This is what Rebecca does when she gets bored.

Today was another day I spent walking around the town. Did I mention that an elderly couple who keeps chickens and geese lives just down the street from the school? I can sometimes hear their roosters crowing in the morning. They also have a German Shepherd named Leo (pronounced Lay-O); I know his name because he spends most of his time barking and one of his owners is always yelling at him to stop. Today I found the town's park, a war memorial, and train station. I'm hoping to go there this week and buy a ticket for Amiens, where there's a mandatory training day on October 1. After that, I'm told, I'll spend about a week observing classes before I start teaching myself. I still find the idea very scary. These students are uncomfortably close to my own age – I'm sure it won't take them long to figure out I'm really one of them.

And my adventures with French dining still continue. Today for dinner I microwaved a can of beef ravioli, and it didn't taste much like the Chef Boyardee brand, which is good, because I ate so many cans of that during my four years of college that I may never eat it again. So far the supermarket food has been pretty tasty. And I finally tried some of Marcel Proust's little madelines. They tasted a lot like angel food cake.

Sara gave me a copy of this really wonderful book, The Dogs of Babel, just before I left. The main character, Paul, is a linguistics professor who plays a lot of different word games, his favorite being to make as many words as you can out of a person's name. I got bored last night and gave it a try. My first and last names can form a surprising number of words; tell me in comments if you think of any new ones, although I'm pretty sure I've exhausted all the possibilities.

( Long list of words )