Cable and Bobble Hat

I finished a hat for me! This is the Hermione Cable and Bobble hat from the Charmed Knits knitting book. It was an involved pattern but not difficult. I made it out of baby llama from Peru. The brand is Katia, which is Spanish, that I bought on vacation in Estonia and made in Doha, Qatar. It is quite the international hat. I working on a scarf to go with it, not the same pattern but the same type and brand of yarn.

This weekend was not very productive. I did laundry, but it is still in the dryer. I didn't start many projects but I didn't finish any of them either. We have 2 weeks until the Eid Al-Adha holiday so hopefully I can get a lot done over that 4 day weekend.

I am staying in Doha for this upcoming holiday. This will be the longest I have been in Doha without going to work. Normally when I have a long weekend I am anywhere but here. It didn't work this time with a Thursday afternoon lab and trying to conserve money for my Christmas trip.

I hope all is well with you.

I blame it on the bug...

So just a funny story from last night. I was watching TV and knitting and I saw a bug on the floor of my apartment. So, I grabbed my Raid and sprayed him. I went and read for a while and then I went back to the couch forgetting that I had sprayed Raid on my floor and that makes in slippery. My foot slipped and it went underneath the couch but I didn't fall. So I sat down and looked at my foot and saw that a piece of the nail had been torn off. I removed the piece of nail and then saw that it was bleeding. I walked into the bathroom, got my foot into the bathroom sink to wash it off and then I did something horrible. I looked at my toe. I then started to feel woozy and realized that I was not going to be able to put a band-aid on my toe. So I looked to see if my coworker was home, he wasn't, so I called another friend down the street. She came down and while I'm waiting I'm walking/hobbling back and forth trying to not look at my toe. So she walks in sees me with my box of band-aids and I said, "I need a band-aid on my toe but I can't look at it without being woozy, can you do it?" She did, of course, which is how you know you have good friends, they come down do your house at 10 pm and put a bandage on your toe because you can't. Oh, and yes, I feel very silly about it now.

The other exciting news is that I have reached my latest goal on Weight Watchers. I have lost 15% of my starting weight and I am on track to meet my goal of having lost 50 pounds by Christmas. There is one problem with losing weight and that is clothing. My clothes don't fit any more, but I make them work, so I have to get new ones when I go home at Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, I have 36 days until I leave and 41 days until I'm in Alaska. (I'm going to Oregon first to see my sister's kids, and her too.) I'll be home soon and I can't wait!

I hope you are doing well!

Home again home again, jigity jig

So, we hoped that we would be able to get off the boat early and have some more time in Venice before we had to get on the plane. Well, we were the last group off the ship so we only had time to get the shuttle to the bus station, get some lunch, and then get to the airport. So we got our bus ticket, found where we needed to be (not easy with 2 large suitcases), and then went in search of lunch, pizza particularly. We found this little place that only required 1 bridge to haul our suitcases up and down so we sat down and ordered. The pepperoni on this pizza was amazing. (So amazing that we asked the waiter if we could buy some from him.) He said yes and wanted to know why we wanted it. I told him that we couldn’t buy anything with pork in it where we lived and, I kid you not, he said “Momma Mia!” It would have made hauling our suitcases over 3 bridges worth it just to hear that from an Italian.

We took the bus back to the airport, only 2€ compared to 13€ for the water bus, and got checked in. My friend frequent flyer on Emirates, who we flew this time, so she gets more weight in her suitcases which was nice because my sandals put me over on weight so they got moved to her suitcase.

We flew to Dubai and then waited for our flight to Doha at 2:45am. About midnight we realized that we weren’t hungry but if we didn’t eat we might be hungry when we got home, so we had McDonalds at midnight.

We got home about 4 am and I went to work at about 11 that morning. I was still sick so it was a short day at work that day. That morning when I got up I went to the kitchen to see if I could find anything to eat and I saw bananas in a bag on the counter. I thought that they were going to be really icky if I had left them out all week and then I looked in the fridge. There was milk and apples, and other stuff too but I was really tired. I realized then that my neighbor had got some food for me so I could have breakfast. How cool is that? It was awesome and I was very thankful that I hadn’t left any food out for the week.

So that was the trip in a condensed version. The next trip on the agenda is home for Christmas. I currently have 46 days until I am in Alaska and 42 days until I am in the US. I am starting to plan next summer's vacation. My interest was peaked about the Austria/Hungarian empire so I am planning on going to Austria, Hungary, and Estonia in July. I would like to go to Croatia next September so that should be interesting and planning will seriously start in February.

Dubrovnik

I was most excited about this stop, and it was one of the shortest. The walled city has been preserved beautifully preserved, even after the 91-92 war. The city wasn’t cheap but it was interesting and I enjoyed it greatly. You can walk around the entire the wall of the city which is intact. The amount of stuff that got packed into a very small area was amazing. Our guide told us that if we are looking for souvenirs it would be cheaper to go down a block or two south of the main street. My friend and I are walking down the street looking for a shot glass for here, a patch for me, market and a yarn shop is possible. We found everything. I was walking and then I said “YARN!” She said “what?” and then I showed her the find. They didn’t have a lot of yarn but it wasn’t too badly priced and some of it was made in Croatia. I would like to return to Croatia next year for Eid and see what else I can see of the country.

The brown roof tiles are the old ones and the orange ones are the newest.

The city was walled and fortified for protection, we can see where the canon shot would go if fired.

A view of the city from up the way. It is beautiful.

Corfu

This was a very nice stop that I enjoyed. We got to the Achilleon Palace whose most famous owner was the Hapsburg family. It was a beautiful place and the road up and down demonstrated the skill of the bus driver. I was impressed with his skills turning the bus on hairpin turns as I would have given up. When I told Dad about this he said “it is all about how you set up the turn.” I was still very impressed. We went into the center of the main town and into a Greek Orthodox Church. Very fancy, not at all like the Lutheran Churches I have belonged to or have seen. I would’ve liked to have spent more time walking around here and exploring the island. The island was also very green which was great to see, especially have been in Doha for any period of time.

Athens

When in Athens, go to the Acropolis. That’s what everyone does and you could tell because the place was packed. Someone said that there were 6 cruise ships in the day I was there. The Acropolis was really neat to see, despite all the people. I also got to see the Olympic stadium from the 1896 games, the home of the Greek Academy of Sciences, and the Greek Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (the guards where miniskirts). We spent a lot of time in traffic on the bus which meant that I got a little motion sick, which wasn’t cool. Athens was just another huge city and I wasn’t too impressed with it and wasn’t sad to leave. Glad I went but I have no desire to go back.

Oh, and I caught a cold.
Miniskirts!

The 1896 Olympic Stadium.

The Acropolis. There were 6 ships in Athens the day I was there and you know everybody wants to go to the Acropolis.

Parthenon, there is a really good documentary about repairing/rebuilding it on Nova which you can watch on hulu.com.

I came, I saw, and I bought a postcard.

Mykanos

This was the one place that we didn’t have a tour arranged. We were only there a couple hours but it was fun. We went into town and the flood of people made me want to get away from the flow of traffic, so we went up. We went up the side and found a windmill and a wine pressing vat. The vat had been used that year and the leftovers were fermenting a bit so the smell was a little ripe.

Before I got off the boat I had talked to one of the workers about the place and she said that you could get gyros for 2.50€. So we found a small hole-in-the-wall place that had no tourists eating there and ordered. It was yummy. The gyro and a soda was 4€ which was the cheapest meal we found off the ship. I also found some Greek chocolate which was yummy. After dinner we watched the sunset, getting some great photos, and my friend went back to the ship. I wandered my way back and I’m sure I gave some people some laughs. I was on the main tourist street and I went into a store, looked around and then walked out. Well, I turned the wrong direction and then had to turn around again to head back to the boat. It wouldn’t have been so bad but I did this 4 or 5 times within a block area. I finally made my way back to the shuttle to go back to the boat.
The blue doors are to keep the 'evil eye' away from the members of the house. Basically, it is to keep bad things from happening to people in the household, like when we knock on wood.

This is where some people smashed grapes. It was very obvious from the smell that this had happened a while ago

Looking out over the town. Pretty I thought.

Santorini

This is where we went on the volcano hiking excursion. We took a tender to the island of Santorini and then a local boat to the volcano island. (Visiting Sitka every summer as a kid I always wanted to go on a tender and on this trip I figured out 2 things. The first thing was that if I ever owned/operated a tender I would name it the Chicken Tender. The other thing is that I get sea sick on tenders and that they were not as fun as they would have been when I was a kid.) It was fun to get away from the large masses of people and do some hiking. I think I only saw 2 plants on the whole island but it was still fun. After that we went to the main island and we had about 45 minutes or so there before we had to be back for the tender back to the boat. We took the cable car up to the top of the island and walked around for a little bit. Then we saw that the line for the cable car down was REALLY long so we, well I decided, to walk it. It was 588 steps down but these aren’t nice steps. These are wide steps that are being shared with donkeys and there ‘exhaust.’ This poop made it really slippery and about half-way down my legs decided that this was really stupid. We made it down, with our legs still attached, and got back on the boat. The elevators were so crowded that we had to walk up the 8 flights of stairs to get to lunch. Oh my body felt it the next day.

The stairs with the donkeys, and if you look really close, you can see the poop.

Budda in Greece! I thought this was funny on the volcano island.

Das boat. If you have x-ray vision you can see my room, I had an inside cabin. The yellow stacks are the logo of Coasta Cruise and go back to when the company started by selling/transporting olive oil. They kept the stacks that color to remember. Also, to keep with the olive oil theme they use A TON of it on board on pasta, pizza, veggies, and anything else you can imagine.

The volcano island that I hiked. Small with no vegetation but wonderful examples of sulfur in it natural form (yes this is the nerdy chemist!).

A day at sea

Our day at sea was fine. It was our chance to sleep in and that was nice. The ship had lots of activities going on so if you were bored it was your own fault. The food onboard was great. (Who knew that the Italian cruise company makes really good pasta?!) The only problem that I had with the food, especially at dinner, was that I didn’t know what it was, but, I wasn’t the only one. One of the dinners on board my friend and I were trying to place this other passenger’s accent. It was difficult but we finally decided he had to have spent a lot of time in Tennessee, and we were right!

I also did arts and crafts on the ship. These were only for adults, and some of the people were real overachievers. Globs of paint suddenly took the form of a floral display. This one gentleman in particular could make anything but that’s ok, none of the other knew how to knit!