Dreaming of France -- Pre-France Preparation

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even a pastry? Or if  you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
I dream about moving to France a lot.
For a while it seemed really far away, but now, with my youngest graduating high school and going off to college in the fall, it feels closer.
And I'm buying into the philosophy that you should start living your life the way you want it to be.
It's gotten to the point where anything I buy, I stop to think, would I move this with me to France.
I'm running short of dish cloths for washing dishes, but I haven't bought any new ones, thinking of all those beautiful cloths I can buy in France.
For my birthday, I got some stackable espresso cups. They were plain white and kind of squat rather than
 shot glass shaped. They were sensible, but they weren't something I would take when I moved to France. So I returned them and bought two cups in shades of blue and white.
They are definitely something I would wrap in thick paper and pack in a box to go overseas to my new home in France. I can even picture myself sitting on a balcony sipping espresso in these little cups while I gaze at the view of rolling hills that leads down to a village with a stone church, the spire stretching above the rest of the town.
I'd add a sugar cube, the kind you can find in France, wrapped in paper. And I'd use a tiny metal spoon to stir up the sugar until it dissolved as I watched the sun sink in the sky and I kept my refuge under the shade of a a gnarled olive tree.
Now I get to dream of France every day. Whenever I think I need to buy something new, I ask myself, "Would I take this to France?"
What belonging would you take if you moved to France?

Caffeine

An unintended side effect of this broken nose and surgery is that I have given up caffeine.
I know, it's as hard to make the leap between runnning and broken nose as it is between broken nose and caffeine.

Here I am getting an espresso hit in Paris.

Well, I did indeed fall while running and land on my nose breaking it. And now, I've given up caffeine due to the broken nose.
On Friday, the doctor scheduled surgery at 1:30 to put the bones back in place. That meant I couldn't eat or drink anything after midnight. Since I'm not a little kid, I thought this wouldn't be a big deal. I mean, I do have some self control.
I was up at my usual 5, getting things done on the computer. Around the time Tucker woke up for school, my head had started to ache a bit. I'd planned on running a few errands that morning to keep my mind off everything. By 9 a.m. I was lying on the couch with a pounding headache. At 11:30, half an hour before I was to appear for surgery, I was throwing up from the lack of caffeine. Not that I had anything in my stomach...

The morning after surgery, as I stood in front of the espresso maker, remembering how miserable I had felt without caffeine, and knowing that it was currently out of my system, I reached for the decaf.
If you'd asked me, I would have said my favorite thing about coffee in the morning is the flavor. I mix it with steamed milk and add a little sugar. Mmmm.
But, for some reason, the decaf coffee has not tasted as good.
For now, I'll stick with decaf, until the memories of withdrawal fade away. Then I'll probably be back to regular again.