It's Soup Time

Right after I got up this morning I whipped up a batch of Super Easy Chicken Noodle Soup.  Weight Watchers recipe, of course.  Having noodles in the soup seems like a real luxury and you use butter, real butter, to saute the onions.  Talk about luxury!  I love having soup for lunch.

 

The House Finches came back to the feeder today.  In fact a Sparrow came too but didn't stay long.

I spent most of the day working on the next art assignment--Paper Weaving.  My first thought was to use my potholder loom and loops to make a pattern.  It looked good while the loops were on the loom but the pattern kind of collapsed when I took it off the loom.

So I dug around for paper to use.  I found some black card stock, some florescent orange paper, and a sketch pad with white paper.  I have no other colored paper so my weavings are pretty boring.  I made two with the paper in portrait mode and one in landscape.  I was really looking forward to this one but it wasn't as much fun as I thought it'd be.  I might have to take another run at it tomorrow.

This evening I finished the Mulberry Snow Day hat and there might be enough left to knit a cast sock out of.  Maybe.  I'll weigh what's left and see if I think there's enough.

11 February--Barbara Malcolm, The Seaview. 

Chapter 43

Bright and early the next morning Marie, Will, Elizabeth and I caught the 8 o'clock dive boat along with four couples from a resort on the other side of the island.  The day was sunny and the winds were light.  After a short ride out to Sandy Deep dive site Dougie leaned over the railing, stared into the water for a minute, and then turned to us and said, "No current today.  The sea fans are waving like beauty queens in a parade so there is just a bit of surge for you to deal with."  The other divers looked puzzled when the four of us burst out laughing.

Marie said, "Good.  My hands don't need another vinegar bath, thank you."  She turned to look at Freddy who had just finished using the boathook to catch the mooring buoy and tie the dive boat onto it.  "You did refill that bottle, didn't you?  Just in case."

Freddy nodded and kept walking to the stern where he lowered the boarding ladders and let the long trailing line float behind the boat for when we returned from the dive.  Freddy, whose mother owned the Barrel Stave restaurant down the beach from the Seaview, was a man of few words.

Dougie was right.  The slope, which bottomed out at 60 ft., was full of sea fans and all types of sponges waving languidly in the surge.  I've always loved diving in surge.  The water pushes you forward, pauses, then pulls you back a bit.  Forward, pause, back.  It's like an underwater dance.  I try to sneak up and join drifting schools of yellow and white grunts that hover over the reef riding the surge.  They barely move their fins to stay in place, but I always manage to spook them.  As we swam along, I heard a muffled shout and turned to see Marie swimming fast after a hawksbill turtle.  Turtles look slow, their flippers barely moving as they swim, but if you want to take their picture or even get a closer look, it takes a lot of kicking to catch them.  She gave up after a minute, waved good-bye to the turtle, and rejoined us.  Soon our time was up, so we swam to the mooring and began our slow ascent back to the surface.

Our second dive in Little Bay was near a sea grass bed where we saw flying gurnards stretch out spotted pectoral fins that were as long as their bodies to fly-swim just above the sand.  Tiny shrimp that make a sound like popcorn with their claws when you swim too close live in holes in the rock of the cliff that rises above the water.  I could have stayed there all day, but Dougie swam over to motion us all to reboard the boat for the very short ride back to the dive shop.

Today's toss was some old health and beauty aids out of the bottom of the linen closet.  Time to clear out that stuff.

The prompt today was that a storm was coming and the authorities advised evacuation.  Do you stay or go?  What happens next?  Well, my idea of a big storm is a blizzard and as long as my furnace and electricity worked I'd stay home.  If I did evacuate, I decided to pretend that there wasn't a pandemic and wrote about being with lots of people and how conditions would change as time went on.  Another not very cheerful prompt.

--Barbara