I is for... "Bird's Eye" Views

is for "bird's eye" views.

Yes, I'm stretching the letter to cover a homonym!

Guide to birds of the lake

Sparrow collecting nesting material

Young girl with chicks (probably for Easter)

Sparrow in pub!

Swans

Swans

Swans and ducks and lovely clear lake

And then there was the dove on our windowsill...

H is for... Helvetica, and Heights

is for... Helvetica.

Helvetica, which means Swiss in Latin, is a typeface designed in 1957. Then there's the Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland. And then there's Helvetia, the female national personification of the country:

Helvetia in the Jardin d'anglais

From Wikipedia: "The allegory is typically pictured in a flowing gown, with a spear and a shield emblazoned with the Swiss flag, and commonly with braided hair, commonly with a wreath as a symbol of confederation.

The name is a derivation of the ethnonym Helvetii, the name of the Gaulish tribe inhabiting the Swiss Plateau prior to the Roman conquest."

is also for heights!


We took a drive up to St Cergue, on the foothills of the Jura mountains. The temperature dropped five degrees Celsius on the way up!

If we'd gone a little higher, we would have seen snow -- but I had enough of that back in Montreal!

From there we drove down toward the village of Gland, which is near Michael Schumacher's estate and ranch, and where apparently Phil Collins has a house. It's also near the UEFA headquarters.

In the afternoon we stopped by a bakery that had some inspirational sweets:

G is for... Geneva

is for... Geneva -- of course!

Apparently we've arrived the year before the bicentennial of Geneva's joining the Swiss Confederation!

To focus on books and writing, though, I've just learned that the city will host its 27th International Fair for Books and Press in the first week of May. And there's a weekly book market in the Marche de la Fusterie (which also hosts an artisans market on alternate days)!

As for famous people, there's of course the summer that Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin spent here, during which Mary wrote Frankenstein and Byron worked on a number of poems, including "The Prisoner of Chillon", inspired by a castle fortress on Lake Geneva/Leman. There's a great New York Times essay on Byron's time in Geneva.

I also saw a sign on a building near our apartment-hotel stating that Dostoyevsky had lived there for a year in 1867-1868, something I hadn't known before.

One thing I haven't figured out yet is the names of these trees:

They're everywhere! Does anyone know their names?

F is for... Free Time

is for... Free time to explore!

One of the mistakes we made the year we lived in Turkey was to fall into the work/home/local friends cycle. We forgot how close we were to other parts of Europe, and we forgot to travel further afield!

Partly it was our overlapping work schedules that made travelling difficult, but we could have done it if we'd tried.

So while in Geneva our goal is to get away on the weekends! Italy, Germany, France, the rest of Switzerland... Here's hoping we don't miss out on anything!

Meanwhile, we're only just scratching the surface of the city:

Long avenue, with the mountains in the background

Where the followers of Calvin and Knox met, in the 16th Century

Calvin's chair

View from the North Tower of Saint Peter's Cathedral

Another view from the tower

E is for... Everything I Don't Know

is for... Everything I Don't Know!

Amazing to imagine that we've just moved to a city we hadn't even visited before!

Lots to figure out -- how to get a cell phone, which neighbourhoods are good to live in (got to find an apartment!), how the public transportation system works, what sorts of legal paperwork are required, and so on.

So far all I know is where I'll be working, and the view outside our hotel room:

Down the street:

Brunswick Monument

The adventure begins!

D is for... Don't Panic

is for Don't Panic!

There's A Lot to be done when moving. Tiny niggling tasks, and tasks that you'll have to rely on others for, making you impatient. Keeping lists helps - especially because unlike Real Life or maybe even writing, most of the items on your moving list will get done, even if you have to lose a bit of sleep. They have to get done or the move will never happen!

Other things fall by the wayside, though, and that's where I really had to tell myself Don't Panic! I worried about falling behind on the Forum, on blog comments, on the Wallace Correspondence Project, and basically everything that didn't have something to do with The Move and Selling the House. Even reading! Which is hard to imagine for me. I was halfway through 11 Doctors 11 Stories and meant to finish it (last story is by Neil Gaiman!) so I could put it into storage and not pack it to bring with us (have you seen the size of that book?!), but I simply had no time.

It helps to keep a sense of humour, though. Here's me smoking a paper pipe at a party!

C is for... Cats

is for Cats!

And shipping. Shipping or travelling with any animal can be fraught with complications. In our case we were lucky that Switzerland, unlike the United Kingdom, doesn't require a quarantine. But there's still lots of paperwork, getting their vaccinations up-to-date, checkups by their regular vet as well as a European Union-certified one, microchipping... And all sorts of detailed rules regarding kennel sizes and weight regulations and so on.

Only once you've passed them to the loaders at the airport is it all out of your hands. Who knows what happens to them down there? Or on the plane? There was quite a bit of turbulence on our flight (lucky they got to travel with us as "excess baggage" and weren't shipped as cargo on a different date). When we picked them up, their water dishes had been spilled all over and it was none too clean inside the kennel. The cats themselves were warm and dry though, and when we finally got them to our apartment hotel they didn't seem any the worse for wear. Their appetites haven't returned to normal but besides a bit of mewling, they seem to be settling in.

Jet lagged kitties inspect the new view!

B is for... Belated Announcement

is for... not quite the same as the title... Baby!

Yup, announcement number two, as I shared it on the Forum, is that we're expecting!

I was going to share a photo of the lovely crochet layette an aunt made, but as you can imagine, all our stuff is either still packed or back home, waiting to be shipped.

But I will be busy on websites like this one:

If you have advice, feel free!
Especially all you IWSGers - I'm feeling more insecure about this than about writing!

A is for... Announcement and Arrival

is for Announcement -- and Arrival!

Real Life events can now be revealed -- I got a job transfer to Geneva, Switzerland!

Anyone who's ever moved out of one country to another knows how much work this takes. The packing, the sorting, the paperwork, the selling, the storing, the paperwork, the farewells, the final leap into the unknown, the paperwork...

It's still not all complete, of course, but as of a few days ago, we've arrived!

view of the Alps from the plane

view of Place des Alps from our temporary apartment-hotel

Belated Update, 2013 In Review, and Knitting Olympics

inally, an update!

Here's recap of 2013 in my knitting life:

I was nominated for a Liebster Award in February! As part of the award, I answered eleven questions and, funnily enough, this was the first one:

1. What prompted you to start your blog?
I was trying to keep knitting and cats off my writing blog!

A temporary lapse in format, I suppose, since I'm cross posting this to the writing blog...

I offer the Liebster Award to anyone who'd like to accept it, but I've got eleven questions for you to answer!

Next up, I shared knitting related photos from a visit to the New York Public Library, and then I offered a sneak preview of mini-Alex's Doctor Who scarf!

Inspected by Sam, along with a Christmas scarf that I knit

Here's mini-Alex sporting the scarf during his first concert - a live performance of Rush's YYZ.

Later, in April, I got a booth at the Notre Dame de Grace Artisan's Fair to benefit our local food bank!

Actually, that was a spring for fairs. I attended a beer fest, hosted a charity book fair, and spent a day at that artisans' fair. Here's me at the latter:

Later on in the summer I started a long, complicated blanket, mixing a basic pattern with a leaf pattern from the turn of the century, which I found after Googling Mrs Lynde's apple-leaf patterns, from Anne of Green Gables.

Begun!

First set of leaves

Nearly there...

Finished!

There was also a visit to Upper Canada Village, a recreated 19th Century village, with lots of photos. I shared some of my Shetlands visiting dreams...

And another blanket, this one for Christmas!

At the start

Ongoing...

Nearly done!

Sam and I had a dispute over who the knitting bag belonged to:

And because he seems to be in all the photos, he's a gratuitous shot of Frodo:

To tie this post into to reading, here's a lovely shot of a crochet Amanda Palmer and a crochet Neil Gaiman, reading a book, a screenshot from Amanda's blog post:

Meanwhile, will you be participating in the knitting Olympics this year (no matter what it's called)?
I've got another set of baby-related items to knit as gifts!