After morning chores and breakfast I helped in the fromagerie again, flipping cheese. For some of the newer cheese I also wiped them with water to encourage mold to grow and create a strong rind. It was a little nerve wracking at times to make sure the stand did not tip over when I was flipping a group of 8 chess rounds on one of the upper racks. I took my time and all went well but my arms are a bit sore from all the pulling of heavy trays of cheese. Valerie took a picture of me as we were finishing off the cheeses we were washing.
It rained on and off all afternoon so I took it easy, reading my book and taking a nap. My body is tired but not sore and my hands are adjusting to all the work I have been doing with them. I also booked my train trips to Quebec City, Montréal and Toronto as well as Airbnb’s in each of those cities. I’ve received suggestions of things to check out in Quebec City and Montreal, including a really good place to get poutine!
I milked the goats with Valerie this evening, we had a really good rhythm together. I got to separate the goats all by myself for the first time, putting all of the ones who have not been milked into one area so that we knew who still needed to be milked. My milking skills are getting better and I spent a good amount of time using the milking machine, which I’m becoming more comfortable with. It feels good to see my skills increasing. I was also able to get the horses to come out of the meadow to eat their dinner without having to walk out there with some hay to tempt them. It probably helped that it was raining too!
After dinner, we played a couple of games, in French, of course. One was called Deception. There are two teams, and each team had four different words that they had to give one word clues for to the other team but make them obscure so the other team couldn’t figure them out. Each time a player would only give clues for three of the four words, based on a card you drew with 3 numbers on it. If the other team guessed the correct category that each of the word clues you gave went into they received a ‘good’ token, and if they managed to get two good tokens, they won the game. At the same time your own team had to guess what word went with which category and if they got it wrong you ended up with a ‘bad’ token, and if you got two of those your team lost. The other way to win was for the team to figure out what all four of the word categories were. It resulted in a lot of laughter from both teams. Note: the word Bidonville means ‘slum’ in French. The other was a word game similar to bingo card where you had to think of a word that encapsulated both of the words in that square and see if anybody could guess it. I knew a lot of the words in the game but not most of the ones that people shouted it out. Regardless, it was a lot of fun and we laughed a lot. It was a fun way to end the evening and it helped me improve my French a bit.
