Happy Halloween!
Gather ye treats! Arrghhh!
Anchored near Pandora in Beaufort (NC) Harbor.
Chilly Nights, Warm Days
The weather has moderated in the last few days so that we are no longer freezing to death! I know, I’m just a bit of an exaggerator! But it’s no fun being cold all day and then painfully cold at night. We made a very poor choice to take our sleeping bags off the boat and to skip bringing any serious winter clothes. It’s always colder when you are exposed outside all day while also on the water. Those sleeping bags are in my car in Annapolis, and they would have made all the difference in getting some sleep the past week or so….
This is yesterday’s pre-sunset. I think you can feel how soft and warm the day was. Just moments after taking this photo, Bob and I each got a text from my sister, wishing us a happy anniversary of our first date, 41 years ago. This is a landmark date we always celebrate, and if not for her text we would have missed it for the very first time. We are both wondering if this is our first big sign of getting older….
So we sat in the cockpit of Pandora, enjoying this view all the way through sunset. We blew the conch shell to herald the night, and headed out to dinner ashore in Belhaven, North Carolina.
Luckily we had already planned to go out to dinner. Boy, did we choose a fun spot! The Spoon River Artworks and Market….interesting name since I saw neither artworks or market, but only a restaurant! And a very nice one too. Here is a view from our table… it’s lovely, isn’t it? For the first time ever we chose to sit facing inward from a window table, instead of facing outward.
And walking around lovely Belhaven before dinner I spotted this pretty cottage garden that look out to the harbor.
Today we are headed to Oriental, North Carolina, then on to my final destination in Beaufort. I will get a few days there to relax before Bob’s crew delivers my car to me to head home while they get onboard to head offshore to Florida.
231 Mitred Squares
All these years while my Zig Zag ruana was stuffed in a zippered vinyl project bag, I thought I only had a few squares left to knit….maybe 15. I remember thinking I was so close to the end. And that’s why I always thought I’d pick it up again right after whatever current project was on my needles. I could be wearing it in just a matter of days…
Yesterday I counted how many squares I have left to knit…. 86! How could that be? Even on the chart it looks like I’m approaching the end! So I decided to count how many squares I’d already finished. I couldn’t believe I’d knitted 231 squares back in the fall and winter of 2002/2003. That’s a LOT of little mitred squares!
I remember one of my knitting friends warning me that this project involved a LOT of knitting. Naturally, I took no heed and can barely remember the warning much less who warned me. I was happily knitting. Now that I’m back to it, I am slowly remembering lots of other things too.
This was the fall that my older son went away to college. I missed him terribly, but there was a wonderful silver lining that I had not anticipated. My younger son and I suddenly had some uninterrupted time together. It was the year that he toured colleges, took his SATs, wrote his applications. We went on college visits together, and I brought along my knitting….this very project. It had not grown to the dimensions it is now which make it somewhat cumbersome for traveling. We visited schools in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. We had that unexpected time to become closer.
It was the last few months before he got his driver’s license so I was still his main companion in the car, and I was the one who accompanied him when he drove places with his learner’s permit, such as the physical therapist I mentioned earlier.
It seems to me that everyone takes notice of the wonderful time you have with your firstborn, before there are siblings who require you to divide your attentions. Surely it’s a mother’s point of view to romanticize this special time with a firstborn that no other child gets. But I think the time I had alone with my younger 16 year old was equally precious….because he was aware of it too. We both enjoyed getting to know each other more deeply, and he had my complete attention while he navigated the rite of passage out into the world and determined who he wanted to become. It was a significant time of life for both of us, and I was moved to have time with Chris during this stage.
And all through that period I was knitting the ‘Zig Zag.’ Chris graduated from high school over 10 years ago. He finished his undergraduate work in math and physics and is now in his 5th year of a doctoral program in physics. He has become the person he planned to be. He is almost finished writing his dissertation and will probably be out of academia in a few more weeks. There is a lot of life that has happened while this ruana lay in its project bag, buried in my studio in New Jersey, and then my new studio in Connecticut.
Such is the life of a knitting project….everything completes itself in its own time.
Ups and Downs of Life Aboard
It’s no surprise that living on board a boat has its challenges….some things are just so easy at home and so hard on the water. I have gone for months and years at home with no major equipment failures…..heat, water, appliances. At home we expect these things to go on working for decades…. On board they break all the time. You cannot get through a single sailing season without constant repair to major things….. why is that???
So, I won’t go through the laundry list of things that have gone kaput on Pandora. It’s too long and technical for a weaving blog anyway. But I will say that these problems fall heavily on Bob, so he has been under strain to find the source of our engine problems and our failed heating system. We have been freezing the past few days as the temperatures have been unseasonably cold in Virginia and North Carolina.
I finished my niece’s sweater and have plenty of yarn leftover to make her a matching hat….I could almost make a second sweater! (Polly Macc’s Brother/Sister pattern)
But I have been SO cold that I decided to take out a bigger unfinished project so I could wrap myself in it as I knit. It’s the fun Vivian Hoxbro wrap called “Zig Zag.”
As I began to take a close look at where I left off and how to get back into the zen of this pattern I began to realize that’s it’s been a really long time since I put this away. I bought this kit when I met Vivian at a workshop at a friend’s house….we were able to arrange this workshop because the friend offered to meet Vivian at the airport on her very first knitting workshop tour of the US, which meant that we became her very first group of students on her US tour. Ours was not a scheduled workshop, but something that my savvy friend was able to put together since she was housing Vivian on the first leg of her US tour.
So….how many years ago was that?? Vivian’s book Domino Knitting was new in the US, and she had copies with her to sell. It was autumn, and I knitted my Zig Zag through that season and on into winter. I remember specific knitting times when I was waiting in a physical therapy office, happily knitting, while my younger son was getting therapy for some long distance running injuries. Yesterday I asked Christopher what year that might have been, and he thinks it was either his sophomore or junior year of high school. That was a long time ago…..2002 or 2003. And since I met Vivian a few months earlier in the fall of the previous year, I’m pretty certain that I started this pattern in fall of 2002. Eleven years ago…..
What surprises me about how long it’s been since I set this project aside is that I have thought of this fun pattern every few months, planning to get back to it. For over a decade I have told myself that I would pick up my Zig Zag right after I finish this or that other project…..and it’s now been 11 autumns. Where does the time go??
Life Aboard
Once again, it’s the sailor’s life for me…..sailing down the Chesapeake, watching the season gently change to fall down here, getting back to knitting.
We spent a week getting to Hampton and Norfolk, Virginia, where we’ve been stalled for almost a week. There is a lot to do here. In Norfolk we visited the Nauticus Museum which includes the battleship Wisconsin which served in the Pacific in WWII as well as in the Korean War, Viet Nam and Desert Storm. Long history. Across the harbor from Norfolk is Portsmouth, and one night we went to see the movie “Captain Phillips” at a lovely restored theatre there. I doubt there are many places more perfect for seeing this movie, with the harbor full of the same commercial and military ships that participated in those terrifying events.
I have found it rather depressing to see so much real estate and equipment devoted to war, but the alternative is equally depressing…. There is also a memorial to General MacArthur in Norfolk which we visited.
We have had a quick trip home to Connecticut to say goodbye to our favorite Uncle Dick, who has passed away after a long illness. He spent much of the past two years in a hospital, which is tragic for anyone, but especially so for someone who was so full of spunk and life. His funeral was probably the most upbeat funeral I will ever attend. We celebrated his quirky sense of humor and remembered all the practical jokes he participated in during his 60-year marriage and the rearing of their five children. It was great to see all the cousins and their expanding families. That is certainly the upside of losing someone….pulling in the long tethers of family and friends who are dispersed for so much of the time.
I spend some of each day knitting. My sister and I are knitting sweaters for her two daughters. They are matching sweaters, but each in its own colorway of Adriafil Knitcol yarn, so they look quite different! It’s wonderful to be knitting with my sister again, even though it’s somewhat vicarious, through texts and phone calls, since we are not physically with each other. The sweaters are Polly Macc’s Brother/Sister design, and they are turning out really cute! The short sequence, space dyed yarns are so much cuter than what was used for the cover of the pattern booklet!
We each have enough yarn left over to make matching hats, and I’m thinking hard about a design that will have ear flaps and long ties, maybe pom poms on the ends of the ties….maybe with I-cord as a border… on the days when I have internet access I am enjoying searching for idea inspiration on Ravelry.
It’s raining this morning, so we are just sitting here having coffee, enjoying the internet. Probably this afternoon we will venture back past Norfolk to enter the IntraCoastal Waterway for the final leg of the journey to Beaufort. We should be there in about a week. Then I’ll head home….