By now you know our routine by heart. But today I’m going to add photos of our route to work. I think that last time I did this that I showed you the wrong stairs. This morning I took photos as we went and Cathy is in all of them, so I now won’t get them mixed up with the hundreds of other photos of stairs that I’ve taken in this hilly village.   Today I was assigned a true gardening task and I have the scars to prove it – and the back ache. Around the serre are several beds of aloe vera along with some other plants and these beds were 6 inches high with leaves. My job was to clean out the leaves. But raking was not an option, in fact, no tool could be used other than my gloved hands because the aloe vera breaks so easily. So I spent about 3 hours kneeling, bending, reaching to drag all the leaves out of these large beds and put them in a large plastic bag to be dragged over to the compost area. Truthfully, I enjoyed the job – the weather was sunny with clear bright blue skies and it was warm with a cool breeze. Also, it was the kind of job where you can see the results without question. So why do I say I have the scars to prove it? Well, I had borrowed a light yellow shirt from Cathy and was wearing it with the long sleeves turned up 2 turns, so there was a gap of my skin exposed between the shirt sleeves and my gardening gloves. I didn’t feel a thing, but when Cathy came by (after helping T dig a trench!), she said, “Hey! You’ve gotten blood on my brand new shirt!” I looked and saw blood in several places, not only on the shirt, but also on my jeans. I checked my arms and they had gotten punctured by the aloe vera plants many, many times as I cleared the leaves from around them. Not only was I scratched and bleeding, but I was also having a reaction to the scratches – rather like hives. So, what did I do? I took off the yellow shirt, borrowed Cathy’s blue denim shirt, and buttoned the long sleeves tightly and tucked them under my gloves and kept on working, of course! Can’t let a little blood stop me! For the last hour of our work day Cathy and I cut up long branches that had been snipped from the huge wild rose bushes (trees?) that S had spent the morning trimming. I was very careful with the thorns. Unfortunately, I had no time to take photos there this morning. We left our gardening job at 11:30 and walked to the Wednesday outdoor market here in Bormes les Mimosas. I did take photos and have posted them here. Cathy and I bought goat cheese, peaches, strawberries, tomatoes, green beans, and eggs, and then made our way home. We were starving and tired, as any true farm hands would be. For lunch we ate goat cheese, bread, lettuce, tomatoes, chicken, strawberries, and a lovely red wine, a Macon. It was a really enjoyable lunch! Maybe it was all that hard work and being outdoors. After lunch we put laundry in the washing machine – had to get the blood out of that yellow shirt right away. This machine takes about 2 hours, or maybe more, to do a load of wash, so we didn’t wait around. We went off walking down that same hill I keep telling you we are walking down – it leads to an area of Bormes les Mimosas called le Pin, and that is the closest shopping to us – a small grocery store called Huit a Huit, which means 8 to 8, but it’s not open from 8 to 8, a boucherie/charcuterie, a boulangerie, a little restaurant, and a pharmacy – maybe there are other shops, but those are the ones I’ve paid attention to – hmmm….I think there is a gourmet shop and a flower shop, but we haven’t been in either – we are on a tight budget! Anyway, the reason we made this trek (remember, it takes half an hour to walk down and 3 hours to walk up?) is to buy some healing cream for my injured arms. Our legs were so tired from walking the beach yesterday and gardening today that we thought we might not make it back up the hill this time, but we did. My wounds tended to, we decided to go to the art museum here in town: au Musee Arts & Histoire. There was an exhibit of works by an artist named Auguste Chabaud (1882 – 1955), who was a contemporary of Matisse and who knew him and attended some of the same classes as he did and exhibited with him. This exhibit displayed a group of drawings that he had done as studies in one year’s time, 1901-1902. We were very pleasantly surprised. The drawings were very interesting as a group and several were particularly wonderful. I couldn’t get too many good photos of the works themselves because of the reflections from the glass they were framed under, but I will put a few in this post anyway. And I have several photos of the museum buillding. After leaving the museum, Cathy and I found a place to sit and we each did a 15 minute work. I have photos of where we sat, each of us working, and the finished results. We wandered around for about another hour and a half before returning to our apartment. We hung out our wet laundry and indulged in a most delicious snack: a chocolate croissant and an almond/chocolate croissant – each had half of each one. We snacked on our patio and are still sitting there – Cathy is drawing and I am writing this blog. I discovered, to my delight, that the apartment wifi works out here. Hooray!!! The only thing left to do this evening is have dinner, and we plan on making an omelet and some green beans and tomatoes. But I’m going to finish this blog post before dinner so that I can indulge some more – this time in some wine – after which I plan to be entirely useless.