Category Archives: Cruising Life

Pass the Potato Casserole, Please

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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.

 

Home, Again

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Welp, readers, here we are full circle back in our house in Lakewood. It’s so strange to be back here, doing the things we’ve done for so many years. Did we really sail all the way down the Pacific Coast of North America? Did we really spend months in the Sea of Cortez  snorkeling and running from weather all the time? Did we really hit a whale, hit a rock, break our boom? Yes, we sure did. It wasn’t just an illusion; a dream. And now we’re here at our house for awhile. We feel as though we have literally stepped out of one life and into another. It’s like finding an old jacket hidden in the back of the closet, forgotten there for well over a year, and realizing it still fits.  Here’s an update to the cunning plan.

I can’t even remember what I posted last because there has been so much ‘living’ between then and now. The word ‘living’ ,as used here,  means maniacally attacking our landscaping, which has grown to jungle proportions, then falling into bed exhausted and old. Honestly, maybe it’s because we’ve been in Mexico, and then Arizona, but when we drove into the driveway I immediately felt trapped by the sheer amount of greenery we deal with here. I began to make considerable plans to rip things out, cut things down, hog things back (an activity where refers to taking a hedge trimmer and cutting the blazes out of overgrown shrubs), give things away, have trees removed, and basically just remove vast quantities of light absorbing leaf material and weeds.

From this…

To this.

As usual, my goals and my stamina are not necessarily of one mind. Mike can work harder and longer than I can, but even Mike has worn himself to a frazzle in this yard.  We should have hired a landscaping service when we left. It got out of control without my constant attention.  At this point, we have quickly filled a 30 yard dumpster with tree debris, sent it off on it’s way, and now we can both pace ourselves a little better. It’s getting into a rhythm and we’ve got some time. The outside of the house is our working territory until after the wedding. Then we’ll hit the interior. Hard. And by the way, word has it that houses are a lot of work. Here’s what I’ll say: owned a boat lately?

Mike would 100% rather be in a cockpit than a yard waste dumpster.

Yes, we have some time so we don’t have to do it all today. We are ‘home’ for a few months. Yeah, this still feels like home. We still love our house and find ourselves dreaming about what we might do to it if we ever live here again.  I remember when I was anticipating leaving to go cruising,  lamenting to more experienced cruisers that I was going to miss being ‘home’. They would so many times say, ‘Don’t worry. Soon the boat will be ‘home’.’  Well, know what? They were wrong. Right, but wrong. I do feel ‘at home’ on Galapagos. But I think my roots are much deeper here than I knew. That’s interesting coming from a woman who never thought she knew how to have a root anywhere.

Maybe it’s possible to have two homes? Is that like having two spouses? I hope not. We both miss Galapagos a lot and look forward to returning to her and our cruising life as soon as we can. But one thing cruising has already taught me is that I can be happy a lot of different places, even the ones that don’t feel like home at all.

Anyhow, for the most part we are enjoying being here in spite of our anticipation of returning to cruising again.  Our Andrew and his Jill are here with us and we won’t get that opportunity for… well who knows how long it will be. So we are soaking in the energy of being with them as long as it lasts. They are getting ready for their own travels and we love being part of the planning for that. Not to mention the upcoming wedding.

Like I did for Claire’s wedding, I’m doing flowers for Andrew’s wedding. So we got to go to the local flower market and play with ideas.

Our Claire and her Dan will be coming from Ecuador for Andrew and Jill’s wedding at the end of August, so we’ll have lovely whole entire family time; time that becomes even more precious as kids go off into the world on their own as they should. I can’t believe all 6 of us will be in one spot for a couple of weeks. It makes a mom giddy with excitement. And by the way, yes, that’s two weddings in two years. Thank goodness we have only two kids.

If you have been reading between the lines, you may have guessed that after two years of perseverating on it,  we’ve finally made the decision to keep our house for awhile. Sure, the market is good now and we’d make a profit if we sold. But then what? We don’t know where else we’d want to buy. So it seems dumb to take money out of what is, after all, probably a decent investment given the location. We’ll be listing the house for rent with our friend who manages properties in the area. With that in mind, we have so much work to do that it’s blowing our minds. This time, when we leave, another family will be in our home. And we will have landscaping services to care for the yard.

Aside from yard work, wedding planning, hanging out in our back yard watching the bats, and continuing to buy little gifts for Galapagos, we’ve been enjoying a little bit of our old life. I slid right back into my coaching practice, which has been very nice. I am seeing a few clients at the house; just enough to make me feel useful, which is a good feeling. I remember how much I was loving my work before we left.  Mike hasn’t yet started working but he has some irons in the fire and we’re hoping something will pan out soon. If you know people who contract with web based database development professionals, shoot us an email. He’s got the goods.

We’ve been enjoying crewing on Blue Moon again during Wednesday Night Races. Too bad we signed up for a Spanish class that will meet on Wednesday nights. Fun while it lasted.

Our timeline is flexible, but the goal is to get back on board Galapagos. The wedding is at the end of August. We’ve secured a storage unit in low-humidity Yakima, across the mountains from here, beginning in September. It’s cheaper over there, and our furniture won’t rot or mildew. When the wedding is over, we will swing into action clearing out the house, which will feel weird and good all at the same time because it will mean forward momentum once more. Then the work begins on the interior of the house. Painting, possibly some new appliances, all the things you want to do to a house to make it a home for someone else for awhile. I feel good about it. We are really hopeful we can make this plan work. A lot is still up in the air but we hear November is a good month to be in the Sea of Cortez. We’d like to be there by then, all other things considered.

A little bling for Galapagos we’ll be bringing back with us. These portable generators are sold at Costco and get really good reviews.

 

 

We’ve Got Goals (somewhere around here)

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Mike and I have literally been lazing around doing almost absolutely nothing for, let’s see, 4 days now. This is the laziest we’ve been in a good long while and I feel almost, but not quite, guilty about it. We’re trying to embrace the time to do absolutely nothing before the next rush hits. But I have to tell you, sitting on the couch for 5 hours binge watching the new Lost in Space has done nothing good for my body. (Could Parker Posey BE any more evil as Dr. Smith?)

When we last posted we didn’t have a plan and weren’t exactly sure what we would be doing with the boat. Would we be repairing and splashing her again? Would we be flying home to Washington from our easy flight out of Loreto as planned? The answer to those questions is NO and NO.  It didn’t take us long to realize that the hull needed to dry for an extended amount of time. We made the tough but necessary decision to leave Galapagos on the hard in the storage yard at Marina Seca in San Carlos. We’d figure out how to get home from there, changing our ticket as necessary.

I’ll tell you this: that’s a decision we hope never to have to make again. The amount of work it takes to get a boat ready to leave in the hot, dry yard is way more than I ever want to have to do again, although I’m realistic about that. My anxious brain plays out every scenario it can come up with and I find myself ziploc-bagging all the books, heat sealing things like pens that can dry out, heat sealing all of my artist paints (the ones I’ve used exactly once so far), vacuum bagging every single cushion and piece of cloth aboard, throwing out perfectly good food (it went to the yard workers) and then heat sealing any foods I refused to give up because I can’t get them in Mexico. If they ruin, I’ll throw them out at that point.

A juvenile RockMover Wrasse at Punta Perico. Winner of the Best Snorkeling of the Season award.

Then, because I worry about bugs (OK, I perseverate about bugs. Fine. I admit it, ok?)  I had to place bug gel in every conceivable place aboard. Hey, at least if we have to bug bomb the boat, all the cushions will be sealed against that poison. Doing this in the heat was not a lot of fun, not to mention the smell. I’m not talking about the smell of the boat, either. I’m talking about the smell of our own selves. We would go to the boat early in the morning, work feverishly until we couldn’t take it anymore, then drag our dripping pathetic selves back to our air conditioned apartment about a mile down the road,  worn to a frazzle and smelling even worse. We literally stripped our clothing off as we walked through the door.  If you’ve done this, you know the feeling. Maybe this is why most people leave their boats in Mexico in March. Of course, they miss out on the warmer and clearer water that way, too. It’s a trade off.

While I was inside doing all my things, Mike was stripping the outside of the boat of anything that could possibly catch wind or be destroyed by the sun. Sails down and stored below, all running rigging removed and stored below, winches covered, the list seemed endless and just when we thought we had done everything, I’d think of something else. Every thru hull plugged with material that allows water through but keeps bugs out. Every screwhole that is just the right size for a solitary bee to build a nest (which we discovered one day) covered with blue tape. At some point we knew we had to call it good and just say goodbye.

That’s a little bee, making its home in a bad place by the fire extinguisher.

But wait! There’s more! Just as we thought we’d done it all we got the gift of a day of heavy rain from the remnants of hurricane Bud. What an interesting experience to be walking in a warm downpour. The winds were actually pretty mild compared to what we’ve been through already in the Sea of Cortez, but we haven’t seen rain in months. Literally. Galapagos has a few thousand miles under her keel since she has seen rain of any measurable amount. And you know what that means? That means leaks. So, ironically, we were actually grateful for that day of heavy rain because we learned we have a drippy hatch over the galley now. We put a pan under the leak. There was another small drip through a light fixture over the nav station. God only knows where that is coming from. A container is under that, too. It’s the best we can do at the moment, and we were glad they appeared before we left. Add those to the list of ‘fixes’ when we get back; in cooler weather.

Walking back to the apartment, we could go no further and had to retrace our steps. There was a lot of water in one day and there is very poor drainage on the roads in places.

If this is what happens after one day of rain, I can’t imagine what several days of rain would look like.

So last Saturday we went to the yard early, expecting a move to the storage yard at 9:00 AM.  We waited. 10 AM rolled around and we were still waiting. Mike finally went to the office where he discovered we would not be moved that day. Their trailer for moving boats our size wasn’t working. Our boat would have to wait until Monday. And, this being Mexico, we assured ourselves that Monday would come and go and the boat would still not be moved, so we would either have to change our travel plans again or leave her there to the tender mercies of the marina, who would move her into our carefully chosen spot as soon as the trailer was fixed. We decided that we would leave her and it would be fine.

Alarm bells rang in my head but the cooler part of the brain prevailed as we discussed this new plan with other cruisers who happened to be doing the same thing. They reassured us that their boat had been left many times and the marina would do right by us. Omar, in the front office, assured us he would text us photos of our girl as soon as she was in her spot. We spoke to the yard manager about what we needed in terms of chains on the supports, and the spot we had chosen which faced into the wind and was on the asphalt, rather than the spot they had assigned us. That spot faced the wrong direction, meaning that water would enter our cockpit during a storm from the south and south wind would catch our hard dodger; putting stress on the boat. Reassurances given, we let it go as much as we could and walked away. The rain may have been over, but our faces were wet as we trundled down the road dragging suitcases behind us. The party was over. It seemed somehow wrong.

Our travel plans to home had changed dramatically. What was once going to be an easy trip home was now much more complicated and less enjoyable. We opted to take the Tufesa bus to Tuscon, and then fly out of Phoenix at the end of the week. We landed at the home of some good friends of ours who have a place in Green Valley, AZ. They aren’t there during this hot part of the season, but the home was available and they graciously allowed us to stay there. Here we sit, doing nothing but cruising the internet and watching Netflix because it’s 108F outside, even hotter than Mexico. It might be a dry heat, but it sucks the life out of us.

Omar followed through with his promise. They moved the boat to her chosen spot with no issues on Tuesday and he texted us photos that reassured us that she is sitting where she is supposed to be, supports chained. The rest is up to the fates.

Here she is next to her friend, Black Dragon.

So now what’s the plan? We go home on Saturday, Mike’s birthday. We have some goals while we are there, one of which is to make final decisions about what to do with our house. We love our house but probably will not grow old there for many reasons. We have to either rent the place or sell it, and we lean toward selling although that’s an emotional decision that is hard to make. We hope that these decisions will be made clear when we get there and spend some time.There is loads of work to do there to get it ready one way or another, and possessions to go through and release. There is yard work, painting, all the stuff of home ownership. Some of those things I look forward to doing.

The other goal is to put some money in the cruising kitty. To that end Mike is looking for a contract gig in IT.  I am crossing my fingers he can find something where he can live at the house with me while he’s working and enjoy our last times with our son before he goes off on his own adventures as a married person. Here’s a little excerpt from Mike’s resume, in case you know someone who is looking for an employee of his caliber. One thing that’s not on this part is how well he plays with others. That’s important, and one of his best attributes.

“My 25 years of increasingly responsible experience allows me to be comfortable and confident presenting complex technical data to leadership and other professionals. I have extensive experience in the following areas: 

 – Analysis, development and presentation of complex web-based data in engineering, manufacturing, finance, and marketing

-Managing projects and developing inclusive, collaborative partnerships with customers

-Working with customers during requirements analysis and discovery”

Our goal is to return to Galapagos in the fall, timing dependent on many things, including whatever work contract Mike picks up. We need to keep that goal firmly in front of us. As Mike has said, it has always felt like a little bit of magic that we have been able to do this at all, to even leave the dock the first time. Now we ask for more magic of the same kind.

Why we have to go back.