This is what Rebecca does when she gets bored.

[rebecca_in_blue]

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.

Ace
Acre
Are
Bar
Bare
Be
Bee
Bear
Beer
Beware
Boar
Bore
Bow
Bra
Brace
Brew
Brow
Cab
Car
Care
Cob
Cobra
Core
Cow
Cower
Crab
Crib
Crew
Crow
Ear
Era
Ice
Ire
Oar
Orb
Ore
Owe
Race
Raw
Rib
Rice
Rob
Robe
Row
War
Wear
Web
Wire
Woe
Wore