What a lot of work I have to do in the apartment! Mostly it involves sorting out a whole lot of things and taking them down to the rubbish, I'm talking about the magazine pile, no-one needs two years worth of Paris Match and Point de Vue. And the other thing is clothes, there are old t-shirts I wore in Australia and I just don't need those hanging around. In the past couple of years I've got a lot less interested in buying clothes, which is good because, oddly enough, Paris is not a great place for buying clothes for the normal person. Unless very expensive, the quality is not good, so nowadays I reserve the clothesbuying for trips to Germany and Scandinavia.

I've done a little bit today, followed by a trip to Le Bon Marche, where I bought two French embroidery books, one regarding a historic sampler collection and one by Marie-Therese St Aubin about fish:

FNAC will only give a tiny picture of the sampler book, but you can enlarge the Poissons! Why, I do not know. You can see they are both in the same collection, Mango Pratique Cahier du Createur.

I've also been to WH Smith to buy some novels to read while it is still so hot and I don't feel like doing anything, and then went to Hippo and had tartare of tomatoes with shrimps followed by a bavette with baked potato and roquefort sauce. I love Hippo, it is a chain restaurant and can be variable, but is generally good. Lovely steaks, bavette or onglet, and nice salads and things as well. When the Dwarf got delayed for seven hours at CDG, he got a free meal at Hippo and said it was horrible. But he chose grilled chicken, which is not something that I would choose in France anyway, and probably on a busy day when they are giving out lots of free meals to stranded travellers, it was a super-dry piece of cardboard with some wet green beans. He should have had the steak or the Cretan Salad (big hit of their summer menu).

It is still hot, it was 27 degrees inside the apartment at 1pm, so I've gone out and left the curtains drawn. hopefully it won't climb too much more, and it did get down to about 25 overnight. I'm sitting at work now with a fan trained on me, and I'm about to revise a decision sheet for Leo and send it to him. That leaves me one major piece of work for tomorrow or Monday.

Have only stitched a little bit today, in between trip to Le Bon Marche and trip to WH Smith / La Defense, on the Papillon pochette. Will do more of that tonight, in between reading new books and sipping on the rose wine I intend to buy on the way home!