MY NEW SLICE OF PARADISE

Image courtesy of Salt Spring Air! See that long line of docks/boats in Long Harbour? The Wind Walker is one of them. :-) How lucky am I?? :-)

HAPPY SPRING!

May 1st.... wha ....??

This is the ferry that comes by us twice a day ... more in the summer months. :-) 

Some people have guard dogs ... we have seagull sentinels...

Well, we have been on the dock at our 'new' digs on Salt Spring Island for eight months already, and life is good! We love it here, and hope to make it 'home' indefinitely. The folks who own the place have been here twice - a week in October, and a week in March. They'll be here again for two weeks in July, and then two weeks at the end of August, maybe. So we have a few daily and weekly things we do in the house and around the property, and otherwise our time is our own. When they're coming, we get the house ready for them (making up beds, turning up the heat, having firewood ready, etc.) and after they leave, we clean up and then shut it all down again. Pretty easy!

So of course I'm knitting .... lots of shawls mostly. Some of my recent projects include ....

Oh, and I did a little 'decorating' in Ganges in January, too, with a 'partner in crime' who prefers to remain nameless... :-) Actually, we planted a flower 'garden', just for fun.

Kids and grands are all good, families tooooo.

If you're coming to Salt Spring this summer, let us know - I've made more than one lifelong friend among my blog readers .... I love meeting you!

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

My blog stats tell me I last posted here in MARCH. Really, March? How does that happen?

I'm sorry, dear loyal readers, I had no intention of abandoning this little corner of my world for that long. Life (and FACEBOOK) have both gotten in the way a lot!

The short story: Michael and I are both still well (for 60-somethings), still sober, still together and happy. Still on the Wind Walker, still on Salt Spring Island, and I'm still knitting and writing.

We do have a new 'home' though. After 4 years in Fulford, we'd had enough of the not-very-nice-man who owned the property there (in spite of his wonderful wife and daughter... we could've lived there forever if it was just them) - we never said anything publicly because we liked living in Fulford, but being in his world wasn't much fun.

So in June we untied the lines on the boat and left for good. We spent the summer on a mooring buoy in Ganges, and on September 1st moved to a new dock -- where we are the welcomed caretakers of a home and property for some great folks who live full-time in Hollywood, and only 6 weeks of the year here.

One of the new views out our windows....

We're several miles closer to 'town' (Ganges), on a much nicer road, and these folks have treated us SO well since we got here. We hope to stay for a very loooooonng time. :-)

The favorite thing I've knit this year? Well, this was the first of five Dreambirds I made - I was a little obsessed with them for a bit!

The last one pictured here won me 2nd prize at the Fall Fair ... that was a first for me! I might still knit more.... they're pretty fun.

Life is good .... and I hope you all have an AMAZING 2016. I think I will!

KNITTING

It feels like spring here on Salt Spring right now .... we've had blue skies almost every day, and warm temperatures. Gardeners are gardening, folks are bicycling, and the pink-blossomed trees are everywhere. I love it! Not that we've had a bad winter, because we definitely haven't. As live-aboards, our biggest fear going into winter is always the southeaster windstorms, and there are usually several through the winter months. One of them completely knocked out the marina next to ours a few years ago, and they've never bothered re-building it. There's been only ONE this year, and it wasn't even that bad.

I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that you can check out this paper I'm working with now... it's called the Islands Marketplace, and if you click on 'current issue' every other Friday, you can read it - you'll find my boating adventures, community photos, and other stories I've written, and get a real sense of life on Salt Spring if it interests you.

Today was our weekly knitting circle here, in Ganges and most of the usual suspects showed up. :) I have cast on for a top-down sweater for myself that looks like it's going to be a fast knit because it's easy, so that's a change (from the ongoing lace shawls...)

I finished a baby blanket test knit last week, too...

That was fun! I also have a commission on the needles ... it's the Aeolian shawl, a very popular free pattern from Knitty. The one I'm doing is black, so it's hard to see (especially during my favorite knitting time, o-dark-thirty in the a.m.), and it has NUPPS ... so it has been a slowwwwwwwwww project.

It's Monday night ... so that means The Voice is on shortly! I don't watch much TV, but that show and American Idol both have me suckered .... um, I mean, interested. :-)

Here I go again....

I'm so sorry you faithful visitors have had to keep looking at that Christmas countdown thingie all this time. Thanks for hanging in there with me!
 
Well, 'the more things change, the more they stay the same....' is my theme now. Not long after I posted about working for Welcome Wagon.... I left that job. I've said it before and I'll say it again .... I'm too entrepreneurial to fit into a corporate 'slot' that dictates my daily routine. I thought that the job would give me a lot of freedom, and it did, initially ... but then things changed. So ... in spite of the fact that I tripled the income to Vancouver Island Welcome Wagon in a mere eight months, and had a blast doing it, I was being pressured to do things in a way that didn't sit well with me - and I'm too old to 'do what I'm told', or else.

So ... still living aboard, still hanging out with the love of my life (who turned 65 a few days ago), still on Salt Spring Island, and still knitting. Life is good! Since we moved here (can you believe it's been nearly 4 years??) I have done some writing for a little local print-edition news-advertiser that comes out every two weeks, so I contacted the woman who owns it just before Christmas. We are currently working out some sort of partnership; not even sure what that looks like yet, but I'm writing, doing some ad sales, doing promo and editing and ... well, 'one day at a time.' 

It's definitely spring on Salt Spring Island already...

I've been spending a lot of time in Victoria lately and the Japanese plum trees are in full bloom already, too. The reason I've been spending time in Victoria is because, on Dec. 30th, while hiking, my son Jason took what he thought was a small jump off a ledge that turned out to be a too-big jump off the ledge ... and broke his right leg/ankle in four places! After emergency surgery on New Year's Day (which made him a 'bionic man' with steel plates and pins and screws and such), he has been pretty much immobilized for the last two months, and has needed the kind of help a mama can provide .... cooking, cleaning, laundry and other assorted errands! It's been fun to help out and to spend time with him. He's a little more mobile now, so he won't need me around quite as much.

I have, foolishly, signed up (again) to NaBloMoPo's March daily writing challenge, so we'll see what happens. The theme is 'News' and I always seem to have some of that, don't I? ;-)

Christmas Countdown

Christmas Countdown

NaBloPoMo - HA!

See? I never even made it a week with that NaBloPoMo thing!

Oh, well, I've intended to post all day today, and almost went to bed without doing it again.

Michael and I had a great day today, celebrating a couple of pretty important milestones. First of all, it's 36 years ago today that Michael committed to not taking another drink one-day-at-a-time, and he's been sober since that day -- Nov. 9th, 1978.

And then, on his 14th sober birthday, I made a decision to quit smoking (I had been smoking almost 2 packs a day for 25+ years at that point) - so today marks 22 years of being a non-smoker, for me. We took each others' pictures to mark the occasion (in our 'backyard'), and then went out for a cheeseburger.
 

I've been knitting this weekend ... I'm working on a commission for a pair of overalls for a one-year-old boy. I couldn't find a pattern I liked, so I'm combining two different ones with a pinterest photo I liked (talk about eclectic!) and using up some sock yarn and ... so far, so good. Pics tomorrow .... I hope. :)