My Reality is Shrinking

...And I become more conscious of this every time I watch an American TV show and see how big the trucks are. When we first arrived here, everything was tiny to us - from cars to people to bags of chips, the whole country seemed Lilliputian. Now, everything here seems normal-sized, and my occasional exposures to US stuff are starting to get funnier and funnier. Today we received a box in the mail from a US friend who was kind enough to send us some popcorn, various sauces, and a hilariously huge pillow-sized bag of chips... complete with large jug of accompanying salsa. There's a serious message here about American gut sizes, methinks...

But, in even better news, I also received a Christmas pipe! This magnificent beast -

(Whose picture sadly seems to have gone missing in the site host switch)

is a gorgeous Ser Jacopo with more stampings than I think I have ever seen on a pipe. It reads, "Unigena - MAXIMA MAXIMA - Ser Jacq - S2 - Per Aspera Ad Astra - Fatta A Mano". Beaucoup des merci's go to the very kind soul who gifted me with this wonder, which I am currently staring at and lusting over as I race through this blog entry to get it finished so I can load up three hours' worth of Cob Flake. That poker shown to the side is one of our Ligne Bretagnes - in fact, one of the largest of the standard LB shapes, and one which I have heard several French pipe buyers describe as "too big". But look at what we American-types want ;)