There is no one reading this who doesn’t know that in the summer of 2010, I was offered, and accepted a job at Queen Mary, University of London, where I am now a Lecturer in Experimental Linguistics. In fact, I just completed my first year of teaching, and am now celebrating with a month long working vacation in North America.

I flew to Boston on April 2nd, spent a weekend in Northampton with friends, then drove up to Montreal to spend a week there visiting friends and family, and reconnecting with colleagues and potential future collaborators.

Last Monday I drove back to Northampton, and I’ve spent the week here working on data analysis, having meetings with collaborators, reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. I’ve been able to hang out with the dear old dog and cat who I left behind with former neighbors. Charlie the dog is sliding into mild senility at the perfectly appropriate age of 13. He doesn’t really seem to recognize me, which means there’s no angst about seeing him. He’s not bothered whether I’m there or not, but he’s perfectly happy with the attention.

Andi-cat is another story. She seems to be utterly furious with me. I’m not sure why, since she is apparently very happy in her new home. But she can barely tolerate my presence for 5 minutes before huffing off. It would have been nice to snuggle with her a bit, but I’d rather she be happy in her new home than pining for me. And her look of disgust when she sees me is priceless.

So I can leave her with a clean conscience, knowing she is not at all sad to see me go.

Other than being despised by cats, and spending rather a lot of time staring at computer screens, I’ve been enjoying watching spring arrive in the valley. Spring came rather too early in London for me to properly appreciate it, whereas it definitely feels like the time for it now. The earliest flowers are in full bloom.

If anyone can tell me what these are called, I’d be grateful.

The magnolias are just starting to arrive.

Although I only spent one year living here, it feels truly and deeply like home, and it’s been so wonderful to have the time to be here and reconnect with so many of my favorite people and places.

Tomorrow I’m off again. First to Boston to return the rental car, then to Columbia SC for 4 days to visit other friends/colleagues and stare at some different computers. Data awaits.

And for walks in the woods.

How are you spending your holiday week?

Enough snow to wet the appetite and make it actually seem like December after a November that often felt more like September. The weekend snow stayed around – we actually had 3 days in a row with temps below 0. I had a couple fun days of biking to work with snow on the ground (but not on the roads) for the first time in 11 years (the winter of 98 I rode all winter long. I was 23 and not yet entirely convinced of my own mortality.).

But this morning, we woke to this.

Now that’s snow! Nearing noon now, it’s still snowing and looks set to continue all afternoon. It’s very wet snow – which makes for very messy roads, but also plenty of snowmen opportunities (I saw two on my way to work).

Definitely no temptation to bike this morning, walking was enough of an adventure. The major temptation was to stay home and curl up on my couch with the beasties and wrap my outsides around some hot apple cider and spend the day watching the snow in front of the windows get higher and higher. But I resisted and left the critters to keep the couch warm without me.

Every time I think ‘that was the last warm day we’ll have until spring’, I’m proven wrong.

I’ve been baking pear-apple crisps and cranberry-apple pies and honey-apple cakes, and making apple sauce and drinking apple cider (alcoholic and non) and eating piles and piles of apples (much to the delight of Charlie, who loves to eat the cores). This gorgeous fruit crumble recipe, from Everybody Likes Sandwiches is, as promised The Best Crumble Ever. The toppping is just as wonderful on fall fruit as spring.

So what’s putting a spring in your step, even as we wind our way towards winter?

At this point it would make no sense to try to revisit all the impressions of those first days and weeks. But I can still note a few.

In the beginning, their were lots and lots of un-unpacked boxes.

Also, it was really hot for most of August, which slowed down the deboxifying considerably.

My mum came to visit at the end of August and we went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, which happens to be a 2 minute walk from my new office, to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the publication of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. There was cake.

Mum left, I unpacked a little more and then classes began. It’s already midterm now, half a semester flown past in the blink of an eye. I’ve been absolutely loving teaching at Hampshire College. It’s such a treat to have no more than 25 students in a class, nearly all of whom actually want to be there, and to not ever have to think about grades or exams as the motivation for work. This is my first experience with a Liberal Arts College – I’d never really understood just what that meant until now. I would have *loved* Hampshire as a student, and I am so thrilled to get to teach here.

In fact life here in the rolling hills of Western Mass is pretty lovely in every respect. I feel like I’ve moved into the pages of Richard Scarry’s Busytown, minus the anthropomorphic animals, but only just. The air is bright and clear, the sky is full of twinkling stars at night, the grocery stores are small and brimming with local produce. There is home milk delivery, in glass bottles, and cars unfailingly stop for pedestrians at cross walks. Everyone in my little set of row houses leaves their back doors unlocked, to make it easy to let one another’s pets out or in. I usually lock my bike up when I leave it downtown, but I forgot my lock once, and the bike was still there at the end of the day.

People decorate their houses with silly animals and statues.

Yes, that is a deer wearing flippers and a snorkling mask.

George, the cat, who seems determined to use up all 9 of his lives, got himself chased up a tree last weekend. I spent all of last Sunday wandering around the neighbourhood calling his name and putting up lost cat posters.

I had several people call to let me know they had seen him, and by the time I finally tracked him down to a tree in a yard about 8 houses away, his case had attracted quite a bit of interest. I counted at least 10 people out sitting on their porches at 6pm on a chilly Sunday evening, watching anxiously while three fire fighters debated who should climb a ladder up the tree to get him down. Everyone was incredibly nice and friendly and happy about the whole enterprise, including the owner of the house who’s German Shepherd had treed George in the first place.

So life is rather grand. Now I just have to figure out how I can stay.

So this morning I set off at 7:12, well-breakfasted, happy with my outfit for the day, and generally feeling pretty pleased with myself for being in transit so early. As I went to get on the bus, I suddenly remembered it was now July and I would need a new transit pass for the month. The driver was in a good mood, so he waved me through. Fair enough, I’d be able to get my new pass at the subway where I transfer to my second bus, so I got on board.

About 18 minutes later, we pulled into Vendome, I got off, and headed down into the metro to queue up for the automatic guichet. The line was moving quickly enough (it seems like people have got used to the new rfid cards, finally), so I figured I’d best get prepared by having my fare card and my bank card ready. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that I did not have my bank card with me. I’d managed to leave my wallet sitting on the kitchen counter, where it wasn’t remotely useful.

Sigh.

So obviously I wasn’t going to be buying my July pass and continuing on to the office. But just as obviously, I couldn’t jump on the subway or a bus to head back home, since I didn’t have even two cents to pay my fare. I suppose I could have tried to talk the turnstile operator into letting me through, but there were about 20 people waiting in line to get through and I wasn’t optimistic anyone would take pity on me.

So all that was left was to turn around and walk back home. Thankfully, it was a beautiful morning, and the walk is perfectly pleasant, passing along the Glen:

Through St. Henri along the train tracks:

Past a little meadow filled with butterflies:

Along Notre Dame, home of my favourite roti place

Down Atwater, where workers were just setting up at the Atwater Market:

Across the Lachine Canal:

And under the 20 along Lasalle Blvd:

From where it was a mere hop, skip and jump to get home at 8:50.  The whole walk took only 1hr, which was pretty good. And if I hadn’t managed to tip my mug of tea over inside my handbag while attempting to take the picture of the butterflies (don’t ask), and if I’d been wearing more appropriate shoes, and not feeling like a moron, it would have been an utterly delightful way to start the day.

As it is, I’m glad to be home with no more damage than a small blister on my heel and slightly wounded pride. We’ll see if I can get it right tomorrow.

left luggage by flickr user paul_likes_pics

The part I hate is when I have to stop just thinking about it and playing around with various options and actually commit to buying tickets and booking accommodations. If I could possibly get away with walking into the airport with my luggage and buying the ticket at the counter then and there, I would. Having to buy ticket weeks and weeks in advance just feels so wrong and confining and frustrating. The upshot is that I often pay more than I should have for a ticket due to leaving it too late.

So I am very proud to say that I bought my ticket today for a trip that starts on July 22nd. That’s nearly a whole month away. That’s probably the longest in advance of a trip I have ever bought my ticket. I’m already starting to worry that maybe I should have waited a few more days, because what if I change my mind or need to do x or y or…

But the change fee is pretty high, so I am just going to have to make everything else work around it. I’m flying to Paris on July 22nd and coming home on August 13th. I still have to buy all the plane and train tickets that will get me from Paris to Dusseldorf to Osnabrueck to Berlin to Poznan, then two weeks later back to Berlin then on to Nijmegen, and back to Paris via Dusseldorf, but just having settled the transatlantic bit is a huge step for me. I feel almost like a responsible adult.

Of course I have barely thought about preparing my talks and lectures when I get there, but there’s still *lots* of time for that…

This makes more sense when you realise that my sewing room is also my guest room, so this was my last chance to have unfettered access to it for ages. Also, the long lingering cool spring has turned the corner into the warmer, muggier summer weather (still cool enough not to drag out the a/c, but I’m sure that it won’t be long now). So it was high time I got working on several of the summer dress revisions I had planned. One of these days I may actually make a dress or skirt from scratch, but I find it just as satisfying (and much faster) to find an almost perfect dress at the thrift shop, and alter it.

I found a nice 100% indian cotton tunic/dress the other day.

The only problem? It was size XL – definitely much too wide even for the most relaxed summer dress. So I grabbed a tunic dress already had that fit perfectly, and used it to draw a slimmer shape.

I just stuck with the original arm dimensions – I could have tried to reduce those too, but I didn’t want to wind up with any weird bunching. Ten minutes of sewing later: a breezy little shirt dress. I didn’t even bother to trim the fabric after sewing the new seams – it’s not bulky at all, and this way I can always just rip them out if I want the extra width back.

I’ll mostly end up wearing it with jeans, I think – it’s a bit too short for city wear. But it could work well as a swimsuit cover up too. It could really use a belt for a bit more shape.

Feeling on a roll with the dress refashioning, I next decided to tackle a bright little tent dress I picked up at Goodwill last summer, but never wore because it was just waaay too wide and tentlike. 

There was enough extra width to this that I was able to make pockets – so now it’s a good 4 inches narrower on each side, and has comfy little side pockets. It’s another ‘dress’ that’s a bit too short to actually wear as a dress, but it’s a fantastic layer to throw on over jeans for walking the dogs (the handy new pockets hold my key), and I wore it all the rest of the weekend as a housedress/apron.

Feeling a bit more ambitious after these two very quick projects, I moved on to a third dress on my to-fix list. This one is a lovely green strapless dress I found at the very end of last summer, and never got a chance to wear before it got too cold. It’s a very casual, thrown on type dress – super comfy. But I always have trouble with getting strapless dresses and strapless bras to cooperate – one of them always feels like it’s slipping. So I decided to sew the bra inside the lining of the dress. This was mainly a handsewing project, which meant the cat and I could move back to the papasan for some nesting time while I stitched. Good times for everyone. Apparently I forgot to take any pictures of the process or the finished result, but I’ll try to remember to grab a snap the next time I wear the dress.

Interspersed with the cleaning and running errands of a regular Saturday, these projects took most of the day. But I wasn’t ready to stop sewing yet, so I got started on a more ambitious project.

A few weeks ago, I drafter a super simple pattern for toddler shorts for my dear little friend Duncan (aged 15 months). I whipped up 4 simple pairs in an afternoon – if you can line up the pattern pieces with pre-exisiting hems (from old t-shirts, pants, pillow cases, etc), there are only 3 seams and a wasteband to sew. These are the first 3 pairs:

elephant applique waffle shorts, sunshine stripey shorts, and flannel plaid shorts

 This weekend I decided to be a bit more ambitious and make a pair of shorts with a matching sunhat. Saturday I cut and sewed the shorts, and decided to add some little suspenders for extra cuteness. Sunday I made the sunhat (following Cal Patch’s fabulous tutorial on CraftyStylish). Then I decided the outfit needed a matching t-shirt…

I don’t really know what I’m doing sewing with knits yet, and the shirt is far from perfect (I’ll need to resew the hems on the sleeves). And the appliqué truck looks more like a rhino.

But the reversible, crushable sunhat was a joy to sew and came out perfectly.

So perfectly, in fact that I’m going to make one for myself and would be delighted to make one for anyone else who wants one. Just send me a measurement of the circumference of your head at the widest point, the length from the top of your head to that point, your colour/print preferences, and let me know whether you want a wide or fairly narrow brim. (This offer is based on the assumption that there are about 5 people reading this blog – I definitely can’t make 100 hats). I think I’ll try using the skin from a deceased umbrella for one side of mine – I haven’t had a rain hat in a vary long time.

The week upcoming will be filled with work and houseguests and goodbye parties and altogether too much business, but at least I had my solitary sewing weekend to fortify me. And I can’t wait to see Duncan in his new hat.

Happy ‘It’s Officially Summer Now’ to everyone.

• The peonies are out! my number one favourite flower ever, growing just below my bedroom window. Bliss.

 



• My snazzy new folding bike. I couldnt resist this one when I saw the craigslisting. Too cute. I just love the bright red seat. I’ve decided to call her Lolly (as in pop).



• Impromptu weekend at a cottage by a lake. How lovely to get out of the city and spend time with some delightful people. The dogs were in heaven.


Stella and Charlie rest before dinner

Other, even more exciting things are promising to come soon, but these are quite enough to be going along with. I hope summer is bringing wonderful things to you too.

Linnea's closet

Now, anyone who has seen my home knows that I am all about the colour coordinated closet.

Linnaea's colour coordinated skirts and shirts

It’s not as obvious with the skirts, and the colours in the photos aren’t great (it’s raining today, so light is an issue), but I’m just a wee bit obsessed with organising my clothes and accessories by colour.

So should we extrapolate from this data and conclude that all Linn(a)ea’s have colour coordinated closets? 

shoes and bags

Or should perhaps Apartment Therapy was just celebrating my birthday in their own special way. Either way, the excuse to spend time enjoying all the colours in my closet is very much appreciated on a rainy, grey day.