Thanksgiving Morning, 2013

Duncan is cooking our holiday dinner at the Coast Guard station where I will go at the appointed time and enjoy every traditional thing with no uproar in our kitchen. This to me, and to Duncan I think, is ideal.

We talked last night about all we are thankful for. We are very fortunate. Here's our list.

• Employment
• Health benefits
• Health!
• Stock market is booming.
• We have a new car this year -- and specific features we like a lot are: better gas mileage, easy to park, remote key entry, and when you unlock the car to get in it at night, the inside lights come on.
• We are grateful for Mom -- she is an amazing, delightful person, a source of deep love, and helpful in so many ways. (case in point: after her last visit, I had 3 pair of fleece-lined tights in my drawer).
• We remember in gratitude the lives and the influence on us of my Uncle Vic and Duncan's Aunt Mary.
• We love our crazy cats, Fred and Ethel.
• We both have immersed ourselves in new interests this year -- Duncan in the Coast Guard and me in knitting. These things make us happy and we are happy knowing the other one is also happy  while we are immersed in our own happy place. -- Added benefit:  Duncan has become an even better cook!

And here's a few more things that come to mind:

• Guilty pleasures -- Cook-Out Milkshakes and every other week assistance with housecleaning
• Tech Support
• A good night's sleep is not to be taken for granted anymore.
• those grippy hair rollers
• Movie nights
• Shopping in Cary
• Fleece (anything fleece. . . it doesn't get very cold here often, but when it does, I love my fleece!
• My multi-talented fiber arts friends
• Friends in general, of course.

I'm sure as soon as I hit the "post" button, I will think of important things that should be on the list, but it is time to get ready to go to Thanksgiving Dinner..

"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

Bon Appitit, ya'll!

Speaking of Knitting

And speaking of knitting, this went in the mail today -- the first garment I've made to actually fit someone. She's 16 months old so I hope she hasn't hit a huge growth spurt since I got her measurements.

Cables!

Cute button. I added the ribbon in the neckline, but it might just feel scratchy and bumpy. Eagerly awaiting feedback from Mom.

Turns out the sweater is on the big side. She'll probably be able to wear it next winter, too. 

She would look cute in anything!

Next up, a sweater for her older brother. It's going to have red and gray stripes, a collar and a zipper -- so more challenges ahead.

Art, Literature, and Knitting. What's Not to Love??

I stumbled across this blog post by Terri Windling at Myth and Moor today. It is a lovely meditation on Art, Literature, and Knitting.

I love this little bit: 
". . .Like writing, knitting has a finite number of raw ingredients. There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Those letters can combine to give you David Foster Wallace or freshman composition papers. There are only two basic stitches: the knit and the purl. Those stitches can add up to a gorgeously complicated sweater or a pastel pink toilet paper cozy . . ." Adrienne Martini, Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously

The Sock Knitter by Grace Crossington Smith (Australian, 1892 - 1984)

Here is the link.The art is very nice and the quotes range to Stephanie Pearl McPhee and Harry Potter. I shared it with several knitting friends but I think everyone would like it.

Quick Postcard

A few pics from the last few days -- for one reason or another everything has a yellowy-greenish glow:

My Aunt Doris has new cats: Marsh(mellow) and Yum(Yum). Are they cute or what??

Last week was spent determining I have no signs of heart disease so that is good news:

ooey ooey oow oow1

And here's my latest knitting project -- a sweater for a little girl we know.

That's all for now!

Sailing Sailing Over the Ocean Blue. . .

This little blog, in which I used to take great pleasure and care with, will just lay here mostly dormant until I can disengage from this stupid church committee. I'll say no more about it but it is making me lose my religion.

The news here is really Duncan's -- he's thrown himself in with the Coast Guard Auxiliary and is now consumed with classes and meetings and reading navigational charts and -- amazingly enough -- cooking!

They offer, and he attended, an Auxiliary Chef course back in February, and now he is a USCG Auxiliary Food Service Specialist. He went down to Clearwater Florida with another fellow, Joe. and they had a great time together. They are like the grumpy old men, -- Joe is the sunny one and Duncan is the curmudgeon. But now they are cooking buddies and work some weekends in the galley at the Coast Guard station here in Charleston which is down on The Battery -- and a  couple of times they have gone out on working cutters for 3 - 4 day stints. Duncan can actually take up to 45 days a year as "military leave" from his job to do this. He is a happy boy.

Joe is a Public Affairs guy and travels with camera -- so all of these pics are thanks to him.

Here they go, off on a 4-day assignment.

Here's how their days started.

Getting Busy

This is what they came for.

Mission Accomplished

Here are some of the boat's crew. Duncan and Joe were cooking for about 15 all together. All these young guys called Duncan and Joe the FOFs -- Funny Old Farts -- so I take it everyone had a pretty good time.

Cleaning House

I am cleaning like a fury today. Throwing away. Putting up. Rearranging.

I have this little pile of quotes by good women from one of those calendars where you tear the page off every day. These are the ones I could not bear to throw away. I have been keeping them and pushing them around on my desk for . . . 3 years now, I think.

The fury tells me I must throw them away. I'm going to record the quotes here so they're not really gone. Random order. No explanation why it struck me.

June 18, "Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things grow by God's Law out of the smallest". -- Florence Nightingale.

May 29, "My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch on fire or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one cares. Why should you?" -- Erma Bombeck

April 20, "The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now."  Angelina Jolie, academy Award-winning actor and humanitarian (interesting in light of Jolie's announcement this week. . )

July 16, "Forgiveness is the economy of the heart. . . Forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits." -- Hannah Moore, author

March 9, "When you have nothing to be ashamed of, when you know who you are and what you stand for, you stand in wisdom. Insight. Strength and protection. You stand in peace." -- Oprah Winfrey, TV personality, actor, and founder of O Magazine

February 22, "Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up." -- Indira Gandhi, political leader

February 9, "If we were to judge nature by common sense of likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed." -- Annie Dillard, writer and poet

September 13, "If your baby is beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time, you're the grandma." -- Theresa Bloomingdale, writer

September 7, "Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets. -- Mignon McLaughlin, writer

July 19, "Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week. -- Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winnning writer and poet

March 16 (Canberra Day in Australia, by the way), "It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows." -- Erma Bombeck, columnist

June 9, "Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand -- and melting like a snowflake." -- Marie Beynon Ray, writer

September 22, "Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world." -- Grace Paley, writing and social activist

June 22, "Tread softly! All the earth is holy ground." -- Christina Rossetti, poet

July 31, "When you love someone, say it, right then. Out loud. Otherwise, the moment just passes you by." -- Julia Roberts, Academy Award-winning actor

July 9, "All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough." -- Anna Quindlen, author & Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist

June 8, "The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have." -- Anna Quindlen, author & Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist

June 1, "One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory." -- Rita Mae Brown, writer & educator

There you go. Now I can throw away one more thing that's been cluttering up my life. I hope you saw at least one little bit of wisdom that you liked.

First Day of Spring

Art by Nichol Brown -- Marcus's mother, Fiona's grandmother, Facebook friend.

We've made it through another winter.  Here are the signs:

•  The heat has stopped running and we are sleeping with the windows open most nights now.
• The fig tree is leafing out.
• A Canada Goose has taken to her nest on the island in our pond at as she does every spring -- is it the same goose from last year? Offspring of the goose who sat there last year? How do new geese know the exact spot for the nest?
• Pear trees blooming
• Azaleas blooming
• Pollen
• The clocks sprang forward a couple of weeks ago.
• "Doing Taxes" is rapidly rising in priority on the running To-Do List.
• Christy and Morris were here this weekend on the first leg of their sailing trip to the Bahamas. They will be gone until early June -- they have long planned to leave in early spring so they can get back before hurricane season.

Good friends, Bahamas bound.

 And a bit from What the Day Gives by Jeanne Lohman:

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin's difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.

Not a Bad Winter So Far

Knock on wood.

I have been knitting, knitting away on a blue sock.

And even though it's not as cold here as it is most places, Fred and Ethel don't know that and they are careful to seek out the late afternoon sunbeams for their last nap before dinner each day.

Back to my knitting.

Hitting Restart. . .

oh my, coming up out of a bit of a fog. . . fall was a fog because I did not anticipate that my boss's Christmas prep would totally supercede my own Christmas prep and of course I tried to act like everything was normal. Finally the inevitable crash and now hitting restart. Not as refreshed as I would like, but carry on.

Here's a list of things that happened, or in some cases, didn't happen. . .

1. Duncan has decided to join the Coast Guard Auxiliary -- which involves fitting into a very complex hierarchy, taking a lot of training, and having several uniforms -- each requiring the sewing on of name tags and stars and such just so. He is very fussy about it. Eventually he will be able to go out and help  rescue boats in distress. There is an Auxiliary Chef class he is very keen to take. Hmm, peanut butter sandwiches for 50.
2. We visited Christy and Morris in Southport. They have about the nicest brand new house I've been in. Very comfy and livable, even for Aubrey and her wheelchair.
3. Mom visited us in Charleston. We took a day trip to see Pearl Fryer's Topiary Garden in Bishopville. A worthy day-trip.

4. Spent a lovely Saturday at Botany Bay with Debbie and John Dickinson. It is a protected area, so very pristine and "unbuilt." Debbie & John are excellent company and we would have spent the night with them at Edisto, but Duncan felt bad.
5. The very next weekend I spent Saturday with Circular women at Dewees Island -- another lovely barrier island -- this one north off of Isle of Palms while Edisto is down 17 South. Dewees is approachable only by ferry and no cars allowed in the island. Some very nice homes there, tucked into the landscape and made comfortable enough to not want or need to leave for anything. Would have been very relaxing but for the mob of Circular women.
6. I did not make my "This Year I'm Thankful For. . . " list. Not because I'm not. Just didn't get the juices flowing. A regret. I like doing that each year.
7. Thanksgiving was a bit of a whirlwind. We traveled with the kitties to Grandmas. Left them at home while we visited Uncle Bill, the farm in Person County, went to church, had Thanksgiving dinner with Lil Martha and her whole crew -- beautiful table, great food there. Those are the nicest people in the world. We stopped by to see Aunt Mary and I think she knew who we were when we first got there, but things went fuzzy shortly thereafter. On the way home we went by Elizabethtown and I had a Melvin's burger and saw White Lake again for the first time since I was three.
8. We re-joined the gym. Oh boy.
9. The cats think bringing a tree into the house is the very best idea anybody every had. 

10. I successfully did some Christmas knitting.
11. Mom came for Christmas. We agreed it would be low key and quite. A good thing because Duncan got sick  and went to bed. 
12.  A trip to Black Mountain got nixed because Adam and Wilson were both sick too. Must have been grand for Jeffrey.
13. Oh, here's something that fits in the list as a thing that happened and a thing that didn't happen. . . what happened was, my husband, you all know Duncan, he didn't get me anything for Christmas. He didn't have any ideas. And he got sick. I'll just leave it there. 
14. Life goes on. I was fine, then all of a sudden last Sunday night I got cold and started shaking and basically went to bed and stayed until yesterday. So, some days were lost. Some thank you notes haven't been written. Actually some bills didn't get paid, (but they're paid now). Finally, I think I have righted the ship and am steering again. Just not with a lot of enthusiasm or direction. 
15. I did not do the "change over the calendar ritual" that I always enjoy but thumbing through the 2012 book I find clippings telling me The Artist won the Academy Award for Best Picture (eh,), when Mom & Sally were here in the Spring we visited Magnolia Plantation, 3 friends had high school seniors who graduated, we volunteered for Spoleto, when it was hot we went to a little spate of movies; Magic Mike, Moonrise Kingdom, To Rome w/ Love and The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel. Lee and Kathy and I had a weekend in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill in early December. Lee's daughter Nicole got married this summer and Laura finished Law School with a job. A good year for them. Christy and Morris moved into their new house. Barack Obama won, again. . . and I have a clipping that says: 1 in 3 newly elected congress members is a woman, 29 women of color will serve in the new congress, and the 113th congress will include the most female members ever.

So limping a bit, but trending upwards.

The Christmas Knitting