Man, I feel burly--the illustrated version

Does this tractor not bear a striking resemblance to the morphazoidasaurus from before?

Gratuitous self-portrait as lumberjack:

Semblance of a social life

Last weekend, Vincent and Florian took me with them to a party at the farm where Vincent's brother works. Florian had warned me that the brother, who was 26 (two years older than Vincent) was often mistaken for his younger brother because he was such a dreamer.

The brother met us outside and showed us into the party barn. It was dark; they were screening a documentary about a non-violent protest in India. The fifteen or so people there were watching the film projected onto a screen, but we sat on bales of hay behind the mac used to play the DVD, so we got a double view. Two other features of the barn jumped out at me immediately: they had turntables and there was a huge, rainbow-colored butterfly kite attached to the wall next to the screen. I couldn't figure out what the protest in the movie was for, despite the fact that most of it was in English. There were various Indian and international people giving interviews about how lovely it was that fifteen thousand people from all over the world had come, and about the importance of non-violence. Perhaps my favorite interviewee was an American woman: she was white, fortyish, blond, and had a red bindi smudged across most of her forehead.

Despite how extraordinarily compelling the movie was, it was hard to focus on it, because there were people milling about taking soup out of a steaming pot on the table in front of us and then sipping it out of huge bowls. Further, there was an approximately seven-year-old boy running around chasing multiple cats with a piece of yarn. When the movie ended and the lights were put back on, we realized that the barn was filled with smoke from a fire in a metal trash bin that served as a heater. Vincent's bro and a friend scrambled to find a ladder to open up a few windows near the roof. The seven-year-old skipped over to a Yamaha keyboard and put on one of the pre-programmed jam beats, over which he started playing sounds with the keys. He soloed for awhile until the adult party guests wandered over, a few at a time, to fool around with the different beats and sounds. (There was no one around to get my Ferris Bueller reference--ach, ach, ach, ach, ach, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh.) Eventually someone put on vinyl, too, and hooked up the mac to make weird images to go with the sounds (like windows media player does). Then, with the moving images projecting onto the movie screen, about five people started an interpretive dance party right in front of the screen.

It was the hippest party I've been to since the Tupperware party with old British ladies at Jocelyne's house.

Man, I feel burly

For the second afternoon in a row today, I helped Vincent and his father, who looks remarkably like Belle's dad in Beauty and the Beast, haul around wood. They were felling branches from several huge trees on the farm to make firewood. (Vincent's and his parents' adjacent houses are both heated entirely by wood all year.)

Vincent and I started out by throwing big logs and fat branches, which he had cut yesterday, into a wagon attached to the back of a tractor. I'm not sure why, but somehow, tossing huge logs was the most entertaining thing I've done in awhile. They were all somewhat heavy and unwieldy, and there was immense satisfaction in pitching them all the way to the back of the wagon to pile the wood evenly, and in keeping up with Vincent while doing so. It brought me back to childhood summers spent flinging mud balls at the neighbor kids and building forts in the bushes with my brother.

I alternated throwing the big logs into the wagon with picking up smaller branches and hurling them onto the top of a pile that will be used to make wood chips for compost. Some were teeny, but others looked like small trees in their own right. I had a sudden, strange urge to find a red and black flannel shirt and eat flapjacks. Fortunately, I reconsidered the flannel part pretty quickly. Maybe my next project should be to train for the Highland games (except for the part about the kilt).

When Vincent and his pop had finished carting off all the logs from a tree or two, Vincent used a robotic claw on the front of the other tractor to pick up all the smaller branches still littering the ground and move them onto the little branch pile. It was SO COOL. I'm sure that my awe was not unlike what three-year-olds all over America feel when they go through their "construction worker" phase. With the claw in action, the tractor stopped looking like farm equipment and took on the semblance of a toothy dinosaur, or the huge Power Ranger thingie that they turned into when it was "morphin' time":

The world is their urinal

Cities may be an exception, but it seems that everywhere, at any time of day or night, French men can be found peeing outside.

Age is no factor: from boy-children to old men, they all piss outside. In public. Without saying a word, they step a few yards away from their companions and let flow onto a bush, the nearest fence, or just the dark night air. Recently, I saw someone actually go outside for the purpose of peeing, even though there was a toilet available. Further, French men driving cars have no qualms about pulling over to pee by the side of the road. Once, when I was riding my bike up a hill through the countryside, I startled a middle-aged dude maybe eight feet away who was about to take a leak. It was broad daylight on a main road.

The profusion of public pissers perturbed me at first. Then I started thinking, why not? As long as there aren't so many people peeing that it starts to stink, it's kind of a practical thing to do. At least it saves toilet water and time. Maybe we Americans are just prudish. However, I'm not ready to condone public pissing until it is an equal opportunity venture. Why don't French women get to pop a squat in the great outdoors? Practically speaking, if everyone were to pee outside, half of us would have to start wearing skirts all the time or carrying some sort of special funnel. (Yes, they exist.) And I'm not about to recommend one of those options, either. So until I come up with a better solution, and unless I decide to go renegade, I'll only be peeing outside alone, concealed by darkness and/or shrubbery, when I can't find a toilet.

Cheese Cellar Haiku

Wheel of Cheese

Your edges--hard, rough,
pitted, yellow, cracked--recall
a foot's calloused heel

Technicolor Potatoes

Hope everyone is enjoying food, family, football, and/or a paid holiday from work!


I'm not sure how to translate "Thanksgiving" into French, but I tried to spruce up our normal midday meal, American style.


First, I attempted to make my family's brownie recipe. 'Twas a bit harder than normal, given the lack of US measuring cups and spoons. Ended up using a drinking glass that looked to be approximately eight ounces for my "cup," and filled it to whatever fraction of a cup the recipe called for.


The baking was further hindered by a lack of highly-processed food products in the pantry. Couldn't find semi-sweet chocolate--does it even exist here?--or baking chocolate, so used dark. The sugar in the house is weird, organic cane sugar. The baking powder substitute is a little packet of mysterious pastry leavening stuff. French butter comes in much huger hunks than American, so I guestimated. The vanilla, in a little jar, appeared to be real, dried vanilla beans! What in the world does one do with real vanilla?! I sliced off a little bit and tried to mince it and throw it in with the melted chocolate.

I used the handy ruler page of my little Moleskine calendar to approximate the square inches of Vincent's mom's baking pan, compared it to my usual pan, and decided to multiply the recipe by 1.5. When the batter was finished, but didn't taste quite chocolately enough, I threw in some organic hot cocoa powder. It could very well have come out disastrously.


The brownies were in the oven and starting to smell good when someone knocked on the back door. It was a neighbor who was defying the normal cheese-selling schedule, and had to get her hands on some fromage, pronto. Vincent had disappeared and Florian was up to his triceps in curds and whey, so I weighed out the cheese, wrapped it really awkwardly in paper, and wrote out a faux invoice on a farmer's market flyer. Returned to the house just in time to rescue the brownies from crisping. They weren't quite the same as usual, but certainly passed muster.

French farms don't seem to keep a lot of dead birds around they way they keep cow and pig parts. Sausages would have to do in place of a turkey. Cranberries weren't to be found either, and without a turkey, one can't make proper stuffing. So, I settled on some potatoes and strange-looking little orange squashes. The potatoes had lovely, dark purple skin, and, to my delight, brilliant purple flesh! And, by some miracle, the water that they cooked in turned green. Yes, green. This organic agriculture shit is weird. Check out the resulting mashed spuds:

Enough about real food; how about some saccharin? I've much to be thankful for this year. Here's a start:

1. My family and extended family, expecially for being so supportive of my vagabond yearnings
2. Friends: best friends, Chicago friends who will be there when I come back, very old friends who surprise me with an email every now and then, friends who keep in touch even though I'm away, new friends
3. My girlfriend. I still can't figure out why she likes me.
4. Health and sanity. Zyrtec and French socialized medicine.
5. Undeserved hospitality. Farmers, couchsurfing hosts, family, and friends who feed and house me and (advertently or not) teach me
6. My grandma's brownie recipe
7. Technicolor potatoes
8. Bag balm
9. Public libraries
10. Point-and-shoot digital cameras

Moderately Incompetent

Control freak? There's a cure. Live in a new country for awhile. Doesn't matter if you speak the language; you won't know what's going on three-quarters of the time either way.

I keep wanting to tell my farmer hosts that I am not an idiot; I'm just a city girl who doesn't know French. Somehow, I don't think I will win the argument. "No, really, I'm not a moron...but would you mind talking to me slower than you speak to your four-year-old? Thanks."

Thumb update:
It grew back! (Mostly.) It's a hair thinner than before on one side, and it is somehow simultaneously sensitive and numb. That is, it hurts if I whack it even lightly, but I can't really feel anything well with it. I'm happy to be in one piece.

Happy bird-eating!