25 Years

Today is our 25th wedding anniversary! I remember a friend, about 20 years ago, celebrating this anniversary and I couldn't quite imagine getting there myself. Not because I thought my marriage wouldn't last, but because it seemed like an unfathomable length of time. Marriage is often hard, often joyful, but mostly just living together day-to-day. My husband and I each are grateful to have found a partner that is patient with our foibles and loves us despite our imperfections. I'm happy to celebrate 25 years with my best friend!

To celebrate, we went camping. We started camping the first year we were married (it was something my family did a lot of while I was growing up), buying a used tent with some of our wedding gift money. That canvas tent is still in the garage, but we have upgraded, big-time. We have a big tent with a screened "front porch." Don calls it the "fabric cottage." We've also upgraded to a full-size inflatable mattress, though I haven't convinced him to bring sheets and blankets instead of sleeping bags yet :)

This trip was to Lemoine State Park, near Ellsworth, Maine. It is a lovely, little park, right on the water. It is on the mainland, just across from Mt. Desert Island. Maine's state parks are wonderful gems! We started out on Friday in a leisurely way, stopping for lunch at the Riverside Cafe in Ellsworth. We may try the Irish Pub in Ellsworth on the next trip. Then, on to Lemoine where we set up camp. At that point, we realized that we hadn't followed our usual camping protocol and used the packing checklist developed by my family (I still have a photocopy of the one I typed on our old-fashioned typewriter many moons ago) and had left a few things at home. The pots and pans, for example, and the dishpan and tablecloth. Luckily, Reny's is just 8 miles from the campground, so we went on a bit of a shopping adventure and stocked up. Then, we cooked dinner.

It rained all Friday night, but was just gray and misty on Saturday. Again, we moved at a leisurely pace and had a late breakfast after which we struck out for Acadia's carriage trails. We picked out a 6 mile loop around Eagle Lake and headed out.
The view was somewhat obscured by fog, but it didn't rain on us.
One of our "rest" stops -- the first two miles were all uphill!
Near the end, we stopped for lunch, lakeside.
And then, on to Bar Harbor for a walk-around which included running into other people from Waterville in the brewery where we were enticed in for the free beer tasting. I can highly recommend the Thunder Hole Ale -- we brought some home and had it with dinner on Sunday. The finale was an Italian dinner at Guiness & Porcelli's and a campfire back at the campsite.

Breaking down camp was pretty easy, if wet, and after a walk around the 1-mile loop trail at the campground, we headed home (with a stop for coffee in Ellsworth). A very satisfying camping trip and a great way to celebrate 25 years of togetherness and talk about plans for the next 25!

A Little Sun is a Wonderful Thing

The sun came out today for a brief, happy appearance. I needed to find a piece of paper that I knew was in a pile of papers in my home office, so went home at lunch to look for it. My task was accomplished more quickly than expected (or than deserved, given the state of my record-organizing these past few years), so I took the rest of my lunch hour to install 15 geraniums I snagged over the weekend for .99 each at the big box store into the side and front gardens. I love geraniums of any color or variety, and find the red ones to be an easy way to add some pop of color to the garden.

And, they'll coordinate so nicely with the way our neighbors have painted the front of their house this week. They have wide aluminum siding on their white house and have painted every other strip of siding in red -- kind of like a flag, but not really. Sigh.

My seed order arrived today -- it came really quickly! I can highly recommend Pinetree Garden Seeds here in Maine. They offer small packets of seeds, which I like so I don't have partial packets hanging around for years. We also got row cover (to keep the neighborhood cats out of the garden until things start to grow). I think we'll find some time this weekend to plant our vegetables and keep our fingers crossed that we are going to get past this wet, gray weather pattern we've been in for weeks.

Sprössling is done, but I can't put my hands on my blocking wires at the moment (really, there's no excuse for being this disorganized), so will have to look for them this weekend and get that and the wedding stole blocked, finally. Once blocked, I can sew the sweater together and knit on the button bands - can't wait to see it completed!

Will Knit for Sun

Two summers ago, we had a rainy, rather cold season. Plants rotted in people's gardens - tomatoes were especially hard to grow. For some reason, that summer didn't bother me too much. I'm really, really, really not fond of hot, humid weather -- it turns me into a puddle. But, in the past two weeks we've had exactly one sunny day and it is starting to get to me. I'm tired (despite getting full nights of sleep), grumpy, my back hurts (well, who knows if that is related, but I'm blaming the rain and gray skies), and I'm worried that our plans for a garden this year will be for naught. This is graduation weekend at Colby and if it doesn't stop raining, I think I'll skip the whole thing. My favorite event is Baccalaureate, but due to reductions in seating in the chapel, I can't march in it this year, so the thought of standing outside just to listen isn't really appealing given the rain. With any luck (and the forecast is promising), I'll be able to go to Commencement tomorrow at the least. The most exciting thing about graduation this year is that it is not on Memorial Day Weekend! We actually have a holiday weekend to ourselves this year! The downside: we're not used to having to go to the office the day after graduation. I think we'll be able to cope, though :)

I'm working away on my Sprössling -- I just got up to where the decreases for the sleeve caps begin, so the end is definitely in sight. The nice thing about finishing this sweater is that it is light enough to be able to wear once in a while during the summer -- nice and lacy.

I also blocked my Emily's Firmament Shawl and wore it to our choir concert last Sunday. It is really quite beautiful and hangs in a lovely way when I wear it. I'm thinking about wearing it to a graduation dinner tonight:

Today's View

The view from my dining room window this morning is full of our crab-apple tree in absolute peak bloom.
This tree was planted on Mother's Day when my sons were 9 months old. We love the shade it provides the front of our house all year, the birds it hosts (ooh, there's a pair of bluejays flitting around in the tree right now), and, especially, the few days of blooms each year. We love to go and sit under it while the birds and bees work the blooms over -- they are so busy that they don't even know we're there!

We have a birdhouse made by my father that is currently hosting a chickadee family. I tried to get a picture of them (one seems to really enjoy sitting on the perch on the front of the house) but they aren't available for photographs at the moment.
Even in winter we enjoy this tree (you saw pictures of it measuring our snow pack last winter). One day a flock of cedar waxwings descended upon the tree and cleaned off all of the lingering apples. They were so much fun to watch with their black eye masks and the bright yellow spot on the end of their tail that looks like they dipped it into a can of paint.

We've talked several times about cutting it down, but can't get ourselves to do it. I guess it will stay until someone who doesn't know the joy it has brought us owns the house. In the meantime, I'm hoping the rain clears up enough that I can find time to sit under my Mother's Day tree today or tomorrow.

Dragging Myself Through May

I've been neglecting my blog this month, as one faithful reader reminded me this week. It isn't because I haven't been knitting, though my knitting time has been limited by end-of-year events and other time conflicts. In fact, I've been doing a great job of finishing stuff. I think the biggest impediment to blogging has been end-of-year letdown and the gray weather. I blog over breakfast, you see, and I've been having a hard time getting up in the morning the past few weeks. At first it was from fighting off a late spring cold, but now I think it is just the chance to slow down a bit and the fact that we've had so much rain and overcast weather -- the one sunny morning we had last week, I bounced out of bed and felt great. That was a week ago.

But, as I said, I've finished some projects and promised to share one with you. It has been a long time coming, I know. This is a quilt for one of my sisters that has a story behind it. When I was in college, I made her a quilt to take to college (she's 4 years younger than me, so was a senior in high school when I was a senior in college). The quilt was simple -- it had four stripes of color (each was a quarter of the quilt) and on each stripe there was a large star appliqued and satin-stitched. The stars were arranged diagonally. If I remember correctly, the quilt was red, green, yellow, and white. Well, that quilt eventually disintegrated. It was made in 1980 when the fabric available for quilting was pretty poor quality (not only was that all I could afford, but, truly, there was nothing else available to me), and polyester thread was also the only sewing thread available. Many quilters now know that polyester thread will cut and shred your fabric over time and we are fortunate to have beautiful all-cotton fabric and a variety of cotton threads to sew with. And, the internet makes it possible to find and get what you need so easily!

A few years back, I was at the Maine Quilts show and a vendor had a sample quilt hanging in their booth which had large (12" x 12"?) squares, each with a large star in them. But, instead of being appliqued, they were pieced! I immediately thought of my sister (who has always loved stars, hence the theme) and purchased the pattern. She came to the fabric store with me and picked out a fabric she liked, which I then used as a basis for choosing the rest of the fabrics for the quilt, pulling on the colors in the original fabric. The result is a quilt I thoroughly enjoyed working on and finally put the finishing touches on last weekend, right before my sister was coming to spend a night at our house. Here are photos of the FO (finished object):

The best part about this? I had double what I needed to make the quilt, so have another set of blocks made and will be making them into a quilt for myself ...soon. I ended up loving the fabrics so much that without that "quilt in reserve," it would have been extremely hard to give this quilt away, even to my sister :)