Well I don’t remember what yesterday’s

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Well I don’t remember what yesterday’s eaten update was supposed to say and I can’t find the one nice long scenery video that was supposed to be in it but whatever. I drove us through the lovely resort town of Borgarnes, across a causeway over a fjord, past some truly amazing scenery and a road I extremely well understand why it was closed the day before even compared to the dicey ones we’d been over, ate lunch in a charming cafe with Live Laugh Love signs in an array of languages (that was back in Borgarnes I’m not editing this caption), and made it without incident to Keflavik where we returned our rental car to a slightly startled clerk (it was supposed to be returned WHERE?!) but they rolled with it because they are with us on Team Roll With It, and they dropped us off at departures and we gave all our luggage to the nice people and then we flew to Canada and it would be really nice to say The End but that’s not the end!
No, we don’t live in Toronto. So we had to repeat last week’s epic journey but in reverse and tired, it being 3am Icelandic time by then. So shuttle train to the other terminal to the other train that goes to the real train station where we can get the third train but we were super lucky and barely missed the local so we only had a short wait for the express and the express goes all the way through to Niagara Falls,so we didn’t have to get a bus from Burlington to NF like we had on the way out (in reverse of course). So after a long enough trip that I forgot where we were going, the train spat us out directly into the parking lot where our car miraculously still was.
So we drove home in a horrid snowstorm but we’re used to that and the US and Canada are fans of guardrails so it was great.
Our house is still standing and even seems to be in the condition we left it in.
Today we have to get our cat and try to dig out from snow and put our lives back together.
And maybe later I can write a more concise summary but for now my brain is cheese, devoid of wit.
Tl:dr: Home safe! Thanks for following along on this adventure!
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dollsahoy: vinceaddams: annagetsthefabulousbabes: vinceaddams: Please, I implore you, do not be...

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dollsahoy:

vinceaddams:

annagetsthefabulousbabes:

vinceaddams:

Please, I implore you, do not be intimidated by sewing. 

If you try to make a thing and it turns out bad then it’s ok, you learned stuff by doing that. I see so many people say they want to sew stuff but are scared of screwing up, but it’s nothing to be afraid of!!
Find some cheap thrift store fabric or secondhand clothes to cut up if you’re worried about wasting costly materials, but please just try sewing the things you want to! 

This is one of my goals for 2020. PLEASE ADVISE.

“please advise” is very vague so I’ll just link you to my FAQ. 

I have been sewing seriously for nearly 30 years, and people think I’m pretty good at it, and I’ll tell everyone this:

You don’t ever stop screwing up

You will always make mistakes in sewing, in fabric choice, in making projects that are absolutely wonderful and well constructed and completely not suitable to what you wanted to with ‘em.

So, absolutely: don’t be afraid of screwing up–instead, make so many things that the screw ups are lost in all the successes

(and, you’ll get really good at compensating for mistaken cuts and picking out bad stitching and doing things over again)

But!  You can’t get to the point of successes outnumbering the screw ups if you don’t keep making stuff!

home

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I had been under the impression we were arriving back in the country today, rather than last night, and so I’d told my coworker I wouldn’t be in today, and probably not yesterday, because who in their right mind would cross the Atlantic and then report to work the following day?

So I had figured on today off, which is good. I was feeling a little guilt about it, though, because Dude for some reason planned all along to show up to work today and sure enough, did so. I mean, it’s not entirely unreasonable? We got in last night at like midnight local time, and fell into bed, it feeling like 5am to us, and slept until what felt like noon for us but really was 8am so we could go get the cat back from the boarding place. So it wasn’t bad and we ought to be readjusted; it’s only five hours, and this is the easier direction. 

But like. So I’m doing laundry; I unpacked all the suitcases and got everything sorted, and then realized I’d forgotten one whole compartment of a suitcase. I’ve got it separated into five loads of laundry, and I’d done like two of them, and I had carried one down to put into the machine and pulled out the one that was in there and put some of it into the dryer and carried the rest upstairs to hang up, and then I started hanging it up and the clothes were dry? And– dirty? they were dirty clothes? In considerable distress, I raced back down to see if the clothes in the washing machine were just the clean ones again. No, they weren’t. And there was nothing else down there, no trace of the wet clothes I’d just pulled out? The few items were in the dryer, off, as they should be (I only dry a few things per load and so I collect them all and just run the dryer at the end, and usually pull all of it out while still damp– if I can, I don’t use the dryer at all, but some stuff never dries indoors in the winter so I gotta tumble it for a few minutes at least first. Anyway i’m wacky about laundry).

Baffled, I came back upstairs, and realized that what I’d done was bring up the clothes to hang up, put the basket down on the bed while I dealt with one complicated garment, and then I’d picked up a basket waiting to go down and begun hanging its contents up. 

I genuinely had not been able to figure it out in the slightest for a distressingly long period of time.

Also, the cat was inconsolable all morning. I finally lay down in the bed, and she came and snuggled, and would every quarter-hour or so get up and roam around the house crying, and I’d have to call her, and lure her back to the bed, and she’d settle again for fifteen minutes, and then she’d get up and roam and cry, and finally I got her to lie there in my arms and give herself a bath. This wasn’t so much a nap for me as it was a reminder to her that we live here and it’s okay again. But hopefully it’ll help me stay up until a reasonable bedtime; in the best of circumstances now that I’m old I always wake up 3 hours early in the morning, and I expect that’ll only be worse for a while yet. 

But after lunch she vanished, and has been quiet for almost two hours now. I think she’s found a good spot to sleep; this is normal for her, and I’m glad.

I’d told my coworker I’d prefer not to come in tomorrow either, and I was thinking that was very lazy of me but I have now lost my phone completely four times in the last hour, despite having changed into a pair of pants with a pocket that said phone can go in so I’d stop setting it down in strange places and losing it. I’ve set it down somewhere, again, and lost it, and honestly it would be a waste of money for them to pay me tomorrow at this rate.

I have figured out what we can eat for dinner, partly by dint of having made sure we bought food for today before we went away because I knew I’d be useless today. 

Oh my god I just found my phone sitting directly next to me under the bag I was just sorting through. Yow. 

Huh this appears to be a moving image from my phone, we’ll see if it uploads. 

[image description: an image that despite how it looked on my phone appears to be static, of a very close-up gray cat on the lower part, and a part of my rather pink sleepy face on the upper part, and her paws are stretched out and pressed against my shoulder, curled up in bed with me.]

for the record

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No flights went out of Ísafjörður yesterday either. The woman from Heydalur, whose name the Internet tells me is Stella, was absolutely correct when she told us to start driving.

I don’t know if any flights went out today either. We’d’ve been stuck. Driving was absolutely the right thing to do, and she was also correct in predicting that the conditions were worsening in the north even as they began to ease in the south. 

She didn’t have to do that; she just came around to the various tables of the parties who were staying at her resort the night before, and asked each of us what our plans were for the following day and advised us of what she thought would happen, and then checked in with us again in the morning and made sure we had the correct directions. 

She’s from Reykjavik originally, not a native of the Westfjords, and she and her husband have been running that hotel since 2000, so very obviously, she’s seen pretty much all that can go wrong. I don’t know if we can possibly appreciate her enough.

She also asked us when we left if we could send her a message once we’d made it over the mountains, because she’d worry. It was one of the first things Dude did when we made it to the guesthouse in Bú∂ardalur– as we sat in the lobby, he got on the wifi and emailed her. She wrote back immediately to thank him.

Anyway. Dude said that the trip insurance ought to cover the extra cost of the rental car, but then I wondered if the cancelled flights’ refund wouldn’t be more anyway? So he’ll have to look at that. I don’t actually know how much any of the trip cost.

It was kind of funny, he did literally all of the researching, and then I did all of the doing, and that was how it worked. It’s fine, I hate researching and logistics, and he winds up acting kind of a martyr when he has to drive a lot. Next time, I think, we should have him research how much it costs to put two people onto the rental agreement. We wouldn’t have thought to this time, though, because we were only expecting to drive an hour and a half to Heydalur, and then the same distance back. 

I think I’m glad I was doing the driving. Z’s a fine driver, and competent, and more cautious than me, but I’m probably a more obnoxious passenger and backseat driver, and probably would have had far too much advice to give him. He only made horrified noises on three occasions (only one of which was unhelpful; I’d struck a curb and couldn’t tell if the car had made a bad noise, or him). And it was good to not be a passive just-along-for-the-ride sort all the time. 

He did say at one point that there weren’t a lot of people who would have enjoyed this vacation, and he was glad I was, and I said it was more the company I was enjoying and could have enjoyed myself most anywhere, and that’s about as sappy as the two of us get. It was objectively a cool place to be, though.