molly sent me this picture over the summer, wearing the soft patchwork necklace i made for her. i'm making some more necklaces for the craft sale i'm going to do in portland in a few weeks. its been fun to try my hand at jewelry projects.

i'm off again, this time heading back east for thanksgiving. thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday, for the low key time spent with the family, cooking and relaxing. and i do love the mashed potatoes!

I've been making some new things recently for my etsy shop, tiny pill-shaped pins and earrings. They are patchworked tiny bits of fabric filled with stuffing that makes them into wee pillows. Yet another way for me to use materials leftover from other projects!

duty free

there is something about having a foreign currency burning a hole in my pocket when i'm just about to leave a country - i feel a desperate need to spend it all, usually at the airport! we picked up a box of swiss chocolates at the duty free shop with our last euros. it has been a tasty purchase.

some reflections of paris...

today is my sister joanna's birthday! i'm glad we got to spend so much time together this year. i love you very much, joes!

with the arrival of the aforementioned toadstools, i am reminded that humboldt's "winter" will be a mild, rainy one compared with the snowy east coast seasons i always loved. (though the east coast seems to be turning tropical anyway..) so this october sprinkling of snow we saw in the alps may have to tide me over for a while!

its fall in humboldt, and getting lush. we have picture perfect toadstools growing right here on tower drive!

guidebooks

sean and i spent a while at the bookstore choosing guidebooks for prague and paris before we left for our trip. and when we were there, we spent a lot of time standing on street corners pouring over them, often a little bit lost.

we opted for time out paris and lonely planet prague. time out was the clear winner, with well organized information and pretty good maps. (of course, we still ended up needing to know the name of that one street that wasn't labeled or that was under the map key, so if you're going to paris get your hands on a copy of the really detailed book of maps katrin lent us...) lonely planet prague had good listings, but maybe i've been trained by reading time out new york magazine for ten years - the writing just didn't seem as snappy. and the maps? pretty awful.

back at the bookstore we had decided against buying a guide by rick steves. i didn't know who he was either, but i sure do now - some guy who travels europe in a polo shirt and writes opinionated guides and also has a line of luggage. we saw a lot of other tourists with rick steves guides, and when we arrived at my sister's house in dresden she took us on the rick steves tour of the city. he says things like "there's a monument of a guy on a horse in the middle of the square but he's not very important so we won't talk about him." maybe next trip....

the last few days of our trip were spent visiting my sister and brother in law in dresden. it was a too short visit, and all of a sudden it seemed we were back on the plane again, heading home. fortunately we had clementines, which always make things a little bit better, even the ends of vacations.

after visiting paris, sean and i flew east to prague. it was our first visit. we had a great time and found the architecture stunning, but the city life itself eluded us. i think we arrived about fifteen or twenty years too late. tourism has completely overwhelmed the old parts of town, making prague's transition to capitalism seem like a change for the worse. we had to go out of the way a bit to find glimpses of regular czech life, like this bit of kitsch in a storefront window.

i saw lena's post about the beautiful flowerbox building in ny, and was reminded of the musee du quai branly that we saw in paris - it was so amazing to be walking along the river and literally come across a living piece of architecture. somehow the french have managed to re-create fern canyon in the middle of the city.

we have been home now for four days and things seem as they were before. trips quickly fade into shadows, daily life takes over, and thankfully we have the pictures. paris was amazing - we spent time with my dear katrin, saw the sights, walked too much. our few days were not enough, i wish we lived closer!

the reason for our trip to europe was to meet my parents, sister and brother in law in the swiss alps, at some of our old haunts. we had a truly magical time, and my favorite day was spent taking the ski gondola up to the top of the mountain and hiking with the whole family. i am still sorting through the pictures of the trip, but i quite like this one with the shadow of the gondola on the grass..

sean and i are back home again after what seemed like a long time away. we stopped at a beautiful wedding on the coast of maine, and then went off to europe, where we had a great time jetting around to see friends and family. i'll post a few pictures when we download them, i can't wait to see them myself!