All alone

It was the most bizarre experience on Sunday. I got myself up for church as normal, wandered down to the church as normal, went up the path as normal, went to open the door as normal, found it was locked- not normal!!! I checked my watch- 10:30 so there should be people here. In fact the bible study should be finishing about now! I have a church key for the choir so I let myself in and checked last weeks bulletin to check that there was a service on, yep 10:30- main service. I didn't know what to think- had the rapture happened and they had all left me behind? Well in that case phoning someone else would do no good- they wouldn't be here to answer. Maybe it at another church today and I missed the announcement? But it doesn't mention that on the bulletin which it normally would, and anyway I don't know that there are any other churches near by which which we would do such a thing. Maybe they all got ill at the meal last week for something that I somehow managed to avoid. No. Oh course the reason was that I had forgotten that this Sunday was the day the clocks change! I normally rely on my parents on on my diary to tell me. However I haven't got a diary at the moment- it's all on my work computer. And obviously my parents aren't here to remind me. It's a huge shame because I really could have done with the extra hour as well! Instead though I was nice and early for the bible study.

Friday evening saw the choir adding a third language to 'Great is he' Maria has finished translating it into German for us, so we now have it all in English, German and French- it sounds fab :)
We also had a new American girl come to 'group de Jeunes'. She is called Maggie and is a student here for this semester.

Saturday I went to Claire's for the lunch. After a lunch of pasta and smoked salmon cooked by her brother (I was rather impressed!) we went for a wander to the village near her (she lives just a bit outside Caen itself). I love chatting to Claire, mainly because she is really understanding of the limitaions of my French. I never feel like she thinks any less of me coz I haven't understood- it's just one of those things. She is very good at checking I have understood, speaking slowly and explaining things when I don't understand. She also has some English which is nice. So we wandered and chatted about this and that, and got the life frightened out of us by a little beagle which caught us totally off guard when it started barking at the fence we were walking past. We both jumped a mile, it was hilarious.
After the walk we sat down to play monopoly. As a general rule I don't play monopoly, I haven't done so for several years. The reason- I can be a terrible looser!!! Most games I'm fine, I can admit defeat easily. But monolpoly.... well it can get me rather wound up. But when you are with a friend (rather than family) it is easier to take it all slightly less seriously. So we had a big laugh each time one of us either payed out vast sums or received it. So although Claire ended up beating me hollow I didn't actually mind.

Sunday after my early start, was lunch at the church (after a quick trip to McDs for all of us who forgot that we were going to be eating at the church and having a slightly earlier choir practice), choir practice and then a very very long walk. Jamel had once more invited the youth round to his for the evening. However we finished the choir practice with so much time over that it was silly to get the tram there straight away. So we decided to start walking there. Normally I'm well up for a good long walk, but after walking a fair bit the day before, not drinking enough at lunch and it being quite warm, I found myself in desperate need of a rest. So Maria, Nina and I hopped on a tram for a few stops, met up with Benjamin, and readied ourselves for the half hour walk from the tram stop to Jamel's house.
Actually after the rest on the tram I was fine and even better after having a drink once we arrived, so I played a bit of corridor football with Maria and Sammy (2).
As always the evening became a lovely loud mush of conversations which can be very hard to follow. However I'm glad I made the effort with Benjamin and Maria- just because it was so random.
We started off thinking of as many ways as we could for measuring a length of time, that we could do ourselves. [unfortunately I haven't got the piece of paper with them all written on so I can't post them up for you at the moment. I will try to put it on the random stuff page soon]. Then for some reason- I'm really not sure why, the new question became "How can you measure the height of a building using a barometer" I told you it was random. Bizarrely we came up with quite a few:

• measure the difference I pressure at the top and bottom
  
• drop the barometer from the top and time the decent
  
• measure how many barometers height the building is
  
• Use similar triangles- see how for you have to go back for the building to seems the same size as the barometer and calculate the angles etc.
  
• Suspend the barometer on a string and swing it like a pendulum. From this you can use the frequency of oscillation and the mass of the barometer to calculate the length of string and thus the height of the building.
  

Well what did you expect when you put two engineers and a mathematician together!