New year, new effort to keep up with the blog

Well, my blogging efforts in 2016 came to a dead end when my rhythm was broken by travel and other things. I also went through a fallow patch in my crafting.  Attempting to grow things in our tree covered shady garden took over my creative efforts over the summer months but my drive picked up towards the end of the year and I started making stuff again, which has inspired me to put my fingers back on the keyboard ("pen to paper" just doesn't work) and bring my blog back to life.

Here are some of the things I made and grew last year. We also took a trip to New Mexico in November and enjoyed the sunshine and wide open spaces.

So far this year I have been working on Bonnie Hunter's En Provence mystery quilt and my OMG (one monthly goal) for February is to turn this collection of pieces of fabric and sub-units into a quilt top/flimsy. I have at least done ALL the cutting (but not all the pressing and trimming....)

I also want to take part in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge and my plan is to make dresden plate blocks in the various colours.

Update: I had these done by Tuesday evening:

So that is the purple done for January, next aqua/teal/turquoise for February....
 

Where is "home" ?

My second trip of February was to the UK and before I set off I wasn't sure whether it was back home or not.  I suppose that England will always be home in some ways even though living there full time again is unlikely. Whatever the future brings I will always be an Englishwoman, shaped by my time growing up and for the first 40-something years of my life spent there.

As I wrote part of this entry I was at my husband's cousin's dining table looking out at the greenness of their back garden with its English lawn, trees and vegetable plot together with the more unusual suburban addition of chickens.  I had forgotten how many shades of green were to be found in the English landscape, even or especially in the wintertime, and it has been soothing for my village raised soul.  As I left Pennsylvania the landscape was still a stark white with dark, bare trees contrast against it, even the evergreens only give subdued colour to the landscape and true bright colours are probably another month off.  It would be lovely to arrive back home (there is that ambiguous word again) and at least be able to see the leaves of the spring bulbs poking above the soil, promising a riot of colours to come. I shall be most dischuffed if the squirrels have eaten them over the winter.

Seeing familiar birds such as the European robin hunting for breakfast amongst the plants and tiny cheeky blue tits doing acrobatics on the bird feeders has also been a pleasure, though, thanks to Eugene Schieffelin, the starling has become a familiar sight across the continental USA and I have seen a cock pheasant with his glorious plumage running through our PA subdivision.  Looking out of the window of our new home and seeing the scarlet plumage of cardinals and the bright blue of the jays has been a delight and I look forward to the arrival of groups of American robins working their way across the yard eating the garden pests that they are most welcome to!

My trip ended up being 2 weeks rather than the planned single week so very little sewing was completed in February, though all the sections of my grandson's sweater are now complete and awaiting assembly with a final few rows to complete the collar.  Earlier this week a last minute effort on my part while my younger son was at school resulted in him having a hat to go with his scarf before the end of his birthday!  The pattern is Sideways Bobble Hat by Woolly Wormhead, though this hat has no bobble.

In between my travels I did add the borders and letters to a project from a design workshop in October 2013 with Jenni Dobson. The project reappeared in the unpacking of my quilting fabrics and equipment and I decided to get on and get it done, even though there was no expectation to end the workshop with a completed or ongoing piece of work.

The words around the border are Contrast, Line, Balance and Shape - all elements of design which we were encouraged to explore over the 2 days.  Completing the quilting on this is my One Monthly Goal for March.

To answer the question in the heading? Home is with my husband and sons, wherever we might all be.

Halfway around the world and back again

I thought I had published this entry on 9th Feb as per the heading, but somehow I managed to delete it from the blog during editing, so here it is about three and a half weeks later than intended!

As I mentioned last time I have travel scheduled for half of February. My first trip was to Lithuania, specifically to the Baltic coast. There is no quick route so, on Monday afternoon I flew first to Chicago, then overnight to London Heathrow in England, arriving Tuesday morning, where I waited 6 hours for a plane to Copenhagen in Denmark, there I should have only had a 3 hour layover, but that eventually became 5 hours after technical issues with the plane (something to do with a door!). I finally exited my destination airport at 3 a.m. local time on Wednesday morning or 8 p.m. EST, and arrived at the hotel half an hour later, 27 hours after my first plane took off and 37 1/2 hours after my alarm went off at home on Monday morning. Rarely has a hotel bedroom looked so inviting!  During my outward travel I completed knitting one scarf, started another and also continued with a summer weight sweater for my grandson. This is the back pinned out on my ironing board after I got home.

I had been expecting to be met by cold weather but by the time I arrived it was a balmy 6°C, as opposed to the -15°C of two weeks earlier! Strong gusty winds, grey and wet are in some ways better than 2 feet of snow and bitter cold, especially as there would almost certainly have been a cutting wind with that too.  However I was still very glad not to be out in it for more than a few minutes at a time.  After I had completed the job I had flown out to do I had a couple of hours on Thursday afternoon to wander around Klaipeda by which time the wind had dropped and the sun had come out. This is one of the older buildings in the town.

Now for the important bit of the travelogue: the food! My chosen hotel was home to an Armenian restaurant and the dishes were excellent. I enjoyed salads that had never seen a lettuce leaf in their existence, aromatically spiced meats served with fragrant fluffy rice and a delicious filo, honey and pistachio dessert.  Definitely a cuisine to investigate further.

Travelling home on the Friday I essentially reversed my route, though with shorter stopovers at the various airports along the way. The icing on the cake for the journey home was clearing immigration at Chicago O'Hare in about 10 minutes (as opposed to the, at least, 2 hours it took me on one previous trip) and being able to catch an earlier plane for my final flight, getting both me and my luggage home 4 hours earlier than expected!  More knitting on the homeward legs led to completed scarves for my sons.

An unexpected bonus on the transatlantic flight was flying over the southern tip of Greenland - only the second time I have done that in 20 years of travel between Europe and the USA.

Holidays in both the New World and the Old World

Starting with Thanksgiving and moving through to Christmas and New Year.....

Thanksgiving

Back in the UK there is no formal Thanksgiving holiday.  Probably the nearest thing is Harvest festival, a pagan celebration assimilated by Christianity (aren't they all?) and now fading somewhat, though schools still observe it with collections of non-perishable foods which are then donated to charities.  As a child I remember going to the village church where we would take our edible donations, sometimes home grown, sometimes canned goods, up to the altar where it would be stacked up to show the generosity of the parish, before being taken to those that needed it.  There were special hymns sung to celebrate the safe bringing in of the crops, and growing up in a village surrounded by largely arable farmland these were particularly resonant.  Over my adult life I have lived in areas less in tune with the natural cycle of planting, growth and harvest so it is refreshing to once again recognise the importance of nature's bounty even though the consumerist experience of Black Friday seems to be overshadowing the original history of Thanksgiving.

For our part for Thanksgiving 2015 we joined our first State College family friends for their celebrations for the second year running (first time for me though) and had a wonderful meal of turkey, sweet potatoes, Yankee stuffing, Texas stuffing, cranberry sauces, the most delicious buttery potatoes and other good things.  It was a lovely evening of family and friendship with the six children and five adults all having fun, eating too much, doing puzzles, playing games and sharing conversation and music.

Feast of St Nicholas aka Sinter Klaas

The world certainly seems to have become smaller,  as at the beginning of December I was sat in a Mexican restaurant in a small city in Holland and it seemed quite normal.  The wide acceptance of international cuisine is a far cry from the occasion of when one of my brother's grammar school friends asked "Is your mother foreign?" after being served lasagne and salad at our house in the early 1980s. Oddly enough in our market town in SE England the predominant immigrant culture at that time was Italian, thanks to the local WW2 prisoner of war camp having held mainly Italian soldiers some of whom returned as soon as they could after the end of the hostilities.  Further south in the county there was a significant Polish population seeded by the Polish airmen who flew from the local airfields for the RAF.  There were also representatives of the Windrush generation too, adding to the mix of cultures making up our small corner of England.  As children this was seen as normal, in our eyes our classmates with odd names were as English as we were, we had grown up together and that was that - multiculturalism working on a local scale because it just didn't occur to us that  there was any other way.

I was in Holland on 5th December, better known over there as Sinter Klaas, or the feast day of Saint Nicholas (a Greek/Turkish bishop), who across the Atlantic has been transformed into Santa Claus, and as I ate a young lady dressed as Zwarte Piet visited the tables and photographs were taken of her with smiling children. Zwarte Piet is Sinter Klaas's assistant or sidekick in a similar way that Santa Claus is helped by an elf, now nobody blinks an eyelid at Santa being accompanied by somebody dressed up as an imaginary being, but Zwarte Piet is being tarred (sic) with the brush of racism and yet when you look into the history of the character he wax probably based on a Moorish servant boy travelling with Saint Nicholas from Spain where the gift s of oranges and pomegranates were collected.  In Holland Sinter Klaas is the big gift giving/receiving day for children and the shops were full of seasonal goodies - the marzipan filled pastry rolls were particularly good!

Christmas

Two Christmasses into our American life we are still celebrating in the UK style -  our tree and decorations go up the weekend before the big day, which was the first weekend of the school holidays back in England and was when decorations went up when I was a child.  This year we have also put up external lights with an animated LED "tree" to brighten the evening gloom in the US style.  Mincemeat was made just before I set off for Europe and has since been made into to dozens of mince pies! Christmas Eve was spent doing as much preparation for Christmas Dinner as possible to stop Christmas Day itself being too frantic to enjoy.  At bedtime stockings (actually pillow cases this year as we couldn't find the stockings) were hung on doorknobs by the boys, gifts were placed beneath the tree and we went to bed with a sense of exhausted achievement and anticipation.

As ever Father Christmas brought silly gifts from around the world and put them in the "stockings" - this year he seemed to have visited Holland and the UK as well as finding oranges from California ;)  After opening the gifts a full meal of turkey, Brussels sprouts, peas, carrots. roast parsnips, 2 sorts of stuffing, cranberry sauce, bread sauce, gravy and pommes dauphine was consumed, followed by mince pies once we thought we had enough room for them. I had even managed to find some UK Christmas Crackers complete with paper hats, silly gifts and dreadful jokes!

In the UK the day after Christmas is know as Boxing Day and as a child was spent with the extended family. As the closest family members are now over 1000 miles away and the rest over 3000 miles we shared our evening with our friends from Thanksgiving and ate even more food.......

New Year

....which brings us to New Year's Eve and I for one am looking forward to 2016 being a more settled year than 2015, which had some big ups (me finally getting to the USA) and downs (the loss of my much loved mother-in-law) and lots of undulations along the way.  A New Year and new start in a new country (yes I was here on New Year's Day 2015 but knew I was heading back to the UK for the final pack up of home and business, which took way longer than anticipated), I hope it is a good one.  The Christmas tree and decorations will stay up until Twelfth Night (another UK tradition) at which point they will be packed carefully away until December 2016 when they will have the chance to brighten another mid-winter.

What with travel and other stuff I didn't actually sew any gifts for Christmas this year, but did manage to make some table mats and matching coasters, which have at least been both decorative and useful.

Small things that make life easier

Visiting Philadelphia last month we checked in at the hotel using my American issued debit card and the receptionist asked for photo ID. I duly handed over my UK passport and I saw the panic enter into her eyes. After I assured her it did have photos of yours truly within its battered maroon covers, and she conferred with her more experienced colleague, she accepted it as valid proof of my existence. Only as we collected the receipt as we left did I see that my address had been entered as Northern Ireland, United States - no street address, no town/city, just two completely geographically separated countries! Such events should now be in the past as I now have my Pennsylvania Driver's License in its full Technicolor glory. I swear I was more nervous for this relatively straightforward test than I was over 20 years ago on a foggy day in the UK. This time the test route was flat, short and simple as opposed to the one taking in the steepest street in the town specially to do the dreaded hill start, as many junction types as possible and a quiet housing estate (subdivision) for the 3 point turn and reversing around a corner. Back then I was disappointed to fail the first attempt (I passed second time around), this time I would have been terminally embarrassed.

Learning to use the correct vocabulary helps make life smoother too - there are the well known examples pavement/sidewalk, tap/faucet, boot/trunk, holiday/vacation, petrol/gas(oline) but less familiar terms crop up too, sometimes to the gentle amusement of one or both sides, this week I discovered that my shake-proof washer is an American's toothed washer and a grub screw is a set screw. Cooking ingredients need care too - all purpose flour is plain flour, self-rising is self raising, golden raisins are sultanas, American granulated sugar is nearer in crystal size to UK caster sugar than UK granulated sugar. For some recipes only the exact ingredient will do, calling for a trip to the international aisle in the supermarket to find a run of the mill UK item, usually at extra cost, for example golden syrup or, for a special occasion, a can of Heinz baked beans, which are not the same the world over as we have discovered. Some surprising things such as Lea & Perrin's Worcestershire Sauce are easily available as standard products. Also I heard "copacetic" (satisfactory, tickety-boo) used in speech for the first time ever - it just doesn't seem to exist in UK English.

My quilting achievement for this week was completing a pair of cushions started in the spring of 2014 - as you can see I had help!

Mostly moved....

Life got pretty busy after my last posting - both on a business & personal front but the container shipped in late September and I then managed a 10 day trip over to Pennsylvania in October and took the cats with me.  This is the story of how that trip went.

After booking my flight from Manchester to JFK I called customer services and made reservations for the 2 cats, to be paid at the airport on the day of travel. It is worth insisting and speaking to a supervisor if the first person you speak to claims they don't take animals.  In preparation the cats visited the vet a month in advance for microchips and rabies vaccinations, and then not more than 10 days before the flight another visit for the health and fitness to fly letter/certificate.

The morning of travel I woke up earlier than usual for our flight and let the cats out to do whatever cats do at 5am, then fed them a small breakfast and got them into their carriers. The carriers were labelled with the cats' names, chip numbers, flight number, ultimate destination address and our cell phone numbers.  I arrived at the airport 3 1/2 hours before the flight time and went to check in as normal with a trolley laden with suitcase and 2 cat carriers. The check in agent called down the pet check in agent who confirmed that the temperatures were fine for the cats and went through all the paperwork, I paid the fees for the cats and then weighed in the suitcase as normal baggage. The pet agent then escorted me and the cats through security, where I did have to open the carriers so they could be swabbed for testing! After security the cats and I went our separate ways and I was assured that their water bowls would be refreshed before loading.

I didn't actually see the cats being loaded onto the aircraft, but was assured they were on and "tied down" before I boarded. The flight was just as I like - blissfully uneventful.  On arrival at JFK I cleared immigration about 30 minutes after touchdown and then went to baggage claim, waited a few minutes for my suitcase and then a few more at oversize baggage for the cats. They were both fine and seemed quiet but awake and not at all distressed. Clearing customs was also straightforward, as usual. Some of the other passengers came over to see the cats before leaving, having seen them in the check in queue back in Manchester.

Then I met up with my husband for the first time in 2 months and drove home to PA via a route where I was able to see the Statue of Liberty. We stopped and rewatered the cats when we had a coffee and on arrival at our new home they came out of their carriers and explored every room, under every piece of furniture, inside every cupboard for the next couple of hours. I'm not sure whether my sons were more pleased to see their mum or their cats!

I promptly went down with a horrible cough & cold and spent most of my stay feeling pretty grim.  Work issues also reared their ugly head and had to be dealt with as soon as I returned to the UK.

The container was delivered a few days after I returned to the UK so husband and sons had the fun of unpacking it :-)

Saying goodbyes and refreshing memories

Before moving there are goodbyes to be said to family and friends. Some people you are sure you will see again but with others you know it could be the last time you see them. Some friendships exist purely because you live near each other or share an interest and may only be short term, others last for years, even though you see and talk to each other rarely, but when you do meet up your conversation picks up as if you had last seen each other a few days ago, not a decade or more.

One of the things I am trying to do in my last few weeks before leaving are to catch up, in person, with my various friends. This week I had a very pleasant evening in a Peak District pub reminiscing over shared memories and making new ones to take with me into the future.  My feeling is that you carry your friends with you in your head and it is important to refresh your "stored" friends so that they are truer reflections of their real world selves.

In the last few months I have also been acutely aware that I am visiting places for the last time: the house that I was born in, the church in which I was baptised and married (first time around) and where I also sang in the choir for much of my childhood, the schools I went to, the chalk landscape I grew up sheltered by.  Leaving "home" to return to where I currently live has always been a wrench, even if I was only passing through after visiting a client, this time it felt like a final pilgrimage.  Somehow leaving the house where I have spent all the nearly19 years of my (second) marriage has not had the same sense of loss as we are moving onwards together as a family and also I have helped my daughter and her family move into it.  I suspect my feelings would be different if we had sold it to a stranger.

Our house packed into a 20' shipping container