Beautiful dawn this morning, so glad I was up to enjoy it.
Today was another day of putting up hay in the barn. Luckily, we didn’t have to do as much, they were only two truckloads this time because they are having much larger bales made, which will entail a tractor driving them into the barn. Those will still need to be manipulated a bit, but likely that won’t be some thing I will have to help with! All went well with getting the smaller hay bales into place today, except afterwards, when I realized I had put my glasses in my pocket and they had fallen out while I was shifting bales and by the time I realized it it was impossible to figure out where my glasses may have dropped and there was no way to shift the bales to find them. Luckily, they were my cheapie Zenni glasses and I had brought a second pair for back up. That’ll teach me to make sure that I have secured my glasses in a zippered pocket!
It was another hot day, so after finishing with the hay I took a lovely shower then went down to the river. It was wonderful getting my legs wet, then laying in the hammock and reading. I just finished a book called And The Birds Rained Down, about a group of older people living on their own in the deep woods of Canada. It was a touching and wonderful book.
I think one of the most challenging things for me to get used to, besides the fact that I don’t have enough Québecois French skills to be able to understand what people are saying most of the time, is how dinner comes together here. It’s pretty much left up to whoever wants to make dinner and they can make whatever they want to share with others. There’s no specific time that anyone eats and you just use whatever food you can find in the fridge unless you happen to buy something at the store. This is really different from how I have lived, especially the last few years that I’ve been living on my own, where I would usually make sure I had a meal plan for the week and the supplies I needed. I’m also not used to cooking everything from scratch (bread, soup, etc.) so it feels very intimidating. I prefer having the role as sous chef or to clean up dishes afterwards because I don’t like the stress of trying to figure out what to cook given the items available. Hopefully they don’t feel like I am a total flake! I have explained that the way we usually do meals is pretty different, a lot of meals that are pre-packaged to some extent.
It was still pretty warm at bedtime last night so I went for a walk outside to cool off and see the amazing star show. Because there is so little artificial light the stars are out in full force. I only wish I could capture it better with my camera. As I was sitting next to the fromagerie I saw a shooting star-what a treat! The sounds of insects and owls filled the air, I think it was noisier than during the daytime.
