While the markets tremble

The weather has been lovely the last few days, sunny and pleasantly warm. We've been sitting on café terraces; other creatures have been making themselves comfotable in other ways.
We hear the distant rumbling of the financial crises, we read the news online, we watch CNN, but just as the rest of our everyday lives seem to have been put on hold, so do our real life financial concerns seem a bit distant. Of course I'm sitting here listening to the TV telling me the Dow has fallen 777 points, but I somehow can't register it as applying to the life I'm living this month.

We visited the wonderful Musée des Arts et Métiers yesterday. It's full of elaborate models of mechanical marvels, among them scale models of the building of the Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the French to the US in 1876. This museum is perfect for anyone with an interest in the way things work and the history of invention. Everything in it deals with real things, made by genius and hard work. It's a nice antidote to the dissolving fantasies of Wall Street and the banks.