Author Archives: Melissa

Clearing Quarters

Posted on by

Is it October? Already? Did September already come and go? Somewhere along the way, I believe we have lost an entire month. Time has been marked not by the calendar, but by the tasks completed and checked off a list that feels like it is always expanding. The end of each day has been punctuated by falling into bed like overly extended toddlers, too wound up to really fall asleep easily. As I was sweeping the laundry room for the last time, the term ‘clearing quarters’ emerged from some long ago recess of memory. It was a little ‘a ha!’ moment. Clearing quarters is the term the military uses when you vacate military housing. Military housing always comes with a very long list of rules and regulations. It’s like living under the strictest home owner’s association.

A parting shot of fall sunshine through our big trees.

As a military child, we moved almost each year. Lets see… we moved when I was in kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 5th grade (to another house and neighborhood, if not another assignment for dad), 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, and 10th grade.  After all of that I was blessed with three years in the same high school. We always lived in military housing so while I don’t have much conscious memory of all the times we had to move our stuff, except this vague feeling of ‘here we go again’, we must have spent a lot of time ‘clearing quarters’. I’ll have to talk to my mom about what that was like, but I find it interesting that the term came to me in a moment of meditative movement clearing out of our family home of 18 years.

These floors actually gleam.

I immediately knew what this term meant, even though I have not heard it in decades. I wonder if it was this process instilled in me through my formative years that made me into the woman who insisted we paint this woodwork here, replace that fixture there, clean this tile grout to within an inch of my life, make everything look as tidy and as perfect as we possibly were able to do. It’s been an act of will to call ‘good enough’ and walk away. I mean, it’s not a new house, after all. But should we replace that toilet seat? I had to have Michael take a look at this completely serviceable toilet seat that wasn’t exactly perfect in every way. There were a few scratches on the underside where someone (NOT ME!) must have cleaned it with a brillo pad.  He said it was fine. In fact, he said he loved it. That if he weren’t already married, he’d marry it. I took his word for it but really I’m still waiting for the inevitable trip to Home Depot on that.

During this process I’ve received some messages via Facebook and email from other women who have had to clear out of their own homes in order to go cruising. They’ve been uplifting and encouraging and I thank them for the support. During the times when Michael and I were taking turns talking each other off the ledge of stress about this big life choice, their words of experience and wisdom steadied me. It would be fine. All would be well. We would get all the work done. The right tenants would appear. And you know what? They were right!

Now on the other side of the mountain of work we’ve done, we’ve had two blissful days of doing absolutely nothing except enjoying my sister’s house and dog while she and the fam are away on a hunting trip.  I’ve been in my pajamas for two days. We’ll take this break while we can get it.

Tenants did, indeed, appear and we’ve now got a two year lease on the house and our awesome friend and property manager to take care of the place while we are gone. All of our chosen furnishings and possessions have been titrated down to a 10×20 storage unit, which has been paid for through November 2019.  We got a terrific price for this unit and paying in advance nailed down those savings. Replacing my sofa alone would cost us about what the storage is costing for an entire year.

Our final piece to store: the king sized memory foam mattress. Weighing in at close to 200 pounds of dead, slippery weight, we needed help getting this into the truck. Sure wish we’d had help getting it into the storage unit. That was interesting.

So as of Monday, October 15 the house is no longer our day to day responsibility and we are free to leave. We’ve got a few loose ends to complete up here before we head south, but the car is packed and overall we are looking forward to a leisurely drive down to Mexico. We’ve got new SUP boards, a generator, some more solar panels, and what feels like a million odds and ends for the cruising life we are ready to get back to.

Our final issue before we leave has been the boom replacement. In the little time available he has had to focus on finding one, Michael has hit snag after snag. We’ve lost count of how many places he called.  We were getting dead discouraged and had even talked about just waiting until we were back in Mexico to figure it out. Now that appears to possibly be resolved. You won’t believe it, and neither do we until we actually have that boom installed on the boat, but here’s the story so far.

We put feelers out for a boom replacement all over the internet and the sailing community. We need at least an 8 foot section of Isomat NB-40. Yes, we could have ordered a brand new one from RigRite, but our guts were saying ‘no’ to that for a myriad of reasons. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to pull the trigger on it.  We were prepared to put an entirely different type of boom on the boat and had planned to start walking the boatyard boneyards up here now that the house is done,  looking at possibilities.

Lord of the storage unit: Skippy painting by Jillian Boyte-White, our daughter-in-law. We wrestled the big mattress up onto that white blanket and allowed it to drape casually over the back of the camel back sofa. Should anyone open the door to this unit without being warned, first the memory foam mattress will fall on them. Then Skippy will curse them forever.

Then I got a text from a Facebook acquaintance saying she knew a guy down in Guaymas who had done work on their boat. He had recovered a few boats after Hurricane Newton hit a few years back. He might have something for us and she was checking with him.

Turns out he did! It’s exactly the same boom that is on our boat, but a little shorter. That means that we could use the existing long piece that we have, then cut a new piece from the boom he has and sleeve/rivet the two pieces together. It would be a great solution for us. If possible, some friends will check the boom out for us before we get down to Mexico.  If it’s in good condition, then we’re on! This would save us a lot of money, plus save us trying to import a boom into Mexico. That money could be put toward a new mainsail, which we cannot get until the boom situation is resolved. Keep a good thought. It will be a major piece of magic if this works out.

All that is still up in the air as Hurricane Sergio made its way across San Carlos as a tropical storm. Communications are disrupted at the moment and people are busy recovering from mother nature. Galapagos did fine, thank goodness. But Marina Seca San Carlos did have some boats blow over. Even though we know she fared well as she is not on the marina’s list of damaged boats, we’ll feel better when we get a recent photo of the her. We hope to have one tomorrow.

For now, S/V Galapagos, out.

 

Second Time Around

Posted on by

I’m sitting in my mostly empty house running down the seemingly never-ending list of ‘to do’ items in the coming days.  You will never know how many little projects your home needs until you move out of it. In fact, I think all homeowners should have the opportunity to move OUT of their homes every ten or so years just to keep things fresh. In my life I’ve remodeled two houses and bought an old boat and refitted that. I thought I knew what hard work felt like. But I’ve never worked as hard as I have in the past three months, and that’s saying something. We need a vacation. How about a trip to Mexico?

Playa El Burro. You can barely see  S/V Galapagos.

Slowly but surely we are getting the hard work done to prepare this house for new renters; renters who are not our children. It was great renting the house to our kid and his friends. The bar was super low in terms of what they expected of the house. Since Andrew grew up here, he was used to the fact that the three way switches in the kitchen and office were wired incorrectly. He didn’t expect there to be a doorbell; people just knocked. The old  dated pale yellow wallpaper felt warm and comfortable to him. The grout in the family room and kitchen, well, hasn’t it always been black? The chipped paint on his bedroom door wasn’t an issue, much less the fact that there were two different kinds of doorknobs on the doors off the hallway. The nicked and scratched paint on the cabinets in the kitchen? Part of the patina; evidence of a room well used. All the scratches on the solid fir doors left by various dogs over the years? Ahhhh, we love the memories of those pooches. And are all those growing green things in the landscape actually weeds that set a million seeds? Who knew? These things have flown beneath the family radar for 18 years. We just didn’t care about them. (Except the weeds. I totally cared about and took care of those. All the time.) But now that we are trying to make the home attractive for other people, we do care about those things. As well as thousands of others. 

Yes, having Andrew and Friends move into the house worked great while it lasted. The mortgage got paid, the kids had a much nicer place to live than they could have afforded individually, and Mom and Dad got to move onto their spiffy old boat and pretend that they would never have to come back and face the music that is moving out of the home you’ve owned for many years.  We downsized our possessions quite a lot, and then we just kind of … left. On some level we knew it was too good to last. And we were right. Kids get married and go off and do the things they are meant to do in life.

When we left last time, all of our furnishings stayed right where they were. This time as we clear the house we are faced with choosing which things to keep and which to let go of. It’s probably not a surprise that I don’t let go of furniture easily. Once it’s gone, I’m fine, but the parting is hard if it’s a piece I like. And I do like furniture. Some of the most ‘historical’ (a word which here means I’ve probably had it for decades) pieces are being given to family and friends, which makes the parting a sweet sorrow tinged with a good bit of happiness. The velvet living room chairs and antique mirror going to a cherished ‘adopted’ daughter, our own daughter’s best friend; the piano of my childhood going to our very close friends who live just across the street; our green four poster bed borrowed by some of Andrew and Jill’s best friends, the ones with the new baby; Andrew and Jill choosing our sofa and a couple of stuffed chairs for their future home.  Even my own sister and mom are taking a couple of things. We infuse meaning into these giftings of furnishings with the history of the Boyte-White family woven into their very presence.

And so here we are; sitting in a house with little furniture surrounded by a yard with almost no weeds as summer disappears into the darkness of fall, slowly but surely moving stuff out of all the rooms. It’s a little like gradually disappearing.  In the end we are going to wind up exactly how we started in this house: living in one room, sleeping on a mattress on the floor surrounded by the few things we need to live day to day while we finish cleaning and remodeling the rest of the house. We are still on target to ‘leave the dock’ for the second time sometime in October. 

Astute readers will be asking the obvious: But where are Andrew and Friends going? The friends had a baby and moved on. But Andrew and his wife, Jill, are preparing for their own traveling adventure. They’ve been planning to do some extensive traveling and their plans are coming to fruition. They are outfitting their Honda Element for camping and about the time we leave for Mexico they will be heading off on a cross country trip and then to Europe. They fly from New York to Paris in December (BRRR) and plan to sell their Honda when they get to North Carolina. After a stint in Europe they hope to get to Ecuador to visit our Claire and her Dan, and then we are crossing all our fingers and toes they will come do some crewing for us aboard Galapagos, wherever we are at that point. You can follow along on their travels if you like, since they’ve started their own blog The Wander Blobs. Why that name? It’s a story, and I’ll let you go to their blog page where they define for you: What is a Blob? We are enormously proud of them both for having a dream that became a plan that is now a happening reality. 

And speaking of keeping dreams alive, we had the good fortune to meet up with the crew of S/V Totem up in Seattle. Jamie and Behan Gifford were the special speakers at the recent meeting of the Puget Sound Cruising Club. We last visited in person with them down in the Sea of Cortez where we made darn sure we got a chance to get them on board so we could pick their brains about our pitiful rig and our need for a new sail. They gave a great presentation on some very special places they’ve been and totally lit the fire for us again. Thanks, we needed that! Having our noses to the grindstone as we do, our cruising life feels so very far away, almost like it existed in a different lifetime. It was great to see them, and also to see so many of the cruising club folks we’ve met over the years. Kevin and Cressie on S/V Blue were there, as well as a few other ‘boats’ from the sea of Cortez. It was a little like old home week and makes one realize just how tight and small the cruising community is. It seems like a small world when you see people you knew down in Mexico back here in Seattle. 

In the same vein of keeping the dream alive, you’ll notice the photos I’ve posted are not from the house. Why would you want to see photos of me cleaning grout or painting molding? After listening to the Gifford’s talk I began thinking about all the many beautiful places we’ve seen so far that I haven’t written about. This place in these photos stands out.

These photos are of the the rock art you can find close to Playa El Burro, in Bahia Concepcion. Finding this rock art was one of more entertaining hikes we did as the weather began to warm up last May.   We anchored at Playa El Burro for this specific reason.  What I want other cruisers to know about finding this delicious rock art is that the guide book everyone relies on is wrong. The most popular guide book tells you that the trail head can be seen from the anchorage and this is not correct. There is no trail to the rocks. You can absolutely see a well defined trail going up the mountain, and there is a trailhead close to a small roadside restaurant. But if you take that obvious trail up the hill you will never find the petroglyphs and you will be very disappointed. I’ve taken photos to show you exactly where to go to find these spectacular pieces of ancient art. Go in the morning and you’ll have shade for your hike.  And the guidebook is totally right about the bell rocks! You’ll find huge boulders that ring like a bell when struck due to the iron content. I’ll go a long way to see rock art. But this place is really easy to get to.[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_llpgJgl9fU[/embedyt]

Back to my previously scheduled program of hard labor. S/V Galapagos, out.

This is sign by the roadway. You want to find this sign and then walk inland from the road toward the clump of trees. Once you’ve located your first petroglyphs among the trees, just keep going uphill from there, following the tumbled boulders. There are hundreds of pieces of art. It’s fantastic.

Here’s the view from the position of the sign.Turn around and walk inland to find the rocks.

 

 

 

Pass the Potato Casserole, Please

Posted on by

Lately on this blog it looks like life is all about the yard and getting it whipped into a shape that can be maintained by someone else, in particular my nephew, Reid, of the Zaal NoFlex Digestor trials. He’s at the age where he’s just young enough that he can’t get gainful employment, but just old enough to know the value of a dollar, plus he’s a hard worker and really smart. So he just found himself a job as our new “Gardener”. I figure I have maybe two good years of letting him be the yard guy before he can get a job closer to home. I look forward to training him on the finer points of weeding.

Reid fishing in the Sea of Cortez. We had a dandy time with him and my sister when they came to visit.

What has been less apparent from this blog is all the weeding that has been going on inside the home. Of course we did most of this kind of stuff; the going through closets and boxes and the like and getting rid of meaningless crap; before we left the house the first time, waaay back in 2016. While all the work I did is sure making my life easier now, what remains is the stuff that I chose to keep way back in that other life when I could actually afford to live in this house because we both had jobs. Now I am forced to choose what I absolutely want to keep from things I actually like and care about, or at  least are useful and I’d have to replace once this wild hair about cruising is over. I’m talking about  things like this cement maple leaf that I made during the years when I spent hours playing with different formulas of cement in order to get a product that would hold up without being too heavy. It took me a year of tinkering to get to this formula, which is now lost to the ghosts of posterity. I love this thing and will keep it until the day I die. I will leave my kids to fight over it when I’m gone. I consider this an heirloom.

The mold for this was made from one of the leaves of our big maple tree out back, the one that was recently given a haircut. It’s about 17″ across.

Lots of families have heirlooms they pass down from one generation to the next and while that has kind of gone out of style lately, what with the younger folks not wanting to be weighed down with ‘stuff’ and all that, we still have a certain amount of bequeathing going on around here. (Hello, Maple Leaf.)  But aside from physical things that represent important parts of our family history together, what I really don’t want to lose is the food. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on a rigid routine of balancing the scales of justice, if not the actual scale in my bedroom, since my months of over indulgence on fine Mexican tacos and alcohol in the Sea of Cortez. Maybe I’m just hungry. But regardless of my dreams of literally eating cake, food is an important part of our family culture and I bet that’s true of your family’s, too.

Yeah, I cannot find it in myself to get rid of this Better Homes and Gardens cookbook I bought before we got married. Some things are just sacred.

If this makes it sound like I still have remnants of that potato casserole my mother made in 1974 hanging around in a box somewhere, well, I’m not actually THAT bad (although Mike’s opinion might differ). But I do have her recipe. It’s written in a tiny book that she gave me years ago where she wrote all of her favorite recipes that were somehow important in our family culture. I call it the “Little Hippopotamus Book ” and not for the reason you think. Sure, there are hippos on the cover, and yes, if I always ate like the recipes in the book I’d be about the size of a baby hippo. But also hippos are symbolic of motherhood and these recipes are from my mother. So now you’ve learned something useful here. I live to serve.

The Little Hippopotamus Book. Well loved and used.

I have her recipe for Beef Bourguignon, Candy Cake, Frozen Salad, and the delicious and terribly terrible-for-you Potato Casserole. Absolutely none of these recipes is in any way healthy. They are all loaded with delicious fat and sugar and carbohydrates and that’s what makes them so good. It’s also why I haven’t made them in years. That Frozen Salad though!  When I came across that one I began to wonder how I could make that on the boat. Memories of that creamy coolness sliding across the palate… they came rushing back in a most visceral way. I cannot lose these recipes! But the little book is falling apart. What to do?

The little book. Falling apart with age and use now.

Enter the new world of computer Apps.  For several years I have been using an App named Mealboard, which is about the dumbest name I can think of for an application that is this clever and useful. In a nutshell, Mealboard allows me to add new recipes, sometimes directly from websites, categorize them, and plan meals and create shopping lists from those plans. It’s simple to use and since I’ve been using it for probably 4 years or more, I can attest to it being bulletproof. I can log in on line, where the typing is easier on my computer, input recipes to their simple and intuitive platform, then sync the application with the one on my phone. This gives me easy access to all my recipes even when I’m offline in the Sea of Cortez. If you are gearing up to go cruising, take a look at Mealboard if you are looking for a way to organize your recipes.

To add a new recipe, just click on “new recipe”. To import from one of the websites they have connected with, click on “import recipe”.

One of the best things about this application is that you can enter a recipe via regular text typing, then hit ‘done’ and it will show up in the dedicated columns on the recipe page. If I want to copy a recipe on line, I just copy the ingredients into this page and it populates the correct boxes with that information. Then I simply copy and paste the directions into the appropriate box. There is a place for you to reference the website so you’ll always know where you got the recipe. You can also add a photo if you like. There is a place for notes as well, so you can put in variations or additional information.

Easily type all the ingredients in the text box. Then hit done and the ingredients show up like this:’

Notice that the cheese didn’t get put in the correct grocery category. That’s because I used the words ‘sharp cheddar’, rather than ‘cheddar, sharp’. I can easily correct that on this screen by using the dropdown menu if it’s important to me.

So yesterday I began adding all the recipes from that little book Mom gave me years ago; the one that’s falling apart now and the pages yellowing with age. I’ll be able to get rid of the book, knowing I won’t lose the vision into 1970’s eating and church potlucks that it represents for me. The tastes, smells, feelings of repletion are saved for posterity, I hope. I do admit to being a little hesitant to ever throw away a hard copy of anything. What if the internet goes away? How will I get my recipes? That’s a rabbit hole I’m not prepared to engage with.

Now what to do with the same kind of book I created for my own kids? It has my famous ‘never the same twice’ Chicken Soup, my spicy and thick  Beef Chili, Mom’s Famous and Delicious Chicken Salad (that would be me, not my own mom), and the family favorite ‘Goria’s Taco Soup’, so loaded with carbs you’re sure to be bloated after eating a bowl. For the cookie monsters among us there is the Christmas favorite ‘Molasses Platter Cookies’, the recipe for which exists on an old Tacoma newspaper clipping from 1986.  And speaking of Christmas, I would never want to lose the recipe for the incredibly important French Breakfast Donuts that we have only on Christmas morning with our mimosas. Do my kids want to carry around a book of my old recipes from their childhoods? Probably not. Maybe I’ll just give them my Log in information for MealBoard before I die.

The book I created for my own kids is a little fancier with some useful general information included.

Here are a couple of those fabulous 70’s recipes Mom passed down to me. You might enjoy them, too. And if you have a favorite recipe I can add to my Mealboard App, post it in the comments!

Frozen Salad

Bananas
Crushed, drained pineapple
Strawberries
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 cup sour cream
chopped pecans
1 large carton CoolWhip

You be the judge of how much fruit you want, but I think the pineapple is just one can. Cut up the fruit and mix it together with the lemon juice and sour cream. Fold this mixture into the CoolWhip and then freeze in a pan. Cut into pieces to enjoy.

Potato Casserole

2 pounds hashbrowns
1/2 cup melted butter
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 pint sour cream
1/2 tsp pepper, or to your taste
1 can Cream of Chicken soup
2 cups grated cheese

Optional topping: 1/4 cup melted butter mixed with 2 cups crushed cornflakes. I highly recommend this addition.

Combine hashbrowns with all the rest of the ingredients except topping. Put in 3 quart casserole, greased. Sprinkle topping over the whole thing. You might need two batches of topping if you want it to really be good. Bake at 350F for 45 minutes of until crispy and brown.

Easy to freeze recipe so maybe for your next blue water passage?

French Breakfast Donuts

1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup sugar (half cup for donuts, 1/2 for rolling)
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup milk
1 beaten egg
1/3 cup melted butter
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon

Sift flour with 1/2 cup sugar, baking powder, salt and nutmeg. Combine milk, egg, butter, vanilla.  Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir just until moistened. Do not over stir or they will be tough. Bake in muffin tins at 400F for 20 minutes until golden. Remove from pan while still warm and roll in the remaining sugar mixed with the cinnamon. I brush the tops with more melted butter before rolling. Because why not?

What are your favorite family recipes? I’m ready to add to my repertoire.