Vacations

I haven't been good at all at writing this semester, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it was just too busy. But now, all the funding requests are done and submitted, and I'm off for a month. I'm actually writting this from Kuala Lumpur, where my man and I arrived in the middle of the night, after spending 3 days in Shanghai.
This has been a looong trip. We left Monday morning around 9am to take a bus to Montreal, followed by another bus to the airport, then a first plane to Toronto, a second one to Vancouver, and a third one (over 13 hour-long) to Shanghai. Once there, we realised our luggages had not followed, so we just took the high-speed (300km\h) train to town, where we bought a 3-day metro pass, and went to our hotel. We didn't stay in long, because we wanted to get over jetlag quickly. So the first day was spent disovering the Bund and the old town. Here are a few pictures.

Quite the choice of food! 

Tea house

Tea with eggs...

Fish...

Shanghai metro

Our luggages showed up at the hotel as we were about to go to bed, how lucky are we? 

The second day we visited the zoo, and the people's square and around. The zoo was a lot of fun, although I spent the day freezing. 

Wearing the new blouse I finished the day before we left! 

And we still had a little time, so on day 3, we went to the free national museum, and walked around a bit more before we headed back to the airport for our flight to KL. 

About to taste the stinky tofu I got from a street vendor. It tastes better than it smells! 

So, my impression of Shanghai after less than 72 hours spent there? It's cleaner, better organised than I expected of a country with so many people. It's very easy to get around, EVERYTHING is in English. And the food is to die for! On the other hand, people kind of don't talk unless they're trying to get you into the famous tea-scam, they push or almost hit you non-stop in the metro and on the street. Nobody seems to be following any circulation rule, and the weirdest thing is that nobody ever says a word about it, as if it's just normal that you almost get hit by a bike/car/bus/scooter, etc. at every single corner. Also, Shanghai is really, really rich, and I just kept thinking about what happens in order regions of the country, and did not feel comfortable about this opulence. Lastly, Facebook and Bloger did not work while we were there. It was a good reminder that despite all the Starbucks, Gap and other North American ways of living, it's still China. So, I'm happy I saw it, but I would not go back. Next post: Kuala Lumpur!!!

In need of vacations

Well, first thing I want to say is that life is good again! After a very intensive week training the person who replaced me at the university chiropractic clinic, I'm now finally back in my quiet research jobs. It's still 2 jobs, and it is still not permanent, but at least, it's only 2 jobs with 1-year contracts, the longest I've had in a few years (including the last jobs I had in Montreal). It makes such a difference, although I still need to rest from the 4 last months' craziness. I don't seem to be able to get that at home. I just look around and get depressed about the house and everything I should be doing in it. But then I have no energy to do it. So I get more depressed.

The knitting, sewing and weaving also suffered from this lethargy.

For example, I knit those baby booties at the speed of the light, because I wanted a friend to bring them in Hungary at the end of March to give to a friend who is expecting. But something went very wrong..I did not notice anything before I almost gave them to him. The plan is now to knit a 2nd one for each of them. While in vacations.

I also started a little kimono for another friend who was expecting (she had a beautiful baby boy last weekend). It's an easy knit, which I keep fixing, because I seem to have forgotten how to read instructions. Or that there are instructions to be read. I don't have a picture here because I can't find the bag in which it is. Vacations, vacations...please come soon!

I missed about 3 sewing classes in the past month, between Washington and a meeting. So when I went back this week, I was wayyy behind everybody else, although one of the things I love about this course is that everybody can go at their own rhythm. The other excuse I have for being behind is that I had to do everything twice so far, mostly because we had to modify the pattern to fit me after the first try, but also because I can't seem to be able to sew straight anymore. I have to admit that I am a little bit happy that we had to modify the pattern, because I have been complaining my whole life that nothing fits on my unexistant shoulders, and this seemed to have proven my point.

Looks more like a pyjama than a blouse, I know

Did I show you my beautiful fabric, and the beautiful buttons I found to go with it?

I can't wait to wear it, and I feel I should knit something to go with it. I'm thinking about this or this. What do you think?

The good news of the week is that after about a month, I finished warping my loom, and started to weave a little bit.

It's a baby blanket for the baby that was born last weekend. I better hurry if I want him to get it before he enters kindergarten! It's a beautiful pattern, easy to follow, but I still need calm and quiet so I don't get confused between the treadling. Can you see the mistake I made already? The problem is that in our new house, the loom is facing the TV. So I got totally distracted when my man started watching it while I was weaving. I will try to weave with ear plugs, so see if it makes a difference, but it is something I already wrote down as having to change when we redo the basement.

a mistake, already :-( 

So, really, I need vacations. I can't keep working like this, one stitch/one mistake.

The only thing that can help is a little trip, and I am looking forward to Paris a lot! I think that the fact that it was not planned, nor even part of my bucket list makes it even more exciting. I mean, of course, I'm happy to go to Paris for a week, but it is not in my top destinations, so I have no expectation, and no plan, except for having a "café-crème", and a glass of good wine.

Well, of course, I started to make a list of interesting stores to visit. Most of the addresses I found here. I looked around, and most stores seem to still be open (the post is from 2009).

But there are still 17 days before I leave...Hopefully that means about 40 inches of baby blanket, but I suspect it will be 17 days of mistakes. Until then, I'm going to go play in the snow, because, yes, of course, we are getting 5 to 10 cm of snow today. It's a very wintery spring, this year. Meanwhile, in Paris, they are expecting 23 degrees this weekend. Imagine in 17 days!

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had great holidays. I thought mine would be quiet, but somehow we ended up having a lot of things to do, parties to attend and we just ended up running around like mad.

Except for our annual anniversary going away weekend. My man and I started going out together on a December 28, 4 years ago. I had rented a cottage, and he came to visit (we were already friends). We have been using this excuse for spending a weekend away during the holidays ever since.

This year, we ended up at Auberge Godefroy. The funny thing is that this place is exactly 8.1 km away from our place. But it doesn't matter, it was great to be away from home for a few days and not cook, do laundry, clean, and mostly, look around and note everything that still needs to be done in the house.

We used the hot baths, went snowshoeing, ate at the restaurant, spent time at the hotel's bar, read, knit, watched bad TV, played ping-pong and pool, in a word, we enjoyed ourselves.

Talking about knitting, I think my knitting energy is back.
I managed to finish a dog sweater for my sister in law's new little dog (I didn't mentioned it before because it was a surprise...). How cute is that animal? and it's smaller than a cat!

I'm also knitting my Folded at the speed of the light. What a nice pattern! I'm not so sure about the colour anymore, though. It was pretty in a skein, but I think I would have liked a sweater with less variations in the colour. But if I remember correctly,  there was no yarn of that size that was just one colour at the store when I bought it.

On the sewing side: I did wear my skirt at Christmas, as was the plan. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture, because of course we left in a hurry, having to drive 2 hours to make it on time to my parents. Also, it was not completely finished...I forgot how to make the stitch my teacher told me to use to finish the belt, so I sewed it loosely, and will redo it when I start my courses next week. Also, I lost weight when I got sick before the holidays, and so the skirt doesn't fit well anymore. I wanted to see if that weight would come back, or if I need to, once again, modify it before I finish it. Pictures coming in the next post, I promise!

Right now I'm waiting for my parents and my brother, who are coming to visit for 2 days. I hope a lot of knitting will be accomplished during that time. Who knows, I might have a new sweater to show you the next time I write!

Have a great weekend!

September at the speed of the light

This is my 50th post! Who knew I would find so many things to say, and so many things to learn and do since I moved here!

September has not been an exception; it's been so busy, I feel everything has been done on automatic pilot.
I've always felt that September, for me, was the real beginning of the year. It's the time I take my resolutions, I plan my year, I rework my budget, I take a big breath and get get back in every day's craziness.

So, here are some general news, for those who know me: I now have 3 work contracts at the university, 2 in the chiropractic department (one for the neuromusculoskeletal affections research group, one for a Chair in Knowledge Translation for health, set at McGill University) and a third one in the nursing department in the cardiovascular health laboratory. Tree groups, 3 supervisors, 3 cultures, 3 ways of working, 3 sets of deadlines. I'll get used to it, and anyway, it's supposed to be temporary, but let me tell you that the past month has been brutal on a professional level.

But to get distracted from all that work, I had a lot of options:

1. Get ready for our trip. We both took only a week off this summer, and it was far from being restful, so we are leaving on Tuesday for 2 weeks in Hungary and Romania. I didn't get the chance to organize much, but the good thing with going back to a place where you've spent so much time already is that there is no need to organize. This year, I added a visit to Dracula's castle (my man said he could not go to Transylvania and come back without having pictures of the castle), but besides bringing a few presents, letting people who have access to internet know we're coming, all I have to do is to buy a phone card when we arrive, and let people know we will pass by. AAhh, vacations. I can't wait.

One of the places we are going...I've never seen it in fall yet, I can't wait. 

2. Can. I canned an insane amount of plum jam, grape jelly and tomatoes. All by myself, since my man was busy getting ahead in his studies. He's going to miss the equivalent of 3 classes while we are gone, so he had to spent all his evenings writing papers and homework since he started his class at the beginning of the month. The bad thing with canning is because it doesn't happen often, I forget what I learn from a year to the other. So I have a batch of good grape jelly, and another one that did not "jellify".  The plums are good, but a little runny. And by the time I got to my 3rd box of tomatoes, I had everything under control, but let me tell you that evening of the first box was messy and painful.

3. Sew. I decided to learn how to sew properly. It's been on my to-do list for, like, ever, and I've never done anything about it. I wanted to register for weaving lessons, but I would have missed a third of them while on vacations, so I called a sewing school instead. (Not really thinking I would also miss a few classes, but hey, there was not much thinking done in September, as I mentioned earlier). So I ended up in a year-long class, which I LOVE. I don't know what it is, if it is to put a method to whatever I was doing without knowing how, or if it is just the teacher who is so experienced both in sewing and teaching, but I'm very happy I decided to register. I love how we learn techniques while making something at the same time. I'm making this skirt (model B) to start, and the teacher said that by the end of the year, we will have 2 skirts  2 blouses and 2 pairs of pants.

4. Exercise. I told you, September is the month of resolutions for me. I have not been very good at keeping up going to work with my bike, because I just get so red and sweaty in the last hill that I scared my colleagues. So I decided that since I had access to a gym at the university, I would use my lunch hour to get in shape. I registered to power yoga and aquafit. One of the unfortunate thing about going to that gym is that you have a few people teaching every single course. I know they are kinesiologists, and they know how to tell us to move and what to be careful with, but I do not enjoy that everything is taught the same way. For example, I would enjoy my yoga class to be a little bit more "yogic", and last semester, my zumba class was aerobics with hips. So I think I have to keep registering for classes where I my only expectation will be to move and sweat, such as in the aquafit one. I've also been doing Pilates for the past 2 years or so, and I kept that, and asked my teacher if it could become a little bit more intensive. Hopefully all these, plus my 15-minute walks to and from the bus stop twice a day will give me more energy, which is really my primary goal.

5. Get sick. I managed to get a little sick...but it's okay, I finish my antibiotics today, so  I'll be fine for my trip!

6. Go to funerals. My 84 uncle passed away a few weeks ago. He had had a very good life, so even if it was a sad event, we all managed well. It was great to see relatives I had not seen in a very long time, so all that driving around to get there was well worth it!

7. Start the Farmers' year. I'm still part of the local Farmers' circle (a women craft association) board, and we kick the year with our first meeting at the beginning of the month. I think over 100 members showed up, it was hot in the hall!

8. Harvest. In the past years, we had an urban garden, in containers that my man had modified for gardening. This year, we didn't have any time to take care of our garden, but still planted 2 kinds of cherry tomatoes and some other things, including containers' carrots. (I forget what else we planted, because it obviously didn't work). The fact that we actually planted something this year was due in good part to the fact that a colleague came to visit a few months ago with his young child, and we had to keep that child busy while his mother used my sewing machine to make curtains. So my man showed him how to plant seeds, and it actually turned into a a few very nice tomato plants!

We even got a few carrots!

9. Shop. I got those buttons on Etsy. Love them, but realized they are too big for my Peasy, which I will talk about further in the next paragraph.

10. Go to Montreal. I took a Friday to go to Montreal for ice cream (beet sage ice cream!) with friends, a haircut in an Aveda salon (no aveda product in 3R) a crazy concert featuring musicians I had met at camp this summer, yummy Romanian food, quality time with a little guy I love and an awesome zumba class taught by the best teacher ever.

11. Knit. Yeah, I know, difficult to believe I actually had time to knit something, right? Well, if we count the trip to Montreal + the fact that I take the bus for 10 minutes twice a day, that's about how much time I had to knit in September. Minus the days I chatted with friends who also take the bus, minus the days where my man picks me up from work, minus the few times where one of my supervisors gave me a ride home.

But, yeap, I managed to finish (kind of) my Peasy, which I rename the humility reminder cardi. Or, rather, I will finish it AGAIN today. Why did I need to be reminded to be humble? Well, because after knitting that cardigan quite quickly, without any mistake (well, not any I can see!) lace and all, I was ready to believe that I had become a good knitter. or at least not a beginner anymore. Until I got to the button bands. You, know the easy part, where you pick up stitches, and only knit for a few rows, and bind off, and that's it? I'm not even talking about the other band, where I had to make the button holes, because that went not very well,  but let say, quite well.

So this button band story started at the yarn festival I went to in August, I had a lot of time to knit, and did my first band on the Sunday afternoon. Catastrophe! I did the bind off so tight, it looked like a corset. I undid that. Once, twice, three times. Both sides were never symmetric  Did the bind off 4 different ways.  Changed for bigger needles. Asked my friend and knitting mentor Elizabeth, who told me that I just didn't pick the same amount of stitches on both side. What? That could not have been it? How did that happen, I was convinced I had followed the pattern exactly as it was. Well, I still had to re-do it 2 or 3 times, but I think that now, that's it, it is done. Well, I also realized that I forgot to do 2 button holes, but I didn't have any energy left to panic with that, so I just decided that I would sew the whole thing and wear it as a sweater, and add buttons to decorate. Eventually. That cardigan-turned-sweater is bathing as we speak, because I am wearing it in Europe next week. So I have decided.

Old picture, it is now symmetric!

But wait, that's not the only thing I knitted! I'm also almost done with this hoodie, which I am hoping to bring as a present in Romania next week. the back and front pieces are done, and I'm halfway through both sleeves, which means that tomorrow, I hope to knit the hood, block and assemble on Monday to pack. I don't see a lot of sleeping in my near future, since there is a lot of other things to do before we can leave on Tuesday, but hopefully, I'll be bringing 2 finished objects in my suitcase, and maybe more, but I don't want to talk about it so it get jinxed.

I will take a lot of pictures while I travel, and promise this time I will also post a few on the blog with explanations when I get back. Enjoy the fall, and see you in 2 weeks.