Month: October 2018

A real 'Curaçao' weekend

~ Maggie ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes our weekends here are very boring. Enjoyable, but not much to talk about afterwards. Just relaxing, driving around, not doing much.
Last weekend though… Not boring at all.
We started with our (almost) daily swim at Daaibooi Beach. I remembered to bring my camera this time.

Then we went home to take a shower (and admire some flowers).

We usually go to Mambo beach on Friday evenings (told you, kind of boring) but this time we went to Blue Bay Happy Hour, to meet some friends and to meet some of their friends.
One of them was a dinosaur.

That was such a fun evening! We were invited to join them at the beach the next day. So on Saturday we packed our cooler (with beer for T. and water for me), grabbed some snacks and off we went. To Kas Abou Beach.

Can you guess where some of our new friends come from? Let me zoom in a bit on their floaties.

Yep, that’s an American Eagle. The other one is a Trump floatie. We stayed the whole afternoon. Swimming, talking, snacking. Loved it.

On Sunday we went to a Food Festival, but next time we’ll try it for dinner, not for lunch. It was really hot and not very populated.

The burrito we had (first time we tried one!) was very good though. And the hot dog we had a few hours later wasn’t too bad either.

We drove around the island for a while and then we headed home, but on our way home, we remembered that Kokomo beach has a familystyle Happy Hour on Sundays, with a rock band playing. One of the things we really miss on this island is good music, so we decided to check it out.

The music was great, so we stayed until they stopped playing. And we got to watch a perfect sunset too.

Also, this happened. Found a shop that carried (some) knitting needles and cotton yarn.

So now I’m knitting myself some potholders, because I actually need them. But I guess I’d even knit something I don’t need, just because I’m so happy to be knitting again.

How was your weekend?

Three on Thursday :: it's raining again

~ Maggie ~ Leave a comment

Well, actually, not today. But it has been raining a lot. The forecasts don’t talk about ‘minor flooding in the usual places’ anymore. They just say there will be showers. Lots of showers.
Maybe that’s because the flooding isn’t minor anymore (it’s still not really out of the ordinary though).

Also, showers can be very beautiful if they pass you by (an hour later one went straight over our heads).

linking up with Carole Knits’ Three on Thursday

Right now

~ Maggie ~ Leave a comment

Right now I am…

:: so happy to be on Curaçao again
:: finally (after 5 days) feeling synched with local time. My jetlag was serious this time!
:: enjoying our first sunny day. It rained an awful lot these past few days.
:: smiling when I think about the forecasters that told us to expect some ‘minor flooding in the usual locations on the island’. Typically Caribean relaxed way of coping with things that cannot be changed.
:: laughing at ourselves because we fell in and out of love with a 300-year-old monumental building (second and third picture) within two days of arrival. We looked at it, loved it instantly and started dreaming about all the possibilities. And then we found out how much bureaucracy we’d have to deal with… Hmn. Nope.
:: smiling because on Saturday we found another, much more realistic dream home
:: keeping my fingers crossed that we will be able to buy it (need to sell the Dutch house, officially move to Curaçao and get a mortgage approval before we can put an offer in)
:: having mixed feelings about jumping in so quickly. But oh, it’s such a beautiful house! (last picture)

52 hats :: 35 – 39

~ Maggie ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been going back and forth between doing one post for each hat, because that’s what I’ve done sofar, but these hats aren’t the most creative. I just don’t have that much to tell about them.
So maybe this is a better way to catch up on the hat making. Most of these were made some time ago. The last one took almost four weeks and I started a new one, but I just don’t pick it up enough to make any progress. Oh well… that’s life, I guess.

Anyway, on to the hats:

# 35 – Green Slouch (again… I had lots of this yarn). I knit this one during my husband’s surgery.

# 36 : Soulemama’s pattern again. The second hat I knit on surgery day.

# 36 : simple hat, great yarn.

# 38:  same hat, same yarn, different color

# 39: real, rustic wool. Love this hat, but it wasn’t easy to knit with. This one took me four weeks to finish…

Catching up

~ Maggie ~ Leave a comment

The house has been officially on the market for a week now. We (and our realtor too) expected a lot of viewings in the first week, but we were wrong about that. The first viewing will be next Saturday. Maybe more people will come that day since it’s ‘Open House Day’ (meaning a lot of houses for sale are open to visit without making an appointment). We’ll see. It’s a bit disappointing, but we keep telling ourselves that we need just one buyer.

My days are busy, editing jobs, keeping the house as clean and organized as possible, preparing for our trip to Curaçao. I try to savor the moments in this house, enjoy the last time those purple flowers will be mine, stop to admire the sunsets that are so beautiful this time of year. We’ve both got mixed feelings about it. We’re ready for the change, but since it’s going so slow our farewells are longer and more painful than we anticipated. We lived here longer than in any other house (in our 28 years of marriage, this is our fifth house and we’ve lived here for 14 years) and we love it so.
But now that the weather is changing, T.’s coughing gets worse again and that is a good reminder of why we’re doing this. His heart condition is more or less under control, so we are grateful for that.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I use my time. There are so many things I want to do. I need more hours in a day and more days in a week. Or maybe I just need to prioritize. So, even though I’d like to participate in blogtober and post every day, I think I’m going to do a weekly catching up post. I may take time to prepare some hat posts, I have some catching up to do on that too.

I’m not sure if and how I will continue with the 52 hat challenge. My notes tell me the hat I’m working on is #39, so I’m not far behind, but I won’t be able to knit on Curaçao since we plan to travel with carry-ons only and I don’t have needles there. Should have left them behind on our last trip, but didn’t. And even though I planned to be way ahead before we left, I have hardly done any knitting these days. Oh well, it’s just for fun, isn’t it? (I have to keep telling myself that, I tend to get too serious about these things)

One of the reasons that I haven’t done much knitting is because I’ve been reading a lot. I discovered Susan Colleen Browne and love her books, so I’ve been reading them all. Her memoirs (Little Farm in the Foothills and Little Farm Homegrown) are fun to read. She and her husband moved to the country to live simpler and start a little farm. The fact that they’re close to our age and that she’s a writer too made her story even more relatable for me. But I also like her fiction, a series of mostly romantic books and stories, set in a small Irish village. (If you like to try these books, the first one is available as a free download on Amazon.)

linking up with Jeannie Gray Knits’ Makers’ Monday and Small Things’ Yarn Along