Month: August 2022

Ah, that’s better!

~ Maggie ~ 6 Comments

To be honest I hoped to show you a very big haul today. But in the fist shop I visited yesterday I got a bit stuck in my color choices. It also didn’t help that the very friendly and helpful lady of the shop was hovering over me while I wanted to take some time and visualize a little baby boy in the colors they had. So I stuck with the save options.
The second shop… well, I never got there. I asked my phone to get me to the Welcome Shop, but I never realized we had more than one shop with that name. So it send me to the wrong side of the island and after that I ran out of time to find the right one.
But I did find two nice colors that will fit a little guy just fine (the picture doesn’t do them justice; the dark one is a really nice navy blue and the beige is not that yellow). I’m not sure if I’ll be doing stripes or solids (or both? – I think I bought quite a lot). Now I just need to find some courage and cast on for one of the patterns on my list.
I’m strange like that. Winging it suits me best, patterns frighten me.

I guess I need to go shopping

~ Maggie ~ 4 Comments

In my efforts to get really excited about knitting (and maybe a little bit of crochet?) again, I decided to find some patterns I’d like to work on (for the grandson, of course!). That turned out to be a little bit overwhelming.

(not pictured: Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Baby Surprise Jacket – I’ve wanted to try and make that one for so long now)

Than I looked at my stash. And that was a little bit underwhelming (to say the least).

Most of this is cotton. I bought it because it makes so much more sense to use cotton in this heat, but to be honest I don’t have a clue what to do with it, except making dishcloths, potholders and kitchen towels. On the left I have a big bag of a really nice wool/acrylic blend, but I can’t use that for the baby, since both his parents are allergic to wool.

I’ve been moving stuff around to see if anything looks good , but I’m not sure yet. I may try a bit of granny square making or start knitting a cotton scrap blanket (for the beach?), but for my grandchild I want to make something nice, not make do with stuff I bought secondhand years ago. (I’m also wondering… is this very uninspiring stash the reason my knitting mojo has gone lost?)

So I guess I need to go shopping. That could be fun, except… I seem to be the only knitter on this island. I know three… no, four shops that carry a little bit of yarn, but their choice is very limited. I don’t want to order yarn, because shipping is extremely expensive, and I didn’t bring any from The Netherlands, because we traveled with carry-on luggage only (Amsterdam Airport luggage handling was a disaster this summer). But I should be able to gather some fun yarns in those four shops. I’m going to visit at least one today (need to go to town for grocery shopping).

Wish me luck 😉

Weekend doings

~ Maggie ~ Leave a comment

We had a great weekend, full of resting, swimming, knitting, cuddling with Jul (the cat), ending it with our first trip to Kokomo beach in over a year, where our favorite band was playing.

Such a great way to gear up for the week! Not that we plan to have a busy week, we’re still allowing ourselves to recover from the past few months. But we’re also trying to get back into the normal rhythm of our life here, so there will be house and yard work (for me) and some programming (for him).

Wishing you all a great start to your week.

A good start

~ Maggie ~ 3 Comments

Morning tea and a cat on my lap. Such a great start of my day.

We’ve had a great weekend, but I didn’t take any pictures. Just spent a lot of time in the pool and ate out a few times. Now I feel up to normal life again.

First on the list: give our home a bit of love. I don’t really follow Flylady, but I do like the concept of the “weekly home blessing”, so that’s what I’m going to do.

And than… oh my that garden! Mucho calor, mucho agua, our Columbian neighbor said. And that shows, heat and water does the trick. I’ve got some weeding and trimming to do. But I am looking forward to that.

Wishing you all a great start to your week!

Home!

~ Maggie ~ 4 Comments

We safely made it home. The house is still standing and just a little bit dusty, the garden exploded, at least half of the houseplants are still alive and two of the three cats that visited us regularly (strays that we feed and give some attention) already came by to say hi ( and ask for food 😉 ).

Now we’re filling up the pool again and we’re just doing little things around the house and take plenty of rest.

It’s so good to be home!

Knitting for… baby!

~ Maggie ~ 4 Comments

It wasn’t all bad and stressful these past months. We were only a few weeks in the country when my daughter E. and her husband (they got married last September) announced some wonderful news. I’m going to be a grandmother in December!

So I quickly knit up some booties and a little hat, but I never took pictures of them. I was too anxious to give them to the future parents. After I finished those, I immediately cast on for a little sweater, but then things got busy and stressed. I tried to knit, but my attention span was very, very low. A few stitches here and there, but not the real deal. I think I should be able to finish a tiny little sweater in a few days, but it took me over two months.

Anyway, last Saturday all the girls came by to say goodbye and I decided that I wanted to gift that little sweater before we left. It’s the same yarn as the hat and the booties, so it would be nice if they had that as a set. So I forced myself to push through and finish already.

Isn’t it cute? I just kind of winged it, based on sweaters I’ve seen on blogs and it worked out quite nice. I love the buttons too. They were a thrift find, but they fit perfectly (bonus: my daughter commented she loved them).

So, so tiny. I can hardly imagine that in only a few months a little baby boy (!) will be in it.

Oh, since people will inevitably ask (and I know you do because you care): yes, it will be hard to live so far away from my grandchild(ren). But I knew this could and probably would happen when I made the decision to move. So I’ll just deal with it, make do with pictures and video calling when I’m far away and spoil the kid rotten when we are there.
And I’ll probably need to pay for extra luggage for all the things I want to knit for him. I’m even contemplating making a quilt…

Oh well…

~ Maggie ~ 7 Comments

When I started writing that post last Monday, I really thought I’d be able to take some time to rest this week. Well… that didn’t really happen.

Yesterday we woke up because one of T.’s clients called really early. The problem was not easy to solve from a distance, so T. decided to drive down there. But since the client is in Rotterdam, which is half way to my father’s apartment, we decided to go together and pick up those last things. We also picked up a package that we needed to drop off at the company that ships items for us to Curaçao. That was a bit of a detour, but still very efficient. We felt really good about ourselves and I was so happy that all the driving around was done. We still had 3,5 weeks to go in The Netherlands and I planned to rest, but also to make sure the cabin and the garden around it were perfectly organized and clean. It has gotten a bit messy (that’s an understatement), but 3,5 weeks is plenty of time…

Yeah right. I should know better.  Nothing ever goes as planned around here.

Due to circumstances we decided this morning to rebook our tickets. We’re leaving next Thursday. Which gives me exactly one week to take care of all the things… Oh well.

Part of me is stressed out and a bit sad to say goodbye to my family, but another part is so, so happy to finally go home again! Four months is a really long time.

So, all that to say that I may not be blogging regularly for the next two weeks or so. Not that you all are expecting that, but in my head I was going to. You know, establish a bit of a schedule and keep to it, write, take pictures, maybe even do a bit of social media again. I’ve missed the routine, the connections and the fun that goes with all that. But it will have to wait a little while longer.
I’ll try to pop in, but I can’t promise. I will report back when I’m home (oh, how I love the sound of that!) and pick it up from there.

Can’t wait to see this view again!

Recovering

~ Maggie ~ 2 Comments

Oh my. Has it really been over a month since I last posted? The whole of July feels like such a blur.

I can’t really elaborate about it (not my story to tell), but let’s just say I highly underestimated how much stuff my parents managed to store in that tiny one bedroom apartment. It took a lot of driving up and down (the apartment is 2,5 hours away from us), a lot of sorting and organizing and making hard decisions. I feel like I have hardly been alive these past weeks.

In theory I know how to handle stressful and tiring situations like that. For me, it’s key to eat right and to connect with nature daily (work in the garden, take a walk, sit underneath a tree, swim in the ocean etc.) . Add a bit of creativity (knitting, writing, blogging) to that and I should be fine. But I never do that.

I did just the opposite. I ate all the wrong things and I spent the time I had between all that work on the couch watching YouTube or reading books I wasn’t actually enjoying. It was so easy to convince myself that I “just needed” that, but no, I didn’t. As a result I gained a lot of weight, I suffer from insomnia and I’m extremely tired. I think I could have prevented that.

Anyway, what’s done is done. Maybe I’ll remember next time. And now that the apartment is listed for sale and we only have to go back their one more time to pick up a few things, I can focus on recovering.

To be honest, it’s really hard to pick up the pieces. Part of me just wants to stay right there, on the couch, numbing my mind with other people’s lives and food. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life that way, so I am going to do better, one little step at a time.
I”m looking forward to get reacquainted with the woods… (pictures from before it all went hay way)