Cows Cows Cows Cows

Cows in Beaumont, cows at their Sunday best, all clean and glossy. Yesterday was the day of the fête celebrating the 50th year of the local Comise Agricole. Cows, of course, were part of all this - as were sheep, chickens, ducks, geese (we skipped the opportunity to watch the gavage, the force feeding of geese that forms a basis of the production of foie gras). The cows here, at least the ones on display, were all Holsteins. Milk is their raison d'etre. Here's some of the ladies, one of whom has got herself on the wrong side of the rope enclosure:

Across the path from these, was this lovely little 'Dalmatian' calf. A Dalmatian Reincarnation?

Farther along, there was a grand show - a cow pedicure. We saw this cow being led - or more precisely, being pulled and pushed and tail-twisted - to the pedicure salon, a large steel set of livestock stocks, into which she was deposited with a lot more pushing and pulling. Once in, the apparatus grasps one leg, lifts it and presents it to the pedicurist, first for a trim:

and then for a finishing buff and polish with a disc sander:

Next to the pedicurist's truck were a group of calves - waiting their turn?

Meanwhile in the main square in the town, there was the usual market, with food, clothing, just about everything, even a hurdy gurdy player.

Isn't she something!

But life is more than just having fun at the local fetes, eh? Yesterday afternoon our friend and brilliant handyman (and horse vet, but that's a whole other story) Partick, came to start installing a counter top over our kitchen cabinets. Here's the result of yesterday afternoon's work:

Previously, this cabinet was topped with random bits of wood, wobbling around. Now it has a real counter top! Today, Patrick is tackling the opposite side of the kitchen, a much trickier problem. Here's the state of things there:

It seems that our state of life now is that we bumble around, trying to bring order out of chaos and then all of that precarious order tumbles into chaos once again. It always comes out better in the end, but it does seem an unrelenting process. Entropy is entirely too strong a force in our world!

This endeavor also uncovered some dodgy bits in the floor :

To fix it properly, everything along that wall would have to be removed, including the newly installed sink, but Patrick has come up with a solution involving a slim piece of metal laid onto the existing floor, spanning the dodgy area and preventing the washing machine from plummeting into the cellar one fine day.

I am thrilled with all this progress, in fact, tiring though it may be rearranging everything in the house on a daily basis, or so it seems. Once these kitchen counter tops are completed - Oh, I forgot to mention, the reason this can all now happen is that we finally found a stove top to fit the area this stovetop will sit on top of an Ikea cabinet (of course) with lots of drawers. And yesterday's work also included a lazy susan being installed into the corner cabinet. What this means is that we now have storage room for those things like pots and pans. Wheee! We can unpack the rest of the kitchen boxes, which means we can then unpack the rest of the book boxes behind those boxes. Someday, in the future, in a galaxy far, far away, we may just be able to live our normal lives, without the looming piles of unpacked boxes.