Is 650 Miles too Far to Go for Fabric?

My brother picked me up at the Arcata Airport this morning and took me directly to Eureka Fabrics--well, ok, directly to lunch and then a walk along the edge of Humboldt Bay, but before we got back in the car--where I picked up this one yard linen remnant which I plan to put in a frame and hang earrings from. After I eat the chocolate.


Here is a picture of my hosts:



And here is the edge of the tablecloth where I am currently sitting:



Which is of interest because only yesterday I was admiring Susan's beautiful vintage hemstitcher attachment as part of her fascinating catalog of vintage sewing machine attachments at Spare Time. And there it is in front of me--hemstitching! My brother was surprisingly unimpressed when I told him I knew how it was done.

Eureka!

I'm off to Eureka, California (Ferndale, to be precise) for a week to visit my brother who's up there hiding from the 21st (and maybe the 20th) Century. I had no idea there was so much California north of San Francisco! It is necessary to abandon my new space because my DS has invited who knows how many of his friends to crash at my house while they attend Anime Expo 2010 down at the Convention Center, and technically My Workroom is also The Guestroom. It is also DD's pied-a-terre when she deigns to visit.

I gave up on completing a draft by July 2, not because it was impossible (which it was) but because repackaging my research to fit that particular call for papers would suck all the interest out of it for me.

Meanwhile my proposal to present a paper at a conference in Utrecht in September has been accepted! I've also registered for a conference in Pecs, Hungary, two weeks after the one in Utrecht. I won't be presenting at that one but the topic, a comparative examination of Electronic Justice, interests me greatly and is important for my role as a law teacher. Now all I have to do is 1. scrub up some funding; 2. write the Utrecht paper; 3. make up some all-purpose clothing to get me through this adventure; and 4. figure out where to get my hands on a bicycle in Europe.

I wonder if I'll really pull this off.