Time Out: A Trip To Morro Bay

We had it planned for weeks, and the execution was fairly flawless. It was a time consuming endeavor: we left at 4 a.m. EST on May 2nd and arrived at our destination (my sister's) at 9:00 p.m. PST; 20 hours of travel. Luckily there were no glitches, the only real inconvenience was that after arriving in LA and taking a bus to the train station to catch the train to San Luis Obispo,  it was standing room only!  It was a let down, but most of us were seated before the 5 1/2 hour ride was over. The boys actually preferred sitting on the luggage behind the seats.  It was a beautiful train ride along the coast!

Art Contest Entries: Save the Sound

The boys entered a statewide contest to draw a poster depicting what the Long Island Sound and its watershed means to them.  Both took on the theme of pollution, Cole's showing a clean environment and Cooper's showing what polluting can do to the animals that reside there (while I don't think the Sound has great white sharks or humpback whales, who knows for sure? ).  Winning posters get to appear in a Long Island Sound calendar.

        Cooper - age 6                                                              Cole - Age 10

Purge Time !

The box of shoes currently on the chopping block. Hopefully all will sell and I'll be on my way to disposing of excess clothes next.  There's a lot more to get rid of than I thought there would be.  After we sold our house in 2007, we had a really big garage sale/purge fest and only kept minimal stuff, or so we thought.  But now that we have our new home, a 44 foot catamaran, that we think we'll be on for a while, we have to

 get rid of more stuff so that we don't have to store it anywhere.  Every new purchase has to be carefully thought out, "do we need it?", "do we have something else that can do the same job?".  We must be weight misers!

Even though this new boat is longer than our old one, catamarans are more weight sensitive than monohulls, especially heavy steel ones.  One advantage of the cat is that is will be a much faster boat, but not if too much stuff is piled into it.  I'm only too happy to get rid of stuff that we don't need or is accumulating in bags and boxes under tables and in closets. We are in a rental, so our things have been out everywhere since we've been here, it makes it all too apparent just what we have and what we use. But it also makes it easier to get rid of.

We Have a New Home !

Our "new" St. Francis 44 catamaran. We finally found the perfect boat for us! It all happened rather fast, although we've been looking for a catamaran for about 2 years.  After two potential boats fell through for us, this one came through with almost perfect timing (our lease runs out in June).  In retrospect, we're glad the other two didn't pan out because this one will allow us to leave with minimal work, where the others had a lot of projects to be done. Not that we don't like projects, but when it eats up your time off, it's not always a cost effective solution.  Unfortunately we are not where the boat is, but we hope to be by summer time. We haven't actually figured out the details of where we'll keep her and when we'll go, but now that we have our new home, we are anxious to get aboard and make her our new home!

Art Lessons from a 6 Year Old

He is a good teacher, patient and kind to his mom who can't draw nearly as well as he does.  He has always loved to draw. From the first time he could hold a pencil (around age 2) he always held it the right way, not in a fist like a lot of kids.  Not a day goes by that he doesn't sit down to draw something.  If he watches a movie,  he stays up after to draw something he saw in it.  Whenever we go on a trip I have to be sure to pack pads of paper and colored pencils or he'll be drawing on

something in my purse.  He is very detail oriented and always draws something specific, like a humpback whale or a star nosed mole or a battle between the French and the British.  I wish I had that kind of talent and concentration.  This picture is of him showing me how to draw a sperm whale and giant squid.

Mystic Seaport.....always a lot of fun

The day was chilly but sunny. The seaport was not crowded and there were special activities going on for the kids who were on school vacation that week. I had forgotten how much there is to do there and how big it is.  We had a blast!

The Charles W. Morgan:  America's last surviving wooden whaling ship, currently under going a 3 year restoration.  Her maiden voyage

was in 1821.  In her 80 years of service, she made 37 voyages ranging in length from nine months to five years. Charles W. Morgan, in total, brought home 54,483 barrels of sperm whale oil and 152,934 pounds of whalebone. She sailed in the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans surviving ice and snow storms. She's been in Mystic Seaport since December 1941.