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Links Comments to: yankinparisot@gmail.com |
Welcome to French Food
Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food
and because I live in rural I hope you enjoy my ramblings about rural France!
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This is our village. Our house is the white one at the top right. |
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About me
When you get to my age, over 73, its hard to describe yourself. You either write a book or keep it simple. I'll spare you the book and keep it simple. Grew up in Northern California's wine country. I'm writing this blog because I enjoy writing. My first degree is in Literature and I've always enjoyed writing. I quickly discovered, however, that I don't seem to have the right imagination to write fiction so I gave up on the idea of writing the great American novel. Not knowing what else to do I decided to get my military service done & out of the way. (fortunately, I was too young for Korea & too old for Vietnam) I had a wonderful military 'career'. Two plus years of full time electronics school followed by two and a half years based in Spain near Madrid. Although military pay wasn't great Spain was so inexpensive that you could eat very well on what I was paid. I was also fortunate enough to spend two periods of 3 months each in France; thus starting a love affair that lasts to this day. Back in the states I decided to make a career in the electronics industry. I went back to school and got my BSEE, never really used it as I was asked to go into Sales pretty quickly by the first company I worked for. (I was also teaching semi-conductor physics at the local community college & still have a valid teacher's certificate). After 4 years back home the company asked me to move to Brussels to start a European Sales & Service office. What an opportunity! Did that for a couple of years then moved to England to work for an English company as Export Sales Director. Quit that & formed my own company with a Canadian friend. We were doing Ok, but he really wanted to make it more of a family firm so I agreed to sell him my share. I left to join a Silicon valley start up. Great people! My job was to start up European Operations. At the end of six years we had 5 Sales & Service companies plus a dozen Distributors and European revenue of $38 million. (it was a lot more then than now!) At this point I returned to the states to head up worldwide marketing. We continued to grow and were purchased by Xerox. That went well & 4 years later I was asked to go back to Europe to help merge a Xerox division with the organization I had built. What a culture clash! Long story short, we banged a lot of heads, doubled revenue over 3 years to $600 million and were the most profitable division of Xerox.. Back to the states to do strategic planning. Technology was changing & Xerox wouldn't so I grabbed a chance at early retirement. It was too early & after messing around for a year I joined a company where I had friends to set up a new Division. That was a fun and it prospered until 7 years later Linda put her foot down & I really did retire. The question was where to retire too? We had a beautiful home in Carmel Valley, California, but it was a long way from family. (Linda is English & my daughters from my first marriage live in England) About then the property market was booming & we got a great offer on the house. So we sold. Now where was a burning question. We didn't want to go back to England with its lousy weather & high house prices. France was the logical choice; we both loved it, the climate is good in the Southwest, house prices were reasonable and you can't beat the food & wine. We've been here full time for 9 years now and still love it. We bought our French farm house already renovated, but have spent until now remodeling it. We're now finished, in fact we're trying to sell it in a low key way. Its just too big and we're tired of running the gite business. We have numerous friends both French and ex-pats and an active social life. Life in rural France is very good. You'll see this reflected in my blog. Enjoy it!
PS: We have now sold the house (October,2010) and bought another. We've moved all of about 6 miles. We didn't want to go far as we wanted to stay close to our local friends and because we love this area. The new house is far more modern and quite a bit smaller; we think it will be much easier to keep up and with no gite business to worry about we'll be able to travel more. I'll keep you up to date on that. |
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