Winter. Movies. Knitting

My view from the couch when it's snowing.  The ski trail is in the middle of the picture.

Snow.
Here in Craftsbury, when people (me usually included) 'pray for snow', it's to make the skiing better.  Today I needed it to cover up the ashes and big hole along the driveway before Vince came home.  It's not that I would never tell him I went off the road but I wanted a chance blame it on the car before he sees the hole and assumes it was my fault.  Even if I would have had my right hand on the steering wheel instead of in the potato chip bag, my rented Ford Focus would have ended up in that snowbank.  

When Vince takes the car to school, I'm carless.  So, one sunny, clear roaded  (I'm sure that's not a word) day I rented a car for a month without thinking to ask about snow tires.  Today as I crutched (I'm sure that's not a word either ) up our 200 yard driveway with a backpack full of groceries to swap for a bucket of ashes and a snow shovel (it worked pretty well as a crutch actually), I knew I wouldn't forget to ask about the tires next time.

 All dug out and parked at if nothing had happened, I called the rental car people to see if I could get a car with snow tires, he said that no rental cars in Vermont had snow tires, 'it's the law' (now that sounds a little odd) and that the car was 'fine' since it had all-season tires.  I asked him if he wanted to come and drive the car out of the ditch.

Rental car with miraculous go-anywhere all season tires.

Customer service.
Our 'Six Feet Under'  Netflix addiction got to the point where the nights we didn't have one to watch were almost unbearable.  Pathetic, huh?  We finally decided the suffering was just too much and it was worth four dollars a month to upgrade our membership from one dvd at a time to two.  I clicked on 'my account' and noticed I'd been paying 15.99/month (one dvd + streaming) and not the 7.99/month (one dvd) for which I had signed up.  Of course we had never used the streaming because we didn't know we had it and wouldn't have anyway because we both like the anticipation of that red envelope in our mailbox and it being as close as we'll ever be again to the thrill of our photos being in at the drug store.  Evidently during the Netflix fiasco last summer, if you didn't say "don't add streaming," they added it, and since they had your credit card, they charged it.  They just didn't tell you.  So.  For 4 months I'd been paying 15.99 instead of the 7.99 I'd agreed to be paying.  I figured it would be as easy to get my money back as it was to upgrade my plan but she told me she could 'only credit me for three months and I was lucky because until recently they could only credit one month'.  I think that's stealing.  Shouldn't I be making up the rules in this case?


aforA.
I haven't knit since I finished a sweater for my girlfriend's baby that I never saw her wear but I'm finally over the knitting self-confidence issues enough to pick up my needles again.
"afghans for Afghans is a humanitarian and educational people-to-people project that sends hand-knit and crocheted blankets and sweaters, vests, hats, mittens, and socks to the beleaguered people of Afghanistan".  

I'm unreasonably proud of the hat I knit to contribute.

January 2012, World Service delivers our wool gifts to girls and boys in Kabul!

Little bits.
The emergency room doctor had conjunctivitis (pink eye) and kept dabbing his weeping eye with a piece of toilet paper.  Should he be in there?

I have a new favorite movie this week....'Rocket Science'.  About a stuttering boy who joins his high school debate team.

My friend Fred bought a bail jar of pennies at an antique store the other day and there were 1157 pennies in it.

Did you notice?  Nothing about my knee.

Let There Be Light and Recycling

Finishing Vermont.

Just when I was sure I'd looked at every pendant light ever made, I involuntarily clicked on a link that brought me to another 1436 of them.   It didn't help that I wasn't really sure for what I was looking but thinking that I'd know it when I saw it made me look at every one.  Filled with hope, while wondering why 'view all' isn't always an option, I trudged through 24 items per page sixty times.    An hour later I decided that the pendant light I was looking for must not exist and went to the dump.

Finally.  I decided to go with the one millionth pendant I looked at.

I guess it's called  transfer station.  Whatever it's called, the one in Washington is like a carnival compared to the one in Vermont because of the glass pile.  True.  In VT you can recycle everything in one bag which is it's own reward but nothing like being encouraged to shatter a month's worth of wine and beer bottles without having to sweep them up.  But, if you want to recycle your number 5's (like yogurt containers) you have to mail them somewhere and I'm not sure where that effort ends up in the good-for-the-earth recycling pay back stream.  

The Metaline Falls bottle throw

One Saturday on the way to the post office with a box of empty yogurt containers we got to talking about what would happen if we drove our plastic up to Nelson, British Columbia for recycling and decided to head north to find out.  Sitting at the border crossing feeling guilty for no reason like usual we told the agent that 'recycling' was the reason for our trip ( now, I would've thought that sounded fishy ) and they waved us through.   The transfer station in Nelson was closed when we got there but it looked like it wold be pretty easy to climb over the gate past the signs that said we were being watched and would be prosecuted if we dumped anything when the gate was closed. Idle threats?  It was a chance we were willing to take.  Now, after a couple months of looking over my shoulder I'm letting myself assume we won't be spending Christmas in a Canadian jail cell.

Our sixth road trip across the country in two and a half years started with a 'hi-bye' stop at my cousin Linda's in Spokane to make excuses for not visiting while we were out west and to move a heavy hutch from smack-dab in the middle of her living room to it's real home in her dining room.  Two days later, in Tyler, we were at Uncle Roy's making excuses for missing his 80th birthday party at the Legion and moving a china cabinet from his garage to a flatbed.  After that, caught up on the excuses, I played gopher while Vin fixed a couple tornado-torn roofs on my brother Dale's farm.

When we're in Tyler we stay at my Dad's.  We called him from the road to say we were on our way but it was Thursday and he had to get to Men's Night at the golf course so he couldn't really talk. 

Growing up, 'for cryin' out loud' was the only swear word Dad ever used.   I don't know what happened but this trip it seemed like every other word was 'fricken'.  Where did he even learn/hear it?  Vin says he probably learned it from his girlfriend (80).  I think it might have been Men's Night.

I think I promised to post a few pictures from our Greece trip.

 

They told us they never crumble feta in a Greek salad...and they would know.

Linda and I were born the same day in the same 12 bed hospital.

We never ate inside.  Not once.

The chef.  We drank wine he made and ate potatoes he grew.

It really looks like that. (Island: Naxos)

View from out balcony (island: Santorini).  Scary.

Another view from our balcony (island:Santorini) Everything is very old.  The mountain goes straight up and the houses are built into the rock.

Everything is connected with stairs.  Steep stairs. (island: Santorini)

If you don't want to walk the steep stairs you can ride up on a mule.  (island:Santorini)

A little harbor town below the Santorini buildings above.

In hind sight maybe the Greece trip wasn't so bad.

Humor Me

I wanted to do another post while I was still 54 and I am still 54 even though my Spanish classmates think I'm already 55.  On day one we had to announce our birthdays to the rest of the class in Spanish.  I was first and said Mayo cinco (May 5 with the words in the wrong order) when what I meant to say (or thought I was saying) was Mayo quince (May 15, again, the words are in the wrong order).  Everyone was so psyched that my birthday was Cinco de Mayo that I just let it go.

Looking out at the wooded hills from a sun warmed granite step outside our Vermont kitchen I say to myself "it's a good thing I like the color green".  It's hard to believe there can be so much green.  A million different shades, textures and layers.  Everyday it's greener.  This is where I decide to write just one more post where I pretend I'm in Costa Rica and be done with it.

Since I've been back I've been asked what a day in Costa Rica was like a bunch of times.....

,

Jose' lives at Rainsong , the local animal sanctuary, and has one arm after trying to swing across the road using a powerline.

It's 5:30.  The rooster wakes up the monkey and the monkey wakes up me.  It's hot but not as hot as it will be by 7 so I ride out to Cabo Blanco, the first ever nature preserve in Costa Rica, and back...about an hour-ten.   The fat cold stream of water from my shower head feels good as I rinse the dust from my haphazardly tanned body.  A hardy bowl of oatmeal and almonds prepared in the communal kitchen should hold me over until I get another chance to eat.   Then 4 hours Spanish.  Because 'they' just keep moving you forward according to the amount of time you've been at the school and not according to how much you actually know, in my 4th week I ended up in Spanish Level 2.  The nightmare began when I got to class on that 4th Monday before my sole classmate, Simon, and Edgar, the professor, started talking to me in Spanish....just Spanish...just me and him.  Even after 3 weeks it still sounded like one long word and didn't take long for either of us to realize that I wasn't Spanish Level 2 material.   Instead of concentrating on the content of the questions he was asking all I could think was "Where is Simon?"  Finally Simon got there just in time to hear the last question directed at me.  I answered in broken, but only, Spanish, "Last night I studied my Spanish."  Edgar and Simon laughed which was OK because the focus then shifted to Simon.  Later I asked Simon what the question was....."Do you have children?"  I somehow made it through the week and Spanish 2 partly by making sure I never got to class before Simon again.

Then.  Back on my bike and out to Cabo Blanco again with a stop at the Cabuya Bakery on the way back where I'd sit and read a chapter in my book while sipping on a club soda with ice and no lemon.*
Getting back to the school/hotel on oatmeal fumes, I had just enough time for the fat stream of cold water rinse and an egg sandwich or guacamole and chips prepared, again, in the communal kitchen (the avocados were always perfect) before surfing.   Depending on where we were surfing that day, our surf time from strapping the boards to the top of the van or hiking to the beach was about 4 hours.  While most of the women surfed with bikinis and complained about bruises, abrasions and having to take days off or quit early, with my board shorts, rash guard, knee bands and wool socks attached to my ankles with electrical tape (it wasn't my age that set me apart from the rest of the group) without even thinking about it, I was the last one out of the water every day.** 

After another cold water rinse, different (though not clean) clothes, I was relaxed and ready for the highlight of my day....an hour Skype to Vince where we would talk about nothing really.  We would both get hungry about the same time and hang up.  He would heat some of the lasagna I'd made for him (out of love and guilt) before I left and I would go to El Sano Banano for the same thing every night, (lettuce, heart of palm, avocado, olive oil, chips, guacamole, sometimes grilled chicken, club soda with ice and no lemon*) and either eat it during the nightly movie***, while reading my book or studying my Spanish. 

And that was it...everyday except Wednesdays when we had only 2 hours of Spanish and I could go to the Montezuma Hotel for a club soda with ice and no lemon, sit, look out at the beach and write postcards that I would give to the bookstore owner that would bring them to a town with a post office.

*By the end of my stay I was really really good at ordering in Spanish at the Cabuya bakery and El Sano Banano.
**In atypical fashion I returned home after 4 weeks without a scratch.
***the nightly movies were current and shown in English with English sub-titles because of the street noise.

Lots of pictures with the free camera....


OK.  It's time to move on and while composing this post I did turn 55.

I knew if I kept looking I'd find some great roads for riding.

And more great roads.

I came down a hill on my bike, the cows were in the middle of the road drinking and didn't move.  I had to weave through them.

Remember the mangoes everywhere that I was telling you about?

The Montezuma Hotel cafe'.  High ceilings with fans.  Open air and on the beach.  I felt like I'd turn around and see Ernest Hemmingway sitting there.

A street scene.  No Starbucks.

Another street scene.

More of the street.

Last one and another place that sells mango smoothies.

The End for now.

OK I'm Ready For Winter

It's still really hot so I don't mind that the shower is only cold water but when the ceiling fan quit, I was bummed.  I pantomimed to the housekeeper that the fan wasn't spinning.  She got up on my bed, gave a blade a whack and voila.....moving air.  Easy enough. 

My humble room

Yesterday, sitting in the van in front of a new break/beach with a rock bottom, the four of us...I guess you could stretch the definition and call us 'advanced beginners'...were all pretty nervous.  Guiermo our Uraguanian surf instructor was sitting deep in thought, looking out at the water and we weren't going to move until he did.  Expecting to hear some deep wave assessment insight I asked,

"What are you thinking Guiermo ?"  

"I thinking where I going to park" he answered.

The Weekend.

There is no getting around the riding being hot and hilly (I'm saving the flat 15 miler to the bakery and national park for weekdays) although the morning rain made it cooler and less dusty for about a half hour.  I was on my bike today for a long time and not because I went a long way but because I walked some of the hills.  At the beginning of the ride, if I'd hear someone coming, I would act like I had just gotten off to let them by, stand there while they passed and then act like I was getting back on my bike until they were out of site.  After a while I decided even that was too much extra effort and would just keep walking.  As much as I was suffering, I still really really enjoyed being out.  I stopped for club soda and decided to enjoy it in the ambiance of the little store.  As the uncomfortable silence became louder I said to the clerk "Las olas grande" ("the waves big") which is what you say when you don't know the language well enough to say "How about this weather?".  She gave me a confused look and answered with something about the moon.

Later while passing a group of 4 or 5 12-ish year old kids on their bikes the front girl stood up and said "Vamos" which I happened to know meant "Let's go."  

On the same ride 2 dogs came out and chased me.  I yelled "go home" a couple of times and they didn't.  Of course not, they only speak Spanish.

Sharing the road

More sharing the road

Other News.

While my surf today was spent working on turning...on purpose, Carly from Vancouver was at the other end of the beach letting the board get between the wave and her.  Wop.  Off to Cobano to the Emergency Room with a sign above the door that says "Lifeguard Station", then across the street for an x-ray at the vet clinic.  Nothing was broken.

I was reading my book.  I don't have a bookmark but I've been having pretty good luck opening the book to where I left off each time.  Today I opened it to where I thought I left off and read the first line "The bullet that killed Laurie..."  Shit.  Wrong place.  Last I knew Laurie was on a raft trip.

To be here you have to not mind being dirty.

I've never enjoyed icing my knee as much as I've enjoyed icing it here.

There has to be an easy way to get out of this hammock.

Sorry about the photo quality but it's what you get with a digital camera you get free with a hundred dollar HP printer.

 Presentation is everything

Breakfast and more sharing

Coloring My World

Even though I don't really mind sleeping on the floor and doing dishes in the bathroom, the other day we got to thinking that it might be fun to finish something in the house other than the home theater and multi-room stereo system.  Since the mudroom is small and it's use clearly defined, we decided it was a good place to start.  Have you ever played that game where everyone takes off their shoes and makes a big pile out of them in the middle of the room?  Someone says 'GO', everyone runs to the pile and the first person to find their shoes and put them on is the winner?  Our mudroom reminded me of that game.  Anyway.   We'd virtuously saved some of the 100-something year old lumber* from the house's original kitchen and turned it into a really heavy shelving unit using ski boots to determine the space between the shelves.   We got a ceiling light with a metal cage around the bulb so we shouldn't break anymore light bulbs with our skis and I painted the walls the same happy happy blue that my friend Tina used to paint her kitchen.  I was positive that the blue was the perfect color for that space until I saw our neighbor Nancy's yellow mudroom but then after a few days I decided again that the blue was perfect.  I don't know why I obsess so about paint colors when it's not that hard paint over a color that looks way different on a whole wall than it did on a little chip.

More on painting.

So you have the unfinished baseboard nailed to the wall.  It needs priming and two coats of paint.   But the wall is already painted and the floor is finished which means you can't let the paint can't get anywhere but on the baseboard because if you get it on the painted wall you have to paint that part of the wall again and when you do that you you'll likely get wall paint on the baseboard that will then have to be painted over again.  Then, if you get paint on the floor, you can't paint over it because the floor isn't painted.  The paint just soaks in and looks ugly.  Ceiling painting problems are similar to baseboard painting problems except everything is overhead with a ladder which adds to the normal discomfort that goes along with just plain painting. 

We got a price to paint the ceilings and baseboards in the Vermont house.  The price was 3 times what we thought it would be and 5 times what we wanted it to be. 

Stalemate. 

It took a couple days and several attempts to get rogue paint glops off of the concrete floor for us to decide that having someone paint the baseboards and ceilings was worth almost any amount of money.

Ceiling and baseboard painters

Holiday News:

• Vin an I did our Christmas the other night.  A pile of priority mail envelopes holding surprises were arranged around the bottom of a bulbed coat tree that served as our balsam fir.  I made a pizza and wore a skirt that kind of hid the watermelon that used to be my knee when it wasn't riding up the front of my tights with static electricity.   Halfway through the ceremony, Vince surprised me with 'LOST, season 3' and then I surprised him 'LOST, season 3.

Our Christmas coat rack.  For at least 20 years, my high school (long-time!!) friend Linda has given me one of these hand-blown glass ornaments from Sun Valley at Christmas.  Actually, she forgot this year.  "Linda! Where's my ornament?"

• Since we hadn't seen our O'Connell niece and nephew for the holidays, Vin and I recently drove to Boston to treat them to a special post holiday-time dinner.  I found a Zagat's 5-star vegetarian eatery that sounded incredible.   It ended up not only being vegetarian....but vegan.  And not only vegan...but raw.   Vin ordered pizza and was surprised when it came with a...somehow dried because it couldn't be baked and still be considered raw...cracker crust.  My sister-in-law asked to have her portobello soup heated up a bit and they couldn't/wouldn't because raw-law states that nothing can be over 102 degrees.  Luckily a banana-chocolate shake (make that 2) fit all the 'raw' rules and supplemented our 15 year old meat-eating snowboarder nephew's raw-vegan sushi.  If we'd been raw diners I'm sure we would have given the place 5 stars but we're not raw diners.

The whole house looked like this.  I kind of liked it.

White can look OK too.  (Vince's tilework)

Messy house.  Pretty colors.

I'm not a blue person so I don't know how this happened.

Free Bag Checking and Priority Boarding

After 4 hours of watching rain falling at 2 inches an hour, I figured it was too late to run out and roll up the windows in the rental car.  Instead I continued to sit in our studio apartment where nothing was drying and see if our Kauai guide book had any bright ideas for things to do on a rainy day.   I could shop (yuck and who wants to drive around in a wet car?) but decided to wait in the room and hope the rain would let up.  It didn't but the traffic by our hotel window pretty much stopped when the road into town washed out.

 It was back in mid-October when I realized we had to fly 15,000 air miles by the end of the year to maintain our silver status on US Airways* (admittedly ridiculous obsession).  Vince was born in Rio and hadn't been there since he was 1 so going to Brazil seemed like a good idea.  We could fly to Rio and take a couple of flights and buses and taxis to that bulge in South America where there is a cute little town (Itacaré) that time forgot with a mellow enough surfing beach.  Round trip to Rio would give us 11,000 miles, then we could go to Mesa, AZ to visit my Dad for Christmas and viola.....*free bag checking and priority boarding. (so much for cost benefit)  So that was the plan...we were going to go to Vin's old stompin' grounds, Brazil.  That is, until mid November when I read somewhere that we needed visas which required sending our passports away to get them.  Not enough room for error with a December departure quietly sneaking up on us so we told Brazil she'd have to wait.

Now where?  It had to be somewhere that was 11,000 round trip miles away.   Costa Rica would be good.  I could practice my Spanish**.  But it wasn't far enough away unless we went twice.  Kauai had numbers that worked so we planned a hiking, snorkeling, surfing, riding, paddling trip to Hanalei forgetting that Hawaii could have lousy weather.

What a long trip.  Pretty much 24 hours. (and all for 'possible' *free first-class upgrades?)  A few days before we left I heard Vin telling someone that he wasn't looking forward to the 11 hour flight it would take us to get to Kauai.  I didn't correct him (like I usually do) and hoped he wouldn't look at the itinerary too closely.  Not sure where he got 11.  I didn't tell him 24 but I didn't tell him 11 either.

Getting ready for a trip like this used to take about an hour and meant packing a duffle bag.  For this trip I had 2 cortisone shots (1 in the left knee and 1 in the right knee) 6 Supartz® shots (a roster comb derived (sorry) lubricant...3 in the left knee and 3 in the right knee), 4 pediatrist appointments to excavate a plantar wart from my left foot and an MRI that determined my right rotator cuff had only a 'get-better-on-its-own' partial-tear...over-riding the ultrasound that said it had a 'you-need- surgery' full-tear.  And then I still had to pack a duffle bag....

Here's something really dumb.  You know all of the preparation I just told you about......the shots, the tests, the foot?  Well, I got here feeling pretty young.  A playful new skirt that is too big (any tips on how to order clothing online and have it fit?), couple of organic cotton camis....and the cutest pair of new shoes that I wore for the first time the morning we got here.  NEVER do that!  A 5 minute walk to town and both feet were covered in blisters....or enough blisters to quickly-gradually bring me to a complete stop.  We entered the first place we could which happened to be a cafe' with four different big screen TV's playing 4 different football games.  So, after all the effort I put into getting ready for the trip....now I couldn't walk.

So cute, but a wolf in sheep's clothing

Ugly comfort

Discovering that as long as the shoes were off I could make it to the beach, Vin and I decided to take a surf lesson.  Even with wool socks duck taped to my feet (I have my quirks), the salt water 'irritated' (understatement) my blisters (insert scream here).  Here comes my first wave.  I'm up and the only person more surprised than Vince was me....

p.s. Is there a good way to tell if you have a broken nose?

It actually doesn't look too bad here.  More on that later.

 p.s. again.  Max turned 10 today

and decided to sleep in

*US Airways Silver Preferred Status-see * above

**Having never learned another language other than the few Dutch swearwords Vince taught me, I decided to see if picking up Spanish was as easy as picking up that Dutch.  I've been trying with the Spanish, but it's really not taking.  For a couple of classes I felt like things were really clicking but the guy teaching the class kept adding more words.  Ever see the 'I Love Lucy' episode where Lucy and Viv worked in the chocolate factory and the conveyor belt kept moving faster and faster?  That's me.  My brain seems to be purging an new Spanish word for every newer Spanish word and I don't know how to make it stop doing that.  

The Beam Team again (again) interesting if you like beams and decks

More decks and beams and summer.