Italy & Greece

As some of you might know, we love to cruise. We have done about 15 or so, next Saturday we are going on a 12 day Mediterranean cruise. Having never been to Italy or Greece, I am obnoxiuosly excited about it (John, refrain). You know those people that have count-downs on Excel spreadsheets that calculate days, hours and minutes, or worse, the ones that are packed a full week before the trip?..sorry to say, I am one of them.

The best part is that we are spending 4 days in Venice. There is something so incredibly romantic and old fashioned about Venice. We are arriving by water taxi since I want that first impression to be incredible. I will recount our travails and post pictures as soon as we come back.

Colored Pinwheels

This is a sweater that at some point I will do again because a)I enjoyed doing it so much and b) I made it for Paul and not for me. Yet another Kaffe Fassett design. I am always torn between doing textured sweaters with lots of cables or Kaffe Fassett geometric multi-colored designs. I have to get going on decision making since I don't have a project after the socks that I am almost done with.

Learn something new every day

Being a terribly curious person, the pursuit of knowledge and new things even if it is archaic or obscure is a lot of fun. Sometimes this pursuit leads to interesting adventures. My latest, besides the socks that are 70% done has been the tango. Some years ago, while watching the movie Moulin Rouge I saw a brilliant tango performed to Stings Roxanne. After that, a dear friend wished to do a tango as her first dance at her wedding. In order to entice her husband (their second marriage to each other) to learn it with her, I was recruited as the stand-in.

They had a great wedding and they danced the tango, however, it was I who remained with the desire to learn more moves. I've had a blast doing it. Useful in a social setting? hardly, but damn it is such fun!

The Conclave (conclusion)

This week-end was a rousing success. Not only did we get to have a great time, but we actually did a lot of fun things. Opening conclave ceremonies were conducted indoors at my sister’s house. Interesting fact.. none of us actually cook, we are fortunate enough that our other halves do all the cooking. Having said that, we made a lovely baked haddock with asparagus that was very tasty. I know we broke the wine rules, but we had two bottles of red wine, one a great Meritage, the other a very dry cabernet. We did the family gossip thing and chatted until the wee hours of the morning.

Saturday in Vermont was an incredible day. Not a cloud in the sky and 68 degrees. We went hiking up Mt Tom, no easy feat for my couch potato brother. Afterwards we went to the gym at the Woodstock Inn and played racquetball for about 90 minutes. Cocktail hour started at 5:00pm promptly, more red wine, this time an Artemis Stags Leap that was incredible. More chit chat and discussions ensued. Dinner was at The Jackson House, a James Beard restaurant that this time around disappointed all three of us. After all the running around, we all crashed as soon as we returned from the restaurant.

On Sunday, since it was raining, we decided to have a champagne brunch at the house and tidy up any loose ends from the week-end. We drove down to my nephew’s house where we had a BBQ dinner. Three generations, 5 families, 2 languages plus baby talk, it is a mess, but a lot of fun. Paul brought pumpkins and pumpkin paint for the kids to decorate and that was a hoot, the kids had paint everywhere. Overall, a very successful week-end.