Vist to Ocracoke

Because the winds were too bad today, we decided to take the ferry over to Ocracoke instead of sailing over.

Since we were on the boat at Oriental, we had to take two ferries....the first a short little 30 minute ferry to take us from Minnesott Beach over to Cherry Branch. Here is the view approaching Cherry Branch. Cool that the winds were whipping up sea foam... the birds were enjoying the "gliding" in the wind.

This is the first time we've ever driven over the Core Sound bridge. This is the view from the top. We normally cruise UNDER this bridge on the intercoastal waterway on our way to Beaufort or Cape Lookout. Neat to see a different view!

The view from the front of the Cedar Island / Ocracoke ferry. It started out to be a fairly "lumpy" ride....but and hour later it was fairly smooth.



After a nice lunch at Howard's Pub, we checked into our condo....just more relaxing.



I went out to the balcony to snap this photo of the view of the harbor and Silver Lake.....


And Duane promptly locked the sliding glass door behind me.... evil Duane....


He eventually let me back in, of course.....the wind was whipping and fairly chilly....good thing he let me back in. Never mess with a red-head.....

Almost Happy New Year from Oriental, NC

We've been just relaxing and doing "boat chores" this week. Here is the view from the back of the boat.


I love it when the marina is so calm you get the double-image of the boats and their "upside down mate".

We're cozy and warm with plenty to do and read. Just finished the last of the Christmas dinner left-overs, actually. The boys are working the airport for me this week, so no worries!

Our original plan was to sail the 9 hours over to Ocracoke tomorrow for New Years Eve with Sharon and Buddy. But, Mother Nature is making that difficult!!! The forecast tomorrow is 25-30 knot winds with gusts above 40....we could do that - it just would be NO FUN! So, the current thought is that we will catch the ferry over at Cedar Island and stay in a condo with S&B. It will be fun, regardless!!

The Big Read Meme

The Big Read is an National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.)

*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE

Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas in French
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery in French
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo in French

A little teak refinishing at the boat

We're down in Oriental for the week on the boat. We've got a couple of chores to do - then hopefully we'll sail over to Ocracoke for New Years Eve.

Duane's doing important work like replacing the water pump and adding an accumulator tank (I think it helps not to scald us when we take showers, etc.).

I had noticed that the teak seats were peeling - after a thorough refinish 2 years ago, no less! What a pain. If I ever get to order a new boat, it will have NO teak!!

Here's one of the seats this morning. I thought I could just buff them and re-paint the varnish...but NOOOOOO! I ended up having to sand them completely down to the wood. I was not happy - no power sander (just Karen-power sander hahaha).


Late in the afternoon, a finished seat. Lucky - it's about 75 degrees today. Tomorrow is not so nice - so I'm glad I got this done today.

Veggies from the mountains!

I forgot to post these earlier. When we went to Hendersonville this past weekend for a Christmas visit, Granny and Cordy offered to let me take veggies out of their winter garden.....
they had to twist my arm, of course....

Nice mustard greens. They were tender and yummy!


Turnips - one of my favorite veggies. I know some people don't care for them - but to me they seem rather sweet. This batch I FRIED! I've never done that before, but Granny suggested it - just sliced them up and fried them in some butter with some onions. Good!


And last - some broccoli - it really is more tasty fresh out of the garden!

Thermometer

Forgot to post this photo on Christmas day of a nice sailboat thermometer my sis sent to me....sorry sis, don't know if you can see it, but the temp is +65 degrees....(not negative, which seems to be the norm up there!!)

Christmas!

OK, so I'm a little behind on the posting....

Here are the photos from Christmas morning - Richie Rich pretending to sleep - thanks to my sis for the lovely theme afghan! (an amazing amount of work went into that, I'm sure!)



Roberto - relaxing, as usual....


We now have official school shirts!



And finally, Richard happy with his toy for the upcoming semester snowboarding class at Appalachian.

Merry Christmas!! and Plywood Bi-plane

More later, but I wanted to post a couple of photos of the finished bi-plane....Skyler is a happy boy! (And Pat's a proud Grandpa!)

Robins in the yard

I thought robins were a sign of spring - and this definitely is not spring!!
I looked out the window and saw a group of about 6 of them looking for worms. Pretty birdies!

Visit home for Christmas

We had a nice, but short, trip home for Christmas.

The weather was nasty, so we were not able to fly. We were hampered a bit by Robert's work schedule, so we drove to Mom's house Saturday night late.

Our get together was at Trudi and Eddie's house for a Christmas Breakfast and then the "Chinese Christmas" present exchange. We had a good time - just a few people "stole" gifts from each other. After some after-game bargaining, I think everyone left with the right gift.

Here are some photos that highlight the event:

Me and Denise -


Duane and I - something was funny - not sure what!


There was a pile-on for Keith and his family...



Then we asked the kids to sit for a photo-op, but Robert decided he needed to squash me!

All the Grandkids (except the man-cub, of course...boo-hooo)


Eddie, Trudi and Eddie II


And the heads of the family - Mom and Frank!


After we left Eddie and Trudi's house, we went to visit Granny and Cordy for a short while. They're doing fine - went out for a nice meal. Good to see them, but we had to head back to Pittsboro to have Robert back for work!!

Old photo of Granddaddy Hall

I couldn't help myself - I went to my bookshelf and hunted this photo.

My sis had posted about Christmas treats and sucking juice out of an orange. This tradition, according to my mom, was something she remembers from her childhood, also.


I remember that we always got an orange or two in our stocking. It must have been a treat that we didn't often get, because I remember it distinctly.

Here's the photo of my grandfather with Robert and Richard - peeling an apple. (about 18 years ago!!) Couldn't find one with an orange (apples and potatoes were his favorites!!)

It must be Christmas Time!

There's a sleigh and reindeer in the yard!! (Thanks to Mom and Frank, that is...)

A quick visit to see the progress on the pedal-plane

I went over to Pat and Diane's house to see the progress on the pedal-plane that Pat is building for his grandson. I had to snap a photo of Diane and her tree. There is an amazing quantity of ornaments - must take her days to hang them all!! It is very nice.


Then we went out to the hangar to see Pat - he's just now painting on the stripes to match his (real) Pitts Special. (The blue masking tape will be removed, of course). I'll do another photo when it's completely done. Pat had the paint color-matched - and he's done a super job. Next will be the decals on the side of the plane.



Here you can see the pedals and the "stick" that moves the tailwheel for steering.

The wheelpants are pretty neat - all fabricated out of plywood! Can't wait to see Skylar at the controls!!

OOPS! Another one bites the dust!

Nobody got hurt! And the plane isn't hurt very badly either! This is one of our local planes. They were doing some training and the gear indicator lights were not giving them the "three greens" that means the landing gear is down and locked. After a good bit of discussion over the radio, the pilot decided to go on and land. He did a wonderful job - landed very "softly". But on the rollout, the nose gear didn't hold and the plane came to a rest on the grass beside the runway.



The mechanic was right here, so he just hoisted the nose up and manually locked the gear. Then they just towed it back to the hangar for repair.

Don't worry too much - they had insurance and all they'll have to do is inspect the engine, replace the propeller and repair the nose wheel. The landing was so good, there wasn't even much sheet metal damage.



This morning, one of the pilots had left a little note for the owner: (if you can't read it - it just says "ouch")

Company Christmas Party

Every year, I throw my Cardinal Air company party. Most of the employees live closer to Asheboro, so Bobbi volunteers to have the party at her house. She decorates and I bring all the goodies.

So, Thurs/Fri/Sat of this past week was a blurr! Here's what it looks like piled into my car. I had already delivered most of the paper goods and drinks, so this is just the perishable stuff.

Let me see, deviled eggs, baklava, lemon cheesecake, my "garbage cookies", peppermint patty brownies, crab dip, blue cheese dip, salmon dip, spinach wheels, meatballs, little weiners, cocktail shrimp, con queso, hot chicken wings, the usual olives/pickles, chips - I'm sure I've forgotten something!!



Everyone brought their spouse/significant other.




They all look like they're having a good time!



Who wouldn't with such great folks!


Oh, forgot about the entertainment. Gave Robert and two of his band friends a paying "gig". They played a couple of hours of Christmas music for us. Nicely done. Unfortunately, the video didn't come out- my camera is going to have to go back to the shop after Christmas!!

Fuel Prices

Sorry, I just can't seem to help myself - my favorite gas station photo:

Coke took my Machine!

I've had the same Coke machine at the Siler City Airport for about 12 years....Coke, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that we don't sell enough Cokes for them. So, they politely informed me that they would pick up my machine. You'd think that a 12 year old machine would about be written-off by now....and that any sales would be better than NO sales...but, they didn't ask my opinion!

Pat's brother had a contact in Raleigh, so we ended up getting our own machine. They are VERY heavy....Richard helped Duane unload the machine. (There's a candy machine there also - it needs some repairs...)



So "raspberries" to you COKE! I stocked it with PEPSI products!

Pat's Wooden Bi-Plane for Grandson

Pat's grandson, Skyler, is going to be getting a really cool Christmas present this year. Pat is making a pedal-plane for him. We went over last night to his hangar to see the progress. It's pretty neat - it has a "stick" that you used to control the tailwheel and pedals like a tricycle. Very nice Grandpa!



Here's Skyler about a year ago, in his grandpa's real Pitts Special.



Here's Pat in the real plane - we'll see how close he duplicates it!! I'll post again when it's finished.