In Recent News...

Life's been kind of crazy round here lately.  I'm teaching six classes a week now (two quilting, two jewelry making, one baking, and one conversational English), and taking one class (quilting), and preparing for this summer's intern group.  It feels like most days I work, prepare for work, eat, and sleep...repeat.  It's definitely been "I love my job" weeks lately, but at the same time, I find myself looking forward to vacations when the classes will slow down and I get a bit of a break.

The German import store has recently started carrying this knock-off brand of Fruit Loops.  It's funny how, even though I never would buy them in the US, and if they were carried in the regular stores here, I wouldn't buy them either...but they're such a rarity that I got super excited!

I went to Paris last week for work--searching out all the jewelry-making bead stores.  Everything was in full bloom--especially the cherry and almond blossoms.  It filled my heart with such joy to see so much color and life!  (#Iliveinaconcretejungle)

Obviously, I added some filters to this photo, but the original did start from an amazing sunset!

While in Paris, I got to visit some old friends, visit Giggles in the hospital--and she had her sweet baby the day I arrived!  I also stayed with the Superheroes and got good quality time with them...and their dog, who is coming to stay with me for the summer!

I saw horses in the street in Paris!

Upon my return to Marseille, there was an earthquake!  I live above the metro, and so I'm used to feeling my floor shake a bit when the metro (or a really large delivery truck) goes by.  Well, last Monday evening, I was laying on my couch, and it started shaking more than normal.  Then the bookshelf behind me started rattling.  Then the whole room started swaying.  For a moment I thought, "Am I really dizzy?"  Then the door-shaped picture frames on the wall started opening and closing, and I understood what was happening.  Just as I was wondering if I should get up to get into a doorframe, it stopped.  I read the next day that it was a 5.2 shaker based out of a town near where we'd gone skiing a few months ago, and that it was more than likely a precursor to a bigger one to come.  Hmmm... Hopefully not too much bigger!

This week I finished my Tree-of-Life square for my quilt.  Only a few more squares left before I begin putting the whole thing together!  I'm super proud of this one!

A big topic of conversation among all the anglophones is how France recently passed a law that banned doing work email after 6pm.  I like it!  :)  However, since I'm not that good at responding to emails anyway, I'm not sure how much that law is going to affect me!  And besides, turns out the anglos didn't quite get the story right...

And since I'm blogging about stuff I've read recently... How about THIS article about Google's autocomplete of stereotypes of every US state?  

Please note that (1) there are only four states with positive descriptions: Oregon (good), Colorado (fit), Ohio (important), and Alabama (good); (2) that Alabama is the only state in the south with a positive stereotype, the rest are racist, poor, backwards and cheap.  I googled it myself, "Why is Alabama so..." and it should lastly be noted that the autocomplete is actually: "so good at football."  I'm going to take some liberties here and guess that people are googling that about our whole state and not just one particular football team.  ahem.

War Eagle.