Outing to Annecy

On our day off today we went to annecy a city in the alps with a family from our village. It was a beautiful day on the lake.

Here is our group in fron ot the old prison.

Pretty, pretty, pretty!

Wallpapering 101

The skill of this week we learned was wallpaper aplication. After years of wallpaper removal it was interesting to learn how it goes up. We were putting up wallpaper at missionary friends, Dave and Susan Griffiths new house. This is Susan and I.

Here is Maribeth Taylor our newest intern, here for 6 months doing one of the messy jobs of wallpaper pasting.

August entertaining

We just finished up cooking for a group of 70 some cambodians who were here for a week, it was a long week but it was fun to introduce them to some french foods they had never tried before, one thing being creme brulee, they were all quite facinated by the whole thing.

All work and no play

Here is Austin, an intern and I working on tearing down the courtyard wall so we will be able to expand it.

Anne-Christine and I the offiacl dryers of dishes at the cottage.

I really like my new knives donated to the chateau by some English friends, finally i will be able to slice a tomato and stop sawing them.

Here is Anne-Christine and I being very happy after hours of putting up stucco in on the the chateau's dorm rooms.

Summer and Skis

This is our summertime team at the chateau at the moment from right to left Anne-Christine, Me, Lily, Emilynn, Michael, Jay, and the not pictured Debbie and Austin.
Here was a mornings project to carry a bunch of skis, 70 maybe, 1/4 mile from a little building at the entrance to the chateau attic. It was a project. Here are we girls after we got every ski up there. Just in case you are wondering why we have 70 odd skis, one of the chateau associations that hosts an annual ski camp for youth bought out a ski rental place, so they would have them for the kids.

Here is Emilynn starting the long journey with 2 pairs of skis, notice the kids watching, wondering what we are doing with all these skis.

Finally, we got them all up there. Now the next person who takes them out has to put them back.

Burnt Cake and Bastille Day

Today, is bastille day, pretty much the french 4th of July. Yesterday evening Macon had their fireworks and we had the fun of not knowing all day if they would have them as it was raining off and on all day. We had dinner with friends, a progressive dinner from the patio to the dining room to the patio again as the weatheher allowed. In the end though the weather was fairly clear and we were able we to go to the river and watched a nice show of fireworks. The most fun part was the ooo's and ahhh's of our friends little girl who was sitting on my lap.

In going to our friends it was our duty to bring desserts. I had decied to make a choclate cake which unfortunatly became a slightly burnt offering, I am too easily distracted when reading cookbooks. This morning when prowling around looking for breakfast I came across the cake and decided to do an experiment. I made french toast with slices of cake, which turned out to be a quite tasty experince, much better than the dry cake it was. So there you go next time you burn your cake, it is not lost from all usefulness, throw it in a little french toast batter and enjoy, just don't burn it this time too.

Crowbars, chisels, and implements of destruction

This week's project has been the Hockings house. Originally, we were just going to be removing wallpaper but after we started Debbie began contemplating if we tore down the drywall we could expose the stone walls, and deciding to go for it we changed tools. Here Emilynn and I are ripping down the drywall, a job we decided would be best those with anger problems.

Here we are, putting some holes in and making a big mess.

Who says that destruction was not a girl thing? So far, this project has been 95% done by us girls.

Now that all the drywall and framing is down we are chiseling out the old grout, I'm sure there is a techincal term for this. We then will be eithor sandblasing or wire brushing the wall and repointing the stones. We have had a lot of fun so far and the time has gone fast listening to audiobooks.

This is a picture from 2 weeks ago at my old co-worker melody Brickel's wedding in Paris, this is the group from the church at Macon that made the trip.