In an unsurprising display of immense unoriginality, I would like to announce that my favorite season is fall. Fall? Autumn? Which should I have said there? I realized yesterday that I've lived full-time in the states for exactly ten years—plus six part-time years before that—which means I probably shouldn't feel such a fraud saying "fall," and yet I do because it's not what I grew up saying. I mean, what if I'm turning into Madonna, except the opposite? Would somebody tell me if that was happening?

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You know what? I love Christmas. I don't mean I'm the sort of person who plays Christmas music in November or puts her tree up the evening of Thanksgiving---I'm actually pretty slack on both accounts; I haven't even sent my cards out yet, which is what I'm actually supposed to be doing right now instead of writing a blog post, oh how about that---but more that I just love the feeling, a week or so before Christmas, that only good things are coming up in the near future.

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You guys, I am enjoying the heck out of my French classes. The HECK, I say. I am enjoying them so much that right now I almost---almost!---want to leave the comfy couch where I'm sitting under a blanket with a glass of wine in my right hand and a square of dark chocolate at my left, and find my iPhone so I can use my new French dictionary app to look up "heck" in French, or at least a reasonable equivalent.

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Have you been wondering how I've been coping without a kitchen sink? Probably not, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I've also been coping without kitchen counters, a real kitchen floor, and---for the last four days---an oven, which is currently sitting three inches away from me in the living room while we lay the tile. On the upside, the refrigerator is there too, and it's been super handy being able to reach it from the couch. Want a cold beer, darling? Let me just lean over to the left a little and open the fridge.

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We're not going to have a kitchen sink for seven to ten days. If that's not something you don't want to hear coming from your husband's mouth while he's holding a sledgehammer, then I don't know what is. Or perhaps you would prefer him not to be holding the sledgehammer in the first place. I know I would, because then my kitchen wouldn't look like it does right now, which is like this:

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This evening we got home from work around 7:30pm and checked the mail as we always do. In amongst the magazines and bills and, rather excitingly, an engagement party invitation, was a plain white envelope with the back unsealed. On the front, in a careful hand, someone had printed GARDENER. Inside, there was a business card for a gardener---the exact words were "landscaping and maintenance"---and nothing else.

Sean and I had two very different reactions to this envelope. Wait, let me see if you can guess which reaction each of us had.

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We haven't really made a whole lot of progress on the house. In fact, I'm just going to copy and paste that last sentence right now and keep it somewhere handy because I fear it's exactly how I'm going to be starting most of my blog posts between now and, I don't know, Christmas?

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My new commute, until now, has been pretty innocuous. We get on the train, we sit there and read for thirty minutes---I have rediscovered reading! I now have a time and a place to read!---and then we get off at the other end. We do this twice a day and it's fine. Sometimes I get my phone out and Yelp all the restaurants and bars we're passing because we move through entirely different neighborhoods now and it's always nice to know where you can get a decent falafel. Sometimes Sean and I chat, sometimes we don't.

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Picture yourself at the beach in July. What are you wearing? A bathing suit, right? Maybe a t-shirt and shorts if you're there in the evening. What you're not wearing at the beach in July, I'd expect, is a long-sleeved t-shirt under a hoodie under a jacket with a fur-lined hood, wrapped in a pashmina, and topped off with a hat.

Welcome to summer in San Francisco.

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Today marked the very first time Sean and I made the commute on public transport from our new house to work. Don't get me wrong: we lived in it for three days last week before heading off to Barbados on vacation, and they were all days we could have tried to figure out the bus or the train, but we drove to work instead: mostly because our heads were packed and spinning at that point and one more new thing to understand would've driven us, I think, to the brink.

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