I love football!

Or rather, soccer, to us Americans.  I’m really excited, because I’m going to see a soccer game in Paris this weekend with the other English assistants.  It’s Paris v. Bordeaux, no major teams or players, but it will still be a lot of fun, I think. 

Not much else has been going on, really.  I’ve been working frantically to finish all of my Christmas presents, and I finally got the last one sent off today.  (Oh, no, wait, there’s one that I haven’t sent off because I don’t have the address… shoot.)  Well, I’ve gotten *most* of them sent off, and I feel a great sense of relief.

I’ve also been trying to learn how to knit on four needles.  I want to make a hat, and to do so nicely I have to be able to knit on four needles so that I can decrease at the top and make the hat come to a close.  So, imagine what I said a few weeks ago about the secret code of knitting, then imagine that rather than using two needles (the standard vision of knitting) you are using four - or rather, five.  You have four that always have stitches on them, arranged in a tic-tac-toe board shape, and you use a fifth needle as the “working” needle, that actually does the knitting.  It’s very confusing and, what’s more, far too pointy.  I knit sitting down and I keep poking myself in the stomach with one or more of the needles?  But it will be good for me to know, so I keep at it.  I just hope that I made the hat big enough around - I don’t want to rip everything out!

That’s about it.  I’m starting to get excited about the trip to England, especially since it’s only a week and a bit away.  However, I’m sad too.  I was walking around Reims (another city in the area, where I went to do some shopping), and they were playing Christmas music over the loudspeakers in the streets.  At one point they started playing an instrumental version of an American carol, and I almost started crying.  It just hit me hard right then how far away from home I am and how this will be the first time in my life that I haven’t spent Christmas with my family.  I know that I wouldn’t spend every Christmas with my family for my entire life, but somehow it seems like it would have been easier if the first one away from them weren’t in a foreign country.  Then again, maybe not.  Still, I got a bit homesick then.  I got better, and I’m still looking forward to England, but…