My Diaries

The pictures from our last week-end in Saint-Malo (Bretagne), for our friends Caro and Alex’s goodbye party (they are leaving for a 6-month trip to Africa) are online in my photo gallery (here or through the menu, if you click on Photos).

Dear Stacey,

Thank you so much for allowing us to share those precious moments with you! Your wedding was awesome : great organization, great people and a lot of fun! You were the most beautiful bride, shining with joy and pride. You are both great people and we wish you all the best for your new life as a married couple. It might seem that it won’t, but getting married actually does change things in the relationship. At least it did for us, even though I was the first one to claim once that marriage was just a paper and that the girls who wanted to get married only wanted to do so for the dress. Since Pete and I decided to get married, our couple changed : tighter bonds, stronger feeling about our shared responsibility to make the relationship work, deeper commitment… I never thought that marriage would change this, but our relationship has never been as fruitful as since we got engaged.

I guess the reason why I say this here is that I hope it will be the same for you, and that your love will continue to grow little by little into a wonderful tree. A friend of mine once told me that love is like a plant : you need to water it to make it grow, and to remove the bad parts to keep it healthy. This metaphor has never left me and I can see today how much it is right.

By now you probably have come back from your honeymoon, so you may have a bit of time to check the pictures we took from your wedding on my photo gallery here.

Once again we wish both of you all the best for this new start, and especially a fulfilling, serene relationship.

Love,

Nadège

A quick update about the Act4Trees operation : it is doing good! In 12 days there was 5 million new leaves on the website. At this rate, in “only” 204 days AquaVerde association will be able to get their 10000€. Let’s hope it won’t slow down!

Just between us, an easy trick to spread the word: create a link toward one of the forests in your e-mail signature. In that way, your contacts will be able to know about Act4trees without you needing to talk about it!

Read on MEDAD (French Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Planning and Development) website.
(I’ll pass the details, and please forgive my poor English since the translation is very technical and I didn’t spend too much time on it):

Our State Minister Jean-Louis BORLOO visited last August Météo France National Center for Research in Meteorology in Toulouse, and participated into a workshop about last summer’s climate conditions, and on the climate change question. Here below are some summarizing elements from the meeting, as presented by the Ministry :

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Going back to the presidential campaign, during the Sarkozy-Royal debate : at the time, Royal had been called an ignorant because she stated that French nuclear power only met 17% of France consumed energy, and Sarkozy had triggered passionate debates (at least between one of my colleagues and I) when he affirmed that the soon-to-be-built French nuclear reactor, an EPR type, was a 4th generation reactor (for those who haven’t seen it: the Sarko-Ségo debate on environment and nuclear power).

At the time, my opinion was that neither one or the other was right. I thought that nuclear power counted as much as 78% in our electricity production, and I thought I understood that part of the debate on whether France should build the EPR reactor or not actually was that the EPR technology was already outdated, part of a 3rd generation of reactors, while the 4th generation was more secure, less polluting, and more efficient.

But I just found on Ressources-solidaires.org website the answer to my questions : it is a very interesting article (in French) which explains everything and settles the debate.

I won’t spoil it for you… Enjoy!