Huit!

Coffee and Scrabble mix well. A bit too well, actually: I haven’t been this hyper for this long in months. A third influence might be the spontaneous sense of community that has sprung up in the house with the arrival of three more guys. Now it feels less like we’re a small group oppressed by Thérèse and more like, between us, she’s become a much lesser evil that we’ll just have to tolerate together.

The new guys are Batiste and Igor, who came together from Grenoble on the train. I refer to them in my head as Harry and Ron. Elias is a bit of a wankster, but nice enough based on the two hours that I’ve known him so far.

Thérèse also made three significant promises just now that’ll make staying here much more fun. One: on the 4th, I’ll be in charge of cooking hamburgers and corn on the cob, if we can find it in time. Two: soon we’ll all play Scrabble in the yard with the letters on big pieces of cardboard. Three: on Bastille Day, we’ll spend the night in the Fort des Sallettes like we did last night to watch the fireworks over the city! The explosions will be less than a kilometer away and nearly horizontal with our position! If ever there was an opportunity to dual-wield my cameras!

Yesterday Sarah arrived from Paris. She’s done CVM four times before, so Thérèse made her her official adjutant, demoting me from a position I never knew I had. Definitely not complaining, though. We spent the morning building a section of roof in the Château that we’ll use to demonstrate the composition of the roof to the tourists. Then we had lunch and hiked over to the Fort des Sallettes. That morning I had misunderstood Thérèse’s directions for getting ready, so when Diane, who arrived Tuesday, told me we weren’t coming back to St. Blaise before that night, I only had time to grab my sleeping bag, tripod, and film camera. At Sallettes we hauled up pieces of scaffolding from a storeroom, twelve-foot-long metal poles. Thérèse left us in the fort with the admonition not to venture above the ground floor.

But we did, Niels and I. With the gate locked I couldn’t get outside to get a view of the city for night shots of it, so Niels showed me a relatively hidden, that is, inconspicuous, passage from the west bastion to the balcony above. I calculated for reciprocity and took six shots in forty minutes. Niels and I slept in the top of the keep, while the girls slept in the powder magazine.

Next morning Niels and I woke up before the girls and spotted a pair of pine martens that had made a nest in the east wall. We all had pound cake and chocolate for breakfast and got to work right away assembling the scaffolding and mounting a series of CVM photos for the tourists.

Sarah and I scrambled eggs with bacon and onions in the fort’s kitchen for lunch, and then we took the bus back to St. Blaise to wait for the new arrivals. When Niels and Diane got back from the Château, Niels and I got to finish the Scrabble game we had suspended two days before. We had been neck and neck, I mean NECK! AND! NECK! since the beginning, but after we resumed he hit me with a couple of really well-placed plays making use of obscure French vocabulary, and ended about ninety points ahead of me.

We gotta go to bed now. Thiiiiiiiiis is gonna be a problem.