6 janvier 2010 (Day 128)
Today was a fun day! I helped Florence clean the kitchen and dining room. I haven’t seen that many spiderwebs in a long time. It did smell nice like lavender once we were done though. After helping Florence clean the house, we went and fed the sheep. Jean Claude put the baby ewe who had jumped out back in with the other babies. He grabbed one hind leg and let it walk around on the front two; it was quite humorous Around 11, Jean Claude, Florence, and Antoine left to go down into the city, which means Brooke and I had the day for ourselves. Brooke did some house cleaning (since she was asleep for the first part) while I heated up leftovers. I am so glad I grew up with a microwave in the house, because reheating leftovers on the stove is tedious! I made cinnamon couscous, warmed up some cauliflower, and had pork and lentils. Brooke had the rest of the potato omelet. After lunch we went out for a walk because it was such a beautiful day. We were walking in the hills behind the property, but Brooke isn’t much of the mountaineer, so after a while we turned around and went back. It was fun on the way though because three of the dogs (there are four) followed us and were leading the way. We tried to clean the rug, but I don’t know if we did much. I have never seen such a disgustingly dirty rug in my life. I beat it for five minutes straight and there were still giant clouds of dust whizzing off the rug turning the snow brown. We then grabbed the bikes and went for a ride! The dogs chased us and we went who knows how far, but it was gorgeous!!!! The bike ride convinced me that I need to find a bike in France.
We came back and decided to make some cookies. We rounded up all the ingredients and then we heading off to the industrial kitchen. We made honey cookies and chocolate chip cookies. Man did that dough taste good! In between changing flavors, we went out and fed the sheep. Brooke secretly hates sheep, so it is totally entertaining to watch her freak out about them. The sheep got fed and so did we later that night. Before the family came home while Brooke was packing (she leaves tomorrow) I played Colorblind by Counting Crows on the piano and some songs on the guitar like: Country Roads (which I had sang to Brooke earlier on our hike in the mountains), Nantes, Goodbye My Lover, and Picture to Burn. I am still sad about losing my only plectrum (aka guitar pick) somewhere in this house.
We had pork roast and pasta while we cooked some cookies. It was an adventure because we didn’t use a cookie rack and some of the cookies slid off the parchment paper and were baking on the bottom of the oven! Brooke freaked out enough for everyone and we got it fixed several minutes and some parchment paper on fire later. The cookies were pretty good. French butter does strange things to cookies though and the butter taste is very strong. During dinner we talked about lots of random trivia like who invented what and discovered where. Antoine asks the greatest questions really randomly. It will have nothing to do with what anyone is talking about and then he will suddenly ask, “What is malaria?” “How many English people are there?” “Who discovered Australia?” Brooke corrected my paper after our dessert of cookies and milk, before which Jean Claude asked if we were allowed to dip the cookies in milk, lol. Yes!! We also had another practice at learning the moves to “Laissez-Moi Danser” which is only the best French disco song. EVER. (Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYduBo6gqYk)
