vietnam

Absolutely nothing to do with knitting, but a few more snapshots of Vietnam... 

Whistles for sale! I bought one for my sister and she can't figure out how to make noise with it. Suggestions welcome. 

Lanterns and cyclos abound in Hoi An. 

Hoi An, be prettier! 

It felt beyond amazing to visit Vietnam again, even if it was only for a few days (three in Hoi An, three in Hanoi) - and extra awesome that I managed to work a little travel into the tail end of 2012! So here's hoping for a little more adventure in 2013 :) 

snapshots of new orleans!

No knitting worth writing about, unfortunately - but here are a few cellphone snapshots of what I've been up to! I spent the last five weeks in New Orleans, working too much to knit or, sadly, explore as much as I'd like. 

The last five weeks were a bit intense. Besides working 12+ hour days, my boyfriend of 3+ years and I ended up breaking up - so maybe starting that Mr. Darcy sweater last summer was bad luck after all (on a related note, does anyone want like 10 balls of boyfriend sweater yarn?) As sad as I am, though,  it is a huge relief to no longer feel pulled between Scotland and California - and to realize I can put down roots near my family now.

(As excited as I am to settle down a bit, being in a new city for 5 weeks just reminded me how much I love exploring new places, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for lots of wayfaring in the future!) 

Also there was this whole Mardi Gras thing, you may have heard of it. I absolutely loved it, even if I did buy and then promptly loose a pretty fascinator hat amidst all the festivities. Dancing in the streets, strangers in crazy costumes - it was a great time and exactly what I needed to take my mind of things. 

So now I'm back with family in Los Angeles indefinitely, trying to figure out what and where comes next.  Right now I'm just happy to have a little downtime and to catch up on all that knitting I dragged with me to Louisiana and then barely had time to touch! 

more wayfaring, less knitting

Eek. I had not intended to go nearly two months without a post - since the last time I posted, we saw lots of early blooming cherry blossoms, entertained out of town guests, finished our contracts, said goodbye to all our friends and students, and packed up and moved out of Japan two weeks ago. Though we felt the earthquake on March 11 - and many of the aftershocks - we were very far removed from the all the hard hit areas, with no more than the occasional rolling blackout to contend with, and so were just glued to the news with everyone else.

 From Japan, we flew back to Vietnam, where first we stopped here to relax a bit:

... before heading back to our old onetime home Hanoi:

Hanoi hasn't changed much since we left two years ago, and it feels awesome to be here - I am as happy to be back in Vietnam as I am sad to be out of Japan. It also feels awesome to *finally* have free time again - all of March was so disgustingly busy, I didn't even have time to think about knitting. Unfortunately, because there's so much traveling ahead, I have a very limited amount of yarn with me to last until I get to Iain's house in Scotland in early June (where I managed to tuck a ridiculous amount of yarn into a box of books he was already sending back): just two skeins of madtosh prairie and a ball of malabrigo silky merino, to be specific. I started with much, much more, but my backpacker pack couldn't handle it, and so I had to reluctantly mail most of the stuff I wanted to work on back to my mother's house. It feels a bit ridiculous to have little stockpiles of yarn waiting all over the world, but in the meantime I was finally able to shake off the awesome food - lazy beaches - motorbikes everywhere! stupor that has been our two weeks back in VN and wind half a ball of prairie to get started on an Ishbel shawl. So hopefully there'll be more knitting soon...