In Search Of Rest...

We are on holiday!  By 'we' I mean the girls and I, and by 'holiday' I mean tucked up in a little cabin on the waterfront on Camano Island.  It's bliss!  There were a few little settling in issues, but we're all straight now, and it's going to be lovely!

This is 20 feet from our front door!  Becca put a stick in the ground to mark the water level - but by the time we came back an hour later it had been washed away by the speeding water!  

We arrived at 4pm today to find the tide on the way in and the pretty pebbles getting a wash.  We didn't even check out the cabin, we went straight down the boat ramp to see the view...

It's really rather pretty!

We turned around from the water, and saw this...

Home sweet teeny tiny home, for the next 2 weeks!

It's a lot smaller than we thought it would be from the pictures, and it is FULL of stuff.  There is not enough space in the kitchen cabinets to store a box of pasta or a sachet of KoolAid (not that we drink KoolAid, but you know what I mean) it is CRAMMED full of stuff, all sorts of stuff, most of it of little use.

We have emptied the bathroom cabinets of their stuff so that we can put our stuff in there, because otherwise we'd be carrying our shower gel to the bathroom every day, which seems silly - but then we had the problem of where to put the displaced stuff, so it's been shoe-horned into a book case in the sitting room, which is doubling as my bedroom because the 'double room with loft' turned out to be the worlds smallest double bed with a twin mattress crammed onto a shelf above the staircase!  Rebecca LOVES little spaces, secret nests, corners, fun little places, but this was just NOT going to work - she is over 5 feet tall, for a start - she wouldn't even be able to sit up up there, and there's no room for her books, either, which is a disaster in itself!  So she has one bedroom, Caity has the other, and I am sleeping down here, on an IKEA pull out which seems quite comfy.

Every shelf in the place is stuffed with books, cd's, dvds and videos.  There is nowhere to put our own books, and even the dresser drawers are filled with Other People's Things!  It's very odd, and not terribly welcoming, although others who have stayed here have thought it marvellous that they didn't need to bring their own shower gel because Somebody Else's shower gel was in the shower ready and waiting for them - yick!

But we've made a little space for ourselves and our things, and we've covered up the stained couch with a huge IKEA comforter and now it's much more welcoming, and we went for a walk and found...

...a place for Becca to sit and read.

that the tide comes in really quite fast - this was passable when we left and only climbable when we returned less than an hour later!

and that there are really rather a LOT of things to climb on around here! 

The walk was wonderful, there are agates galore in the beach pebbles, Caity and I came home with handfuls of rocks and pretty pretty shells.  We made ourselves some nachos for dinner and then sat around reading and chatting, and I went out to watch the fireworks in the dark, although they were really too far away to be any fun.  It was a beautiful evening, cooler than the day but not cold, just 'eveningish'.  It's SO quiet here, I love it!

This is the view from the front porch, over the flowers and down to the water - the tide comes all the way up to the bottom of that little boat ramp, and the water is moving very very fast - no swimming for us!  After dark I could see the crab boats moored out in the water, silhouetted by the distant lights of the nearest town.  

I spent the evening mending the holes under the toes of 2 pairs of felted slippers so that Caity and I have something for our feet - the floors are wood and a bit chilly at times.  We had a chat with Dad over Skype, and now the girls are tucked up in their beds and I am enjoying a little quiet before I call it a night, too.  Becca and I are planning to get up at 6 to watch the Wimbledon Tennis Final - I'll be cheering on Andy Murray, but Becca is not yet sure where her allegiance will lie, she has been a Federer fan for a long time now!

Sweet dreams, I wish you could hear the water lapping on the pebbles, it's very restful x

P.S.  I miss Connie - there is no Aga in the kitchen here!

Endings and Beginnings

Well, it's been quite busy around here since last I blogged.  And it's only going to get worse!  We did eventually all receive our Green Cards, although it was quite the fiasco!  It was timed in such a way that it completely ruined our remortgage application, which had to be scrapped and started over, and we also had a hiccup with our healthcare in which Husband suddenly aged 50 whole years and was pronounced 'dead' by our provider, even though he is the listed owner of the policy!  Apparently us making a fraudulent claim was horrifying to them, but the thought that they had fraudulently issued a policy to a 'dead man' (after all, he'd be NINETY ONE and no-one lives THAT long, said the girl on the phone!) did not upset them terribly.  It took many hours of phone calls, and much banging of heads against walls in frustration, but eventually they fixed their database and I am now married to 41, not 91!  Thank goodness! 

It's finals week for The Teenager, and although she's doing well, the stress is there, and the feeling of it all 'being just about over' is hanging over all of us.  We are relieved to have made it - when she started at the Uni last September it felt like this week might never come - but it's also gone shockingly fast and now we are facing Freshman Year, just on the other side of summer! 

It's also the Final Week of only having one teenager in the family - Twelve turns Thirteen at the weekend, and we will no longer be able to blame her strange out-of-character little turns on 'being Twelve'. 

I knitted a sweater.  A quick knit, and I intended it to belong to Teenager, so when I was measuring it up against Twelve, I thought I was doing fine!  Then I got to knitting, and thought that there was NO WAY the sleeves needed to be THAT long, and so I shortened them a little.  Silly me!  Somehow I have failed to notice that in order to make a sweater fit my daughters, I have to make it big enough to fit ME!  When did that happen?  They've always been so small, and even when they became tall they were very slim, and now suddenly they have shoulders, and long LONG arms, and all-access passes to my shoes and my shirts!  Teenager put the sweater on as soon as she saw it, and wore it for the rest of the day, so clearly she likes it but I'd like it to still fit next week, really!   

Yesterday Teenager put on her dance costumes for us to see, and that should have been a sign to me that the sweater would be a little on the fits-right-now side.  She looks stunning in her black strapless velvet basque and black tutu - a far cry from the teeny tiny little yellow costume she wore 10 years ago in her first ever ballet recital!  There will be pictures, of course, but only after finals. 

And Sunday is graduation, an informal affair in comparison to a general high school graduation, but nonetheless the closest we are going to get to that special day.  There will be a ceremony, and a buffet lunch, and then the kids all go off to camp overnight (having donned the required jeans and t-shirts, of course) for their last hurrah! 

We have some fun things planned for summer - a garden with vegetables and fruit and herbs in it, a vacation or two, a visitor, days out, days lazing in hammocks with a good book and a glass of lemonade, afternoon naps, walks on the beach.  Teenager needs to write a grant proposal or ten, and Twelve is going to be giving flute recitals and racing sailboats.  Husband may also have Other Things planned - he is getting a little tired of the 3 -4 hrs a day he spends commuting and is considering a change of location for his job.  Watch this space! 

And me?  I will be spinning, like a crazy woman, for the Tour de Fleece, where spinners across the world time their craft to coincide with the Tour de France, spinning each and every day that the cyclists race, and challenging ourselves to complete something difficult and out of the ordinary.  For me, this year, spinning each and every day of the tour is challenge enough, I usually fail to find time. 

And then it will be on to the Ravelympics, another craft-based adaptation of sporting greatness, where we knit/crochet/spin/weave our way through the Olympics, again challenging our skills and talents with new projects.  For this, I will choose a sweater, or a cardigan, and attempt to complete it between the starting ceremony and waving goodbye to all the athletes at the end.  It's going to be fun! 

But before any of that can happen, we need to make it to Thursday, when finals are over, and some earnest sleeping can be undertaken, although some of us will still need to get up - Twelve does not finish school for another 20 days - and that sweater needs a wash to see if we can convince it to grow, just a little bit, so that it'll still fit in the autumn!  I wonder if she wore it to bed... 

What's not Green and not made of Card?

11 years and18 days after we first set foot on American soil, we received 12 emails (3 each) from the USCIS, the department of Immigration Services, informing us that 'documents' had been printed and would soon be in the mail.  The next day, more emails, documents were in the mail, and on Monday, Brian and Becca each received an official 'Welcome To America' letter - on St George's Day, which made me laugh! 

Today they received their Permanent Resident Cards, commonly referred to as the Green Card, and are now officially freed from the burden of constant reporting for the next 10 years.  The email chain leads us to believe that Caity and I will be receiving our documents soon, too, we're not sure why they didn't all arrive together - these things are part of the mystery of USCIS. 

So what does it feel like to have a Green Card? 

Honestly?  It's a bit surreal at the moment.  We have spent so long wishing and hoping and waiting, holding on, thinking that surely it must be soon, and then discovering that it won't be any time soon, that it's hard to believe that our wait is actually over.  We were not expecting to receive our cards until 2014, so this is a big surprise to us, and it comes at the perfect time. 

Advantages that are now available to us include, but are not limited to, the following...

Brian will be able to accept promotions at work, and also job offers at new companies that include a step up from his current position.

We will be able to take vacations overseas - and will be allowed back into the US afterwards.

I will be able to work, for money, instead of volunteering, for free.  Becca will be able to work as a tutor at summer school on campus. 

Caity will be able to travel to Canada with the school band next year when they head to Vancouver for a competition, and will be allowed back in again!  

We will qualify for a .3% lower rate on our home refinance. 

We will save $1000's of dollars each year now that we no longer need to file documents, amendments, photographs, fingerprints, and retina scans.

We will never again have to suffer the indignity of having our blood tested for unmentionable diseases that people can only contract by doing unmentionable things.  And I will never have to listen to the gleeful nurse on the telephone announcing the 'good news' that I don't have any of those unmentionable diseases - like I didn't know that already!!!!! 

In short, life is going to be better, and we are very thankful for that.  It has taken a LONG time to get here, but we are glad to have been 'Welcomed to America'.  Now if we could just get the postal service to actually deliver our mail...

Ouch!

Yesterday we went on a date!  It was wonderful!  We drove down to a dealership and took a really cute little Mazda MX5 for a spin.  The sun was shining, the sky was blue, it felt great to be out and about together, just us two, and when I slipped off the heel of my slip-on shoe, I thought nothing of it.

Until this morning.

I woke up a couple of times in the night, feeling like I had a cramp in my foot, turned over, went back to sleep.  Sort of.

This morning it hurt to put my foot on the floor, it hurt to flex it, and it hurt to keep it still.

I called the docs office, who said that I could come right away, they had an appointment free in 15 minutes.  The irony of 'hurrying' to make that appointment with a sore foot was not lost on me as I hobbled across the parking lot.

I've torn ligaments, down the outside of my right foot, so I have 2 weeks of ice and gentle flexing to hobble through and it should be better.

If Caitlin wasn't already in physical therapy for her knee, and Becca hadn't walked into a table yesterday and messed up HER knee, this might not be quite such a pain!

However - there's a LOT of knitting time in my future, I've already finished one piece!

 and later in the day, sick of my ice pack slipping off the side of my foot - I made myself one of these - a little foot warmer with a pocket to stick the ice pack in - perfect! 

As Much As I Would Like To Be....

...I'm just not a daily blogger!  Life gets in the way, and so I am an occasional blogger! 

Yesterday was one of those mad days where, all of a sudden, after weeks and weeks of seeming to make no progress, a million things get done! 

I planted some fuchsias in the hanging box outside the kitchen window - it's such a lovely place to have flowers!  

The first peony of the year burst out of the bud...

The first rhodo hit full flower...

and it's a beauty! 

We hauled home a bit of wood for the woodstore - I put my size 7 shoe on there so you can see just how big that log is - it was quite the workout!  We brought home almost an entire tree - we left just one small piece about 12 inches long and 6 inches across... the ominous buzzing noises and the fact that it appeared to have been hollowed out and stuffed with moss did NOT lead me to want to put it in my car! 

It's last year's wood, so it should be good for burning soon if we can get it cut and split at the weekend. 
And the daffodils that we unearthed from the ivy pile out the front have burst into life, too...

Add to that the fact that we now have 3 healthy rhubarb plants in the veggie patch -

and Bri spent Sunday fencing it in,

it looks like Spring might have made it to our house! 

...and there went March!

Well they do say that time flies when you're having fun, but this is ridiculous!  Where did March go? 

I think it must have got lost somewhere in between birthdays (mine and Brian's), an anniversary (21 years since we started dating), a spring break (Becca's, and she really needed it), various late winter coughs and colds, and an outbreak of kitchen redecorating. 

The kitchen was inspired by a beautiful piece of beech countertop that Brian and Caity found at a scrap wood place, they brought it home, cut it to size, refinished it, and it's now installed on my cut-down island.  We lost the old cooktop, removed one stack of drawers, and turned the island 90 degrees, also removing the doors so that the pans are easily accessible and they look pretty, too!  Then I got to work with a can of paint and refinished all the lower cabinets.  This really needs pictures...hang on a minute, let me go and find the camera...

First, and most important, here is Connie, in all her beautiful Aga glory!  Guess where everyone likes to sit....

Here's the new island.

 and the newly painted cabinets....

next on the list will be new countertops and white trim! 

 and here's where I'm blogging from!  With knitting, of course!  ;-) 

You can see which part of the floor is refinished and which hasn't been sanded back yet - there was no wood underneath the old island, so we're going to use the torn out bathroom flooring to tidy that up and make it all match nicely.  The refinishing of the rest of the floor will happen after that, probably in fall when we want to be back inside again. 

The ceiling needs paint, and one of the new light fittings hasn't been installed yet, but it's coming along nicely, and we're enjoying the new brighter space. 

Ups and Downs

It's a bit bumpy, this life thing, isn't it? 

It's been a good news, bad news, happy news, sad news sort of a month so far, and most of the stories are not mine to tell, so we'll just leave it at this - I have a lot of dear and lovely people held in my heart right now, you know who you are, and you know why you have a special place, I'm thinking of you. 

Everything else is rolling along as usual, except for the snow this morning, which was a little unexpected.  We've had more days of snow this winter than the combined snow-day-total of the other 3 Washington winters we've experienced - and today was just one more.  Drove to school in falling snow, drove home in falling snow - sometime mid-morning snow gave way to blue sky and sunshine and this afternoon was really quite pleasant.  Bri is outside splitting kindling though, just in case...  you never can tell around here! 

I had planned to come here daily and tell you about my self-improvement challenges - I guess I failed at the first challenge, which was to share the challenges with you!  Oops!  maybe we'll try that one again...  yesterday was an 'eat well' day, and we had chinese veggie soup for supper, which was fabulous even if I do say so myself.  In fact it was so good that everyone took leftovers for lunch today (thus foiling my evil plan to have made 2 dinners at one time, but never mind that now) and it's pretty much gone now!  All those excellent veggies were very healthy, and tonight's chicken with peppers, onions, herbs and tomato sauce wasn't too shabby either. 

Today's challenge is the exercise challenge and that will be taken care of tomorrow morning when I go to the fitness club.  Yep, go ahead, read it again, I know, you're shocked, I have taken up exercise!  I have not yet worn my 'I'd rather be knitting' t-shirt to the club but it's tempting some days.  I go 3 days a week, and do cardio and strength training and it's all computerised and online and gadgety so it keeps me entertained and I barely notice how boring the whole thing is.  I have learned that my body is currently operating at the rate of a 36 year old, excellent news indeed for my 43-next-week self, and that I have only a very tiny amount of fat wrapped around my organs, also excellent news - inspiration to not eat the crispy skin off the chicken! 

Tomorrow's challenge will be to tidy up a miniature disaster somewhere in the house, and there are plenty to choose from!  Who knows, I may even remember to come back and tell you about it...