He was so cute!  And so well-behaved - I honestly couldn’t believe that he was in his “terrible twos.”  After lunch, Luc took their little gas molecule outside to bounce around in a less-confined space, and we joined them a bit later.  Then E, L and I played a little football (translation: soccer) and took a walk over to a match that was taking place in their village’s soccer field.  Florent buzzed alongside us on his little tricycle, and showed much greater respect for the roadway than the grownups.  He insisted on riding on the grassy shoulder of the road rather than in the road itself, since he said that he didn’t want to be run over.

That rather journalistic description doesn’t supply the amazing contentment of the day.  It is a very blustery autumn - in fact, the most autumny autumn that I have ever experienced, all changing colors and sudden showers and mistral-like winds - and I’ve discovered that autumn is a marvelous season.  Passing the day in a little French village with an unpronounceable name, having a long, languid lunch and talking in a mixture of French and English, being around the obvious love in this young family, watching Luc rake yellow leaves from the ground around their dormant garden, walking through a drizzle to watch the local soccer team duke it out with another team on a field with old Frenchmen in caps leaning on the wooden railings…  I felt welcomed and comfortable.  It was wonderful.  ::contented sigh::

Changing moods entirely: yesterday evening I wanted to watch “The Rock,” which was showing on TV.  Unfortunately, the station that it was on is one that I couldn’t get very well at all - static-y and in black-and-white.  That was fixable - all I had to do was program my TV to look for that particular station on channel 10 rather than on channel 1.  Unfortunately, the decade-old remote control for my TV hadn’t had its batteries replaced since it left the factory, and I didn’t have any AAA batteries.  I borrowed some from Hannah, then proceeded to spend half of the movie trying to figure out which of the hundreds of combinations of buttons-whose-markings-had-been-rubbed-off-by-a-decade-of-use told the TV what it needed to do.  In the end, it turned out to be something like this: press the yellow button four times, press the “up” volume button, press the yellow button several more times, press the “up” volume button again and again, waiting in between each press for about ten seconds while the TV searches for a signal in that band range, then press the sticky blue button, then do a little tap dance for the gods of the television, then press the grey button - or maybe the orange one - and so on.  Apparently my dancing was acceptable and I got to watch the last hour or so of the movie.  I missed the awesome chase sequence through the streets of San Francisco, but I *did* get to see the great shot at the end with the MIGs breaking formation in the sky above a flare-holding Nicholas Cage.  Also got to see many close-ups of Ed Harris’ eyes, which was *so* difficult, let me tell you.

After the movie, I briefly amused myself by seeing how many cuss words my French-English dictionary lists.  I started this search in the spirit of scientific inquiry, of course.  There was one word that kept being repeated in the movie for which I don’t have the exact translation. (I’ve also heard it used extensively by the teenaged gamers who use the computers in the internet “cafe” where I sometimes check my email.)  Unfortunately, my best guess as to its spelling didn’t show up in my dictionary, but that led me to see how many other words I could find.  This led to the distressing discovery that I can only think of four words to even try to look up!  (They were all in there.)  I mean, don’t you find it a bit odd that a 22-year-old can only think of four really offensive words?  I feel like I should petition to spend a day back in high school, just to brush up on my vocabulary.  Either that, or I should invest in the book that I’ve frequently seen - “Shakespearean Insults for Fun and Profit,” or something like that.  Might be more satisfying in the long run.  I mean, why call someone something banal and everyday when you could call them a “hackneyed, short-staffed cur?”