progress, involves putting together an interactive website for CRAL writing both server and client-side code.

As the three months spent early in the year away from Tucson were by far the longest since arriving there in 1996, it took some organization to get packed and cancel or put on hold some of my utilities, and pay rent and health insurance in advance, etc. As the lease on my apartment was still running, the penalty in breaking it would have cost about as much as three months of rent, so I kept my apartment and US health insurance, as I needed both when I returned. After leaving a typically very sunny Tucson in January, I arrived in Lyon to find it cold, damp and gray, and for much of the three months in Lyon the weather was like that, although it became warmer and sunnier in late March. I brought some of my ski clothing, as the Alps are nearby, but as the winter was unusually mild, there was not much snow and I thought I would not be able to ski at all. Fortunately, when I booked an excursion for the last weekend of Match, the weather had turned cold and new snow had just fallen. For the very reasonable price of €32, which covered the ski lifts and bus trip to the resort of Les Deux Alpes, I had a superb day of skiing up to elevations as high as 3600 metres, where snow is guarenteed. A week later I went with the people I am working with to the beautiful village of Pérouges, NE of Lyon on the road to Geneva. It is one of the most beautiful villages of France.

Lyon is quite an interesting city, being the second or third largest in France after Paris and perhaps Marseille, depending on how you count the conurbations of Lyon and Marseille. It is dominated by two big rivers, the Rhône and Saône, which in fact meet very close to the university. Often I go out on walks to the nearby Parc de Gerland next to the rivers when I want a break from work in the afternoons. There are often lots of ducks and swans in the river, but so far I have seen no geese. There is an excellent Anglican church in Lyon which I found, and they very recently moved from premises in the centre of town to the university. At http://csharp.com/photos2007.html are my pictures so far for 2007, including those of Lyon and other places I have visited.

I flew to Lyon and back by British Airways via Phoenix and London-Heathrow. On my way back I found that I was missing a bag at Phoenix Airport. Needless to say this was very annoying, and delayed me unpacking when I returned to Tucson. Matters were complicated by the fact that I had my telephone disconnected while I was away, and it was a couple of days before it was reconnected, so had I problems contacting BA and Tucson Airport. My missing bag was delivered to my apartment while I was away trying to contact the airport. Everything was accounted for and got sorted out in the end.

Even before I returned to Tucson in the spring, I heard about the possibility of being able to work in Lyon again for a longer period of time. This was confirmed during the summer, so I started making plans to return to Lyon. In the mean time I had been looking around for some jobs in the Tucson area, but with the likelihood of returning to France, I did not follow this up as much as otherwise. However, I was invited to spend a couple of days in Las Vegas with an old contact there on some possible work, which so far has not turned up. While in Tucson I did some limited freelance web development work, and part of that involved buying a new laptop computer and software. Though I had no official connection with the University of Arizona, I managed to get a really good dual core Inspiron laptop computer with a $900 discount through the university, and the Adobe Creative Suite version 3 Web Premium software for about $500, which is less than 1/3rd of the normal price in the USA. In Europe it costs even more. A friend at the university helped me install Linux on the other partition (the Microsoft partition has Vista - ugh!).

With the firm offer of another job in France, I decided in August to accept it and return to France at the end of September. The maximum duration of this new contract is ten months, but so as not to have a break in my US residency status, I decided to be away for just under six months, returning to the USA in the second half of March 2008, with an option of taking up some or all of the remaining four months later in 2008. In the mean time my apartment lease had expired, so I decided to go on a month-to-month basis until I left for France and give up my apartment. I had also decided to give up my medical insurance and cancel various utilities. The main challenge was getting all this sorted out and putting my stuff in storage, which is obviously much cheaper than paying for an unoccupied apartment for six months. Fortunately, a new storage facility had recently been built opposite the apartment complex where I had been staying for over eight years, but even so, moving stuff there and throwing out a lot of stuff was a real business. It is surprising how much material one accumulates in eight years, much of which I had forgotten and put in a corner somewhere. The last week of September was a very stressful time, and involved far more than when I packed up to go to France in January.

While I was away earlier in the year I left my car parked in an area in the apartment complex. This was not an option after I left the complex, and as the car was not worth very much, I was lucky to sell it for a nominal price just to get rid of it. Unfortunately, earlier in the summer and the spring a number of things went wrong with it in quick succession, which involved quite a lot of expense getting them fixed. This was particularly annoying, as I had already anticipated returning to France and getting rid of the car.

In addition to packing up and leaving Tucson in September, I managed to fit in a trip to Bogota, Colombia, to see a friend there. I only had a limited amount of time, and unfortunately my friend there came down with some stomach infection, so I saw much less of her than planned. Nevertheless, we had an interesting time, and visited some museums and places I had not been to on previous visits. This also included a visit to a science museum, and trying to explain some of the equations displayed there, such as the Laplace Partial Differential Operator en español was quite a challenge!

Anyway, after a real hassle and some kind help from friends I managed to pack up everything before I left, and in fact sold my car on my very last day. Due to some confusion about giving notice when vacating my apartment, I found that I would have no roof over my head for the last three nights in Tucson, and a good Christian friend put me up in his house for those nights. I flew to Lyon on the last weekend of September, and started my new contract on the 1st October, which basically involves continuing with the work I did earlier in the year.

So far things in Lyon have been relatively uneventful here, with the weather getting cooler and the leaves turning various colours then falling, which is something you do not see very much in Tucson. There was a festival of lights in Lyon earlier this month. In addition to the usual Christmas lights, there were special son et lumière shows, but I am told the shows were not as good as last year.

The big event in my family this autumn was the birth of twin girls to the oldest daughter of my oldest brother in early October. My oldest brother has invited me to stay with him for Christmas in England, and on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas in the UK) he, his wife and I will go and see the twins and their parents. I am certainly looking forward to that very much. I am also hoping to see my other brother in Aylesbury. There are no convenient cheap flights from Lyon to where I want to go in England, but I managed to get a reasonable fare with the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) to Paris, then the Eurostar to London, which will be running on the recently opened high speed line from the Channel Tunnel to London. On my way back to Lyon in January I have been invited to spend a few days with a friend in the Paris area.

It will be interesting to see what 2008 brings.

I wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2008.

Christopher M. Sharp (December 16th, 2007)