This week was a lazy one. Long sleep-ins, late nights and a whole lot of French romance movies with my host sister Elizabeth. There’s not much to say really, I just embraced my life as a couch potato. When I wasn’t a couch potato, I played with the dogs, went swimming and played a bit of flute. It’s quite sad, but I have been rejecting my flute during my exchange. I still get strong urges to practice but something always seems to come up or I’ll find an excuse. My current excuse is that I don’t have a music stand which is genuinely problematic. To fix this, I play outside and attach the music to the clothes hanger with pegs – true desperation I know. I don’t know if I’ll be able to continue lessons with my flute teacher here, because I live far away from her, it’d be a pain to switch and I like her a lot.

I almost forgot: the smallest dog called Judie had puppies! I was so shocked because I thought she was a puppy as she’s so small and fluffy. I could not understand how I hadn’t noticed she was pregnant – I see her every day for goodness sake! She had six but 2 died at the vet and one the night after, the surviving ones are really cute and I can fit two in one hand! The first time I saw them I actually thought they looked like baby possums (never a good thought when you used to trap them)!

Other than that the only semi interesting thing that happened was when I was lazing on the trampoline reading a book. Four furry caterpillars fell from the tree all at once and landed right beside my head. They didn’t look friendly so I left them to it – and a good thing too, apparently they were pine processionary caterpillars, a poisonous one that causes bad skin reactions. My host family said that one of their cats ate one last year and died. I won’t be hanging around any more pine trees in France, that’s for sure!