A day full of variety...

Today started out great. I was up at 7am to help Marie-Laure prepare the bread and the oven for this afternoon. Early in the morning the day of the baking, a big fire is built inside the oven, and left to continually burn for about 5 hours. When the bread is ready to be put in, all the logs and ashes and bits of coal are removed, the oven is quickly cleaned out with a wet coth on a stick, and the bread is put in. It stays so hot that it cooks all the bread, and Marie-Laure said you can even cook things in it later in the evening it's still so hot. There's a guy that came a bit later that does most of the work with the bread, and I helped him shape the loafs, add nuts, chocolate chips and fruit to some, and roll others in sesame and poppy seeds. Then we put all 61Kg (Almost 130 pounds) of bread in the wood burning oven as fast as possible so as little heat as possible could escape. They bake and sell all their bread in a building just next to their house, and inside they have a giant wood-burning oven. I absolutely loved helping with the bread, and I'm excited yo do it again on Friday, even though they said it's harder on Fridays because there are more orders, and we will also make some different bread that needs to be kneaded by hand (they have a machine that does it otherwise). After lunch I went with Phillip in the tractor to see him cut wheat and grass for hay, and then I went with Jean-Yves (the farm hand) and helped him build three gates out of logs and barbed wire. Just before dinner I helped milk the cows, and I'm almost able to do it on my own-- I herded them all into the barn with the help of their sheep dog, Lalou, and once Marie-Laure got me started (with the many levers and buttons), things went pretty smoothly. Except, of course, for the 2 cows that shit all over my clothes right near the end. The cows are on a big step in front of us so it's easier to attatch the suckers (what I call the milkers that you attatch to the cow). Their poo is really liquidy, and comes out in a big arc, like a fountain. I wasn't quite able to move out of the way fast enough when one of them started to let go, and as soon as that one finished and I moved back, another one went off. It's ok, it only took a hot shower and an intense cycle in the wshing machine to solve that problem.