I've gone to Wegmans twice since I've been back from France, looking for pastries and bread.

After watching many Parisians walking through their city munching on just a loaf of bread, I wondered what the deal was. So on my final day in Paris, on my way to the airport, I stopped in a shop and fumbled through the French that would get me some kind of baguette. Boy, was that tasty.

I carried half the large loaf all the way back to the States with me. Berta tried some, Abby tried some, and even Riley tried some. I think it was probably a little stale by the time they got to it, but it was still pretty tasty. And so I thought I would go to the only place that I know to create pastries anything like what I had seen in France to pick up something in the morning.

But unfortunately, America has no bread.

On Saturday morning of my trip, Brian took me to a small shop to get breakfast. Before we walked to the Louvre, we settled on a couple of these pastries and a can of orange juice. These pastries were very simple - Croissant-like bread with chocolate in the bottom. Actual, thick bits of chocolate. It was so very fresh and tasty, and not cakey or danishy.

Wegmans doesn't sell breakfast. There are donuts. Donuts, I've decided, are not breakfast. Donuts are small cakes that go with coffee, usually eaten just after lunch or on Sunday after sleeping in at the in-laws.

Their "French" bread doesn't taste like bread in France at all. It's like... Why do you put those chemicals in it as a preservative if you're not going to keep the bread around for more than a day? And then, why would you want to keep fresh-baked bread (which you make every morning) around every day?

I keep thinking that maybe it's really the environment that is affecting my impression of the bread. Perhaps that's so. I remarked to Berta that if I could describe why French food is generally so good then it would make her sad that she wasn't having any.

I remember standing at the airport in Philly waiting for Berta to pick me up and looking at everyone on the platform thinking, "I've got bread that was baked fresh this morning - in Paris." And I smiled like an idiot.

We need a nice stable server running Apache 2.0 and someone to call to keep everything from going wrong and when everything does go wrong. And then we need to move every blogger in Philly over from Blogspot to a supercool fresh WordPress install.  This is my dream as the Philly WordPress Meetup organizer visiting the Philly Weblogger Meetup.

Yes, that would be keen.

I would write more about the meetupS themselves but I'm beat from a very long day.  Maybe I'll spill some details tomorrow, or perhaps later today (seeing the current time is 1:20am) after I get a little sleep.  Yeah, I know it's a lame lead-on, but I wanted to insert some key thoughts here before I lost them entirely when I got back to write.

Ugh. Today is not panning out as I expected.

I woke up with the terrible headache that I sometimes get when I wake up. I believe that this in itself isn't usual. Don't people usually take naps to rid themselves of headaches?

Anyway, I've been going all day with the headache doing its thing, and I held off taking any drugs until lunch time because all I had on-hand was Excedrin, and with the caffeine in the soda I was drinking (thought that might fix it) I'd be a jittery, scattered mess.

So when I got to Wawa - the only place I really had the energy for to get lunch - they were totally out of ibuprofen products, excpet for one item, and I am not currently experiencing water retention problems, if you know what I mean.

Instead, I took some of the aspirin I keep in my car (yeah, ok, travelling medicine cabinet, I know) and it's doing nothing for me. And I kep rubbing my forehead, and try to extend the rubbing down to my eyes, but then I remember my contacts are in, and that would be bad. Ugh.

I just want to throw up and fall asleep. Blah.

Did you do FFAF yet? It's on.

Things like this genuinely tick me off. Near my house there is an intersection - routes 113 and 30, if you know it - that has been the way it has for years. It's been that way as long as I remember, anyway, and probably longer than that.

Now I'll admit to you that the intersection is strangely organized. Whenver we give directions to people coming to visit from out of town, we have to carefully describe how to go through this intersection. It is a little confusing, but only really for people who are both unfamiliar with the layout of the intersection and needing to enter the few blocks of housing back where I live. Most of the traffic coming from that direction (from 113) is going to turn left or right onto 30, making the decision of how to navigate the intersection quite trivial.

Well it seems that in their quest to screw up all the roads in Downingtown, they've decided to reconstruct that intersection. Construction began this morning, and as I drove through it, I was left with the impression that traffic designers haven't the slightest care for efficiency.

They had strung the new lights a week or two ago, and I was curious how they were going to orient drivers to face the lights, which were incorrectly aligned to the direction of traffic coming from Whiteland Ave. As it turns out, they're ripping up the whole road and forcing cars to aim toward the lights. That's not so bad, really, except they have now removed the right-turn lane.

It's obvious that this wasn't an oversight on the part of the designer because they clearly re-lined the road already to indicate that the single lane that will now be available is for turning any direction. There is a big white three-way arrow on the gorund there now.

I wonder if anyone bothered to ask the question, "Do you people who will be affected by this change actually want this?" It seems to me like someone was thinking to fix a problem that does not exist. The main problem with that intersection is not the aiming of Whiteland Ave. northward, but how traffic coming from the south or east must yield to northbound traffic coming from the west. If it is their intent to fix this problem, then I'm glad, but I don't see why Whiteland Ave. had to be forced into one lane to accomplish this goal.

Moreover, since I'm known to see conspiracies everywhere, why do I not know about these changes? I mean, I live there, and only found out about it when they started painting new lines in the road. There has got to be a better way to obtain information about how my local government is screwing me.

And while I'm on the topic of things that irritated me while driving today, I want to repeat that area bicyclists are stupid.  I passed two bikers on the street today.  This is not a big deal.  But no more than 20 feet to the left of the road, there is a bike trail, made specifically for bikes. 

Now just to elminate any possibility of excuse for them, the bike trail crosses this road in two places.  I passed the bikers between these two crossing points.  In the stretch of road between these two crossing points there is nothing.  There is no house, no road, no path.  Nothing.

I realize that bicyclists have every right to be on the road if they want to, but come on!  There is a freakin' path designed for your travel, away from the dangers of me running you down for your stupidity.  The path even connects to the larger path in town, and that path probably goes everywhere you might need to go.

It was pretty clear from their appearance that they weren't "professional" riders.  These two were just out for a ride.  Don't get me wrong, the "professional" riders are much worse, insisting on biking on the windingest 1.5-lane blind-turn high-traffic roads.  There should be bicycle police, and they should have guns, and just shoot these examples of evolution at work.

[http://asymptomatic.net/audio/Toad the Wet Sprocket - I Will Not Take These Things For Granted.mp3]