Over the river and through the woods........
18 December 2008 | New Bern, NC
John, Cheryl and Maddey
Cheryl's Notes:
Yea! Tomorrow we are heading home for the holidays. I am not looking forward to the long drive, but I am really excited to see my girls and all of our family and friends back home. I really want to spend a whole day baking Christmas cookies with my girls. As we have explained in previous posts, our oven aboard the boat is not really conducive to making large quantities of food. Besides, it is always more fun to bake with family.
It has been really warm here this past week, and I am going to have a hard time adjusting from shorts and sandals to snow and warm coats. Yesterday we had to refill water tanks and give the deck a good scrubbing. It is December and we have a new batch of flies and mosquitoes that are confused by the warm weather. I took Maddey to see a local production of The Nutcracker on Sunday. It felt really strange to attend a Christmas ballet with no snow on the ground and everyone dressed in short sleeves.
John's Notes:
Last week was a rough week around here. First, a casual acquaintance, Billy, from down the dock...........died. I say casual acquaintance because we haven't been here long enough to really get to know anyone all that well. He was always nice and said hello and we talked politics and economics in the lounge a few times. He was a retired teacher and had a little business re-finishing teak decks. Turns out that he bled to death internally. I had noticed that he wasn't around for a couple of days and then found out that he was in UNC hospital in Chapel Hill. They gave him over 40 pints of blood and still couldn't find out where he was bleeding.
Just after I heard about Billy, I was walking up the dock around 4:00 in the afternoon and noticed that the paramedics were in the parking lot. Turns out that they were responding to a call about another casual acquaintance, Tom Phillips, who was working on a his friends trawler and stepped into an open engine room hatch and broke a leg, pelvis, shoulder and four ribs. He had to be air lifted to the Pitt County Trauma Center in Greenville. He is really a mess. He's older than me, single, and lives aboard his houseboat. They say that he will have to have several surgeries and be confined to a wheel chair for quite a long time. The only good news is that he is a local artist and has a studio here in the marina. A small office really but it could be converted into living quarters for the short term. Those of us that are more or less residents here are already planning on how we can all chip in and help Tom with meals, etc. when he gets out of the hospital. Greenville is about 30 miles away so hopefully they will transfer him to a local facility before long so that he can have more frequent visitors. He has two sons but I heard that one of them lives in Canada and not sure where the other lives.
Not looking forward to the long drive back home tomorrow. We think it will take us about two days if the weather doesn't get too bad. If it does, we will just take whatever time it takes. I didn't work over forty years to retire and kill myself driving in bad weather.
We have a drizzly day today but most of the week has been sunny and in the 70's. We even had mosquitoes in the boat yesterday. Can't wait to dig out my long pants and winter coat. Just this week we removed yet another 100 pounds of clothes and other things that we find we have no need for on the boat. When we get back from the holidays we will really begin to clean house. It really is much cheaper than buying a bigger boat.
If you didn't get a Christmas card from us, well, sucks to be you. You should have given us your address before we left. You probably have a close friend, however, that did get one, so, just ask to look at theirs and pretend that it was addressed to you.
Maddey's Notes:
Oh god, the infamous mini-golf tournament! I lost the first 2 rounds, but then grandpa and I were tied and we had to have three tie breakers! I was so close but in the end the better player won. Although, in that third game I did get three whole-in-ones!
I have all of the books in the Twilight series that have come out, I saw the movie Twilight, and now I have the movie soundtrack. Call me obsessed, but I absolutely LOVE Twilight! Right now I am listening to the soundtrack. The movie was great, but like always, the book is WAY better. The books and/or soundtrack make for good Christmas gifts.
Christmas is almost here. I got my mom something really cool. I wont say what it is because she will be reading this, HI MOM! Its always hard for me to come up with things for my Christmas list, but every year I always do. Maybe its because I really don't need anything more, oh well.
The other day my grandpa did something funny and yet a little weird. We're sitting there watching TV and all of a sudden he grabs two peanuts and is telling us to watch carefully. Then he grabs a lighter and puts the peanuts on his chest. He lights the lighter and says, "Ok, guess what this is." Grandma Cheryl and I are looking at him like, what in the world? Then he says, "I'm roasting chestnuts on an open fire! Then we all break out in laughter. Its one of those things that you had to be there in order to get it. Grandpas' will be grandpas'!