It's midnight, Tuesday. We've just left the dinner table after spending the entire day exploring. Early this morning we set out in two vehicles and drove an hour and a half to Yerres, about 12 miles south of Paris, to visit the beautiful home and museum of Gustav Caillabotte. A painter during the time of the Impressionists, he also helped fund Impressionist exhibitions and supported his fellow artists and friends, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and more. Here are his home and some of his paintings.

Afterwards we stopped for pizza and capuccino, then drove about another hour or so through the Fontainebleau Forrest to Moret-sur-Loing, set up our easels on a grassy bank of the river and painted for a few hours in the late afternoon sunshine, in the exact locations where Sisley, Monet and Renoir painted.

We took a wrong turn on the way out of town and wound up getting stuck on narrow one-way roads, twisting and turning between centuries old houses, sites more exciting than the charming town on the river we had painted all afternoon.

I'm watching friendships form. There is a lot of laughter here. There have been some very funny stories at the dinner table, too many for me to remember. I need to bring a tape recorder to the table to try to remember them for this blog, but electronics are banned from the dinner table. We all agree that's a good thing.

I'm off to bed now. Everyone else went to sleep quite a while ago. Tomorrow, another day in the studio and another photo shoot of Kathleen hanging laundry. Good night, everyone.

Note to Meg (my daughter who's house sitting and taking care of my kitty): let me know how my tomatoes are growing. I want them to be bigger than Mike's and Kathy's next door.