First week in Maine

​Hey everybody! Long time, no see. We are into week 2 of our vacation and it’s been “restful” to say the least. On the way up I started getting sick. By the time we got to the stay-over hotel on the 2-day drive, I had a full-blown coughing cold. Not covid, we tested twice. Just an old fashioned horrible cold. I haven’t had one of these in about 10 years. It’s been a long time since I’ve coughed this much and this hard. It was Olympic level coughing.
 
Fortunately, for me, it pretty much rained the first 4 days here. Chris was able to get out for a long walk on the first full day (last Saturday) and that was it. We were rained in until Thursday. For me, it was fine. All I wanted to do was sleep anyway and I had a pretty view. Chris got the cold by Tuesday. Then our friend came in from England Thursday. Fortunately, I was well on the mend by then and I took the disinfectant wipes to every surface in the house and car before picking him up and so far, he’s good. He has his own bathroom in this house and we have been using lots of separation and care to keep him germ free. Chris is feeling much better and I’m almost 100%. 

View from Mount Kineo

Yesterday I was up for a 3.5-mile easy hike in Lily Bay State Park, a lovely little state park. Today Ian and I tackled Mount Kineo. It’s 3.4 miles and the first half is very steep up the edge of the mountain. The exertion was good for clearing out the remnants of the cold. When we got back, we found that Chris had taken a long walk himself so I believe that we are now ready to get back into full vacation mode. We did get to have our first (of many) lobster dinners last night and it was wonderful and such a treat!

I think we have a couple of days of hiking left and then we expect more rain Thursday. You can see from the car that we are 8 miles on dirt roads to get to our cabin! We aren’t disappointed or mad about the weather or our colds. This is the roulette that you play every day of life. We’ve enjoyed having some beautiful scenery to help with our recovery and we both have weathered the colds well. This is just life and I tried to make the most of it with my stash of crochet projects.

​For most of the time I’ve only had energy for crochet and have worked on 3 projects in rotation. I’ve made really good progress on all of them. This is Tim’s blanket and it’s almost half done. I’m glad I bought a lot of colorways of this yarn because I don’t think I’ll get tired of making these blankets. I think they are beautiful and the yarn makes a very soft and squishy blanket.

​This is the progress on my cardigan. I’m loving this too! I’m really pleased with my second garment. I think it’s going to fit fine but won’t know for sure until it’s finished but I think it’s pretty no matter who it fits. The pattern is written so well. I'm delighted. I'll share the pattern details in a later post.

​Since I finished the baby blanket at home, I brought along yarn to start a wheelchair blanket and this is it. Chris says it’s a Civil War blanket but if my niece happens to see it she will think it’s a Longwood College blanket. I’ll post the pattern link when it’s done but I can tell you that it’s a pattern from Christa at The Secret Yarnery on Youtube and is one of her baby blanket patterns. I like it a lot and her tutorials are excellent. She’s coming out with a new one tomorrow that I will want to start when I get home. 

A couple of days ago I finally felt good enough to get out the Judy Neimeyer pattern and start my quilt. These patterns take a lot of brain power to do the planning and set up. I do think that her patterns are the best written patterns around and they are priced appropriately considering the complexity of design, cost of printing the foundation sheets and the thoroughness of the instructions. Here’s where I am on piecing the blocks to make the center of the quilt. Progress will move along a little faster now that I’ve gotten started.
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I’m not sure if I’ll post again before we get to Acadia this weekend. We have to drive into town to the local library for wifi access. I’m definitely not reading blogs until this weekend and then I’ll catch up.