Knitting Iris

Y Blanco

Coral, coconuts, and crabs.   Everywhere.  C worked at perfecting his technique for picking out a good coconut and splitting tit with a machete so that the liquid doesn't spill out.  We ate at least one or two full coconuts each day.  We should have done the same with pineapples...so cheap and fresh compared to the ones here in the stores.  We planted a pineapple top on the hillside at 'our place' surrounding it with pieces of coral from the beach to hold the soil and water around it.  It might need more sunshine, though.  (Note to self:  Set your knitting down and take some time to reread the big permaculture textbook!)  Hours were spent in them making of "homes" for hermit crabs on the beach.

Negro

We caved and had a huge load of laundry done one day and when I went to pick it up, it came back in a bag labelled "Gringo" along with the price.  Fortunately, we brought the tin of pirate bandaids given to R on his birthday to cover the countless number of skinned knees.

Verde

R's weaving and his picture of verde coconuts.  That beachglass was collected in about 10 minutes time on a bit of beach about 10 by 15 feet.

It amazes me the way I recognize some of the plants growing in Panama.  It's not that I could tell you what most of them are but that I recognize them as sold as houseplants back home, and they're so much bigger growing wild in that climate.  C and R planted a few sprouting coconuts just six months ago that were only a foot or two tall and now they're already well over our heads! 

Thanks for all the textbook advice yesterday, by the way, and the grammar lesson.

Anaranjado

Leaf on water.  Burn pile on "our place"(that's so weird to say).  The sweetest orange juice ever.  R kayaking.  Bougainvillea.  Stuff collected on the beach one afternoon.  Lichen on tree trunk.  A kitten who is soon to have her own kittens. Mural in a park.  Big leaf.  Tiny poison dart frog.  One of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many shoes found on the beach, only these were unusual in that they were a matching pair.  Flower in the garden where we stayed.  (OJ and lichen covered tree taken by R)

Does anybody know the difference of when you would use "anaranjado" and "naranja" or "el color naranja"?  I could have sworn I kept my old textbook but maybe I lent it to someone else or ditched during one of several moves.  Yesterday we stopped at the communityl college bookstore looking for a Spanish textbook and found out that a used one was $80.  Yikes!  I guess I should have known that prices would have gone up in the 17 years since Spanish 101 and 102 during my senior year in college.  I guess it was naive of me to think they'd run around $20 or so.

Turquesa

Lucky for you there are so many stories behind these pics that I can't even begin, so I'll keep my mouth shut aside from saying that I couldn't help but learn to love the color turquoise here.

Six degrees and other serendipitous goings on

I've already explained the significance of the knitting of these socks:

Right here:

On the the trunk of a palm tree (sorry, no handknit bikinis):

Here in the shade, while being served up fresh from the tree (the ground, actually) coconut by C, the resident expert with a machete (this picture of your handsome, sweet son is for you GB!):

while watching these boys happily playing in the surf:

These socks kept my toes warm and toasty on the chilly night we spent in the Newark Airport last week.  I could never have known over a year ago that I'd be finishing these off, weaving in the ends, so close to where the yarn was sent from by Cassie in the Unloved Sock Yarn Swap.   This sock yarn is now well loved by my two feet, and the pattern is beautiful to boot. (No pun intended.  Really!)  It's the Uptown Boot Sock from the Winter 2003 Interweave Knits, now also published in this book.

Other serendipitous happenings in Panama:

*** Finding ourselves staying in a cabin next to the two who wrote the book on cordwood masonry (which has a place on a shelf in our home, thoroughly read and thickly highlighted in the years before we built our house) and many others on alternative building techniques, and spending a couple of great days snorkeling with them.

*** Meeting up with some people C had met briefly during his and R's trip in September, partly so that our kids could get together and play with theirs.  They picked us up in town and took us by boat to their aptly named resort, Tranquilo Bay,  gave us a tour of the gorgeous grounds, and then took us on from there to the most incredibly beautiful Carribean island with perfect sandy beaches and turquoise blue water.  They insisted we didn't need to bring anything along and they provided boogie boards, ocean kayaks, beach chairs, a cooler full of beer and another filled with sandwiches and snacks.   Their son and nephew played with our boys for hours on the beach and in the water.  We visited and found how they came to be where they are, an amazing story.  An extraordinary day.  I felt coddled and spoiled.

*** Stepping out of the domestic airport in Panama City (population: over 1 million) on our way home and walking right up to the same taxi driver who picked up C and R there last September.

*** The first time we were in Panama City last year, C and I went out for dinner and found ourselves seated literally back to back at an outdoor table in a restaurant with an old neighbor of ours from 'two doors down' in Montana who had moved away to a town in the mountains of Panama a few years prior.  What are the chances?

*** Rifling through our bags at the Newark airport, looking for anything we could find in there to keep us warm.  Fortunately, we each had a queen sized sheet packed with us to wrap up into and we had a few towels to lay down to insulate us from the cold floor.  Best of all: we overlapped the last couple of days of our trip with a couple of friends from home and before leaving we swapped some of our gear.  They took our snorkeling gear and sent us home with a bag of clothes they found that they wouldn't need.  I hadn't bothered to look in the bag until that night in the airport.  Inside?  A polarfleece hoodie!  A sweatshirt hoodie!  A pair of long pants that fit over the thin pants I was wearing!  In other words, enough to swap out between ourselves and the boys to keep warm in.

Maybe there really is something to that Six Degrees of Separaration idea.

L and G, where ever in the world you may be now, if you're out there reading this, we're looking forward to hearing more of your own "quirky" stories from your travels.

Azul

The stripey socks are for my brother in NYC, artist, plumber, and fellow beach scavenger, whom I have dubbed 'the metro-gnome'.  These are the ones I was knitting in the Newark airport while he was so close by, but inaccessible, in Queens.  It's  both a blast and kind of pain taking a walk on a beach with him as he'll both compete with you for the beach glass, especially the rare dark blue pieces, and at the same time be just as thrilled as you are for your own finds.  He picks up of old painted wood that washes up on beaches, particulary blue if I'm not mistaken, using it in his art.  The pieces in the top picture were as I found them on the beach in Panama, placed there, I'd guess, by some children who live nearby on a coconut farm.  I couldn't help but add another piece of blue wood I found down the beach.  The school in the bottom picture is what the public schools in Panama look like, although school was not in session this time while we were there.

The yarn is Regia NationColor # 5395 with Regia#2025 heels and toes.  I'm not sure why the toes appear such different sizes in the pictures.  They're almost exactly the same in person although maybe a little off.  I'm not going to bother counting rows now.  The striping was off by a few rows over the course of the entire sock but I fudged by a row or two each, both in the foot and the cuff parts.  They're a bit big on me.

R's Azul

After last year's trip at the beginning of the rainy season, this time we chose to go to Panama at the tail end of the dry season.  Everyone depends on rain water catchment to some extent and for those who live in the towns, the municipal water where we were isn't reliably consistent, especially this time of year.  What little water there was was used sparingly if at all and all of our drinking water was purchased.  The ubiquitous five gallon buckets were on hand in wait for either rain or for when the municipal water sporadically and almost mysteriously came on.

One day we (C, actually) hauled a bucket of rather brownish water about 20 minutes from a nearly dried up spring just so we (I, actually) could give some of our clothes a rinse.  It was water that I would never have considered usable if we hadn't seen other local people going there to wash up and fill containers. Another day, during a short rainstorm, C was up on a ladder helping tweak the new and as-of-that-point untested gutter system where we were staying, trying to gain optimum water catchment. 

We're no strangers to hauling our own water having done so for years when we first moved to Montana, first in big water jugs from town, then in 5 gallon buckets after hand pumping it up out of our 20 foot deep well, other times melting snow on the woodstove.   Along with moving into our house came the generator to pump water into a tank upstairs that gravity fed back down into the kitchen sink and bathtub.  Now we have the whole shebang: electricity, 80 foot deep well with water pump and pressure tank, and it shouldn't be long before there's even a dishwasher.  Still, it's good to reconnect to those days and know that we can get by on just a handful of gallons a day if we need to.

R's azul pictures are from during one of the few rainstorms we saw during this trip. It was enough to replenish the water supply a little but, even with careful rationing, it only lasted a day or so.  Included above are one of four mini umbrellas we brought along and a glimpse of one of the big blue rain collection barrels that are covered with mesh and stationed at the corners of the buildings where we were staying.

Since our return home, the last we heard was that even the bigger town on the next island over had been without municipal water for nearly a week and people were beginning to protest in the streets.  I wouldn't blame them.  Apparently the government has been promising upgrades to the water system for years.  The weather forecast there called for rain as of this writing.  Let's hope the rainy season has come early and that they get a break from los cielos azules.

I type this while spring rain drizzles onto our own roof and these pictures were taken in the rain:

Yarn: Fortissima Step Aerobic Wollness in Jeans-Grau #8031 bought on ebay a couple of years ago, with Heritage Heirloom 4 ply as a contrast.  I tried knitting a sock with this before and couldn't stand the way the yarn knit up so finally ripped it out.  The solid heels, toes, and cuff this time around completely changed that and now I actually do rather like how they turned out.  Needles: Addi Turbo #2 circular and aluminum #2 dpns for the top cuff to make it looser.  These were knit upon in Montana, while driving through Idaho and Washington, on the plane and in Panama and then back again in Montana when adding the top cuffs.

R's Rojo

Homeschooling away from home

Due to space and weight limitations, we packed only a few small notebooks, a new set of markers, new watercolor paints, and a big, new sticker book for E.  There was also a gallon ziploc bag of miscellaneous Playmobil people and pieces which only ended up being played with a few times. 

School work for R consisted of writing a few sentences (nearly) each day about our travels, drawing pictures, and writing down three words of his choosing and then the Spanish equivilant, looking them up in a travel dictionary.  One rainy afternoon we cut the bottoms off extra water bottles, collected rain coming off the thatched roof palapa under which we were sitting, and painted with watercolors.  Has anybody ever tried using sea water when painting with watercolors?  Did it work or make a difference?

Most mornings we had bread and jam or else made coffee and hard boiled eggs over a backpacking stove.  The one morning that we went out for breakfast, the expatriate owner of the restaurant, who had homeschooled her now grown children, asked R to write the drink special of the day on a little chalkboard for her.  New words learned: sangria & carafe.  Ahem.  That counts as the writing assignment of the day, albeit a rather unconventional one, right?   

Together, we re/learned the names of the colors in Spanish.  R took pictures with the camera of things he found around us, one day rojo, another day amarillo, etc.  We'll print some out and make a poster with the Spanish words written beside them and some may show up here in the next few days.

The most challenging part about traveling with kids, as suspected, was having almost no books along with us.  Each night at bedtime I could dole out only one or two chapters of an abridged, kid-friendly version of Swiss Family Robinson.  R started and finished the entire book on the flight between Newark and Panama City on the way there but still enjoyed having it read aloud.  He even attempted a few chapters by himself of the unabridged Signet translation of the original 1812 version that we'd also brought along.  It would be impossible to carry enough books to keep the boys satisfied so we didn't even try.  A big stack of books sure would have been nice during that 25 hour stint in the airport.  Of course, there were plenty of other things and ways to learn and experience along the way.

Before and after the trip we've been reading up on some of the things we've seen: mangroves, coral reefs, oceans, rainforests, sloths, the country of Panama itself, and more....all for free from the library, online, and in our second hand encylopedia set.   We have plans to pick up a Spanish textbook at the local community college bookstore within the week. 

How would we ever survive without all the books so easily available here in libraries, bookstores, thrift stores, yard sales, and the bookshelves of friends and family???   

The markers and paints were left behind for the little girl where we were staying.  We asked if there was anything we could bring next time we come.  The answer: books.