Moonlight and Sunrise

I hadn't posted any photos of Dennis and Merlin's house since it was completed. It is lovely.
Yesterday we walked up the hill to visit them (and the four dogs!) and to get our electric bill. And yes, Dennis did eventually let us in; he likes to make sure that the dogs don't get out. You may remember, if you've been reading for awhile, that there is no home mail delivery here so the electric company sends workers out to hand deliver the bills by sticking them in your gate or door. You then have 6 days to go pay your bill, in cash, at one of the payment stations. They had already been to town and had paid all the bills for the houses they own and rent on the hill as well as ours. Don asked for the receipt so he could reimburse them, and they couldn't wait to see his reaction to the bill. I thought, surely it can't be much! We've only been here a week and had the power to our house turned off while we were away. Sure enough, it wasn't much. We've never seen a bill so low...2.02 lempira, or about 11 cents! Yeah, we figure someone must have read it wrong, and it will surely be corrected next month, but we got a good laugh out of it.

I woke up early this morning, as usual, and wandered out onto the deck to enjoy the moonlight, the ever-changing early morning sky, the clouds, and a little later, a Norweigan cruise ship passing by on its way to port in Coxen Hole. Click to enlarge photos.



We had rain off and on, mostly on, all morning with temperatures in the mid to upper 70s. Lovely! The rain stopped after lunch, so we made our run into town, braving the cruise ship traffic, to go to the bank and grocery store. Virtually no lines in the bank, although the old persons line teller was at lunch and the teller who waited on Don spoke no English. Fortunately, he knows enough Spanish to make a withdrawal from our account. No problem!

We crossed the street to H.G. Warren's grocery store. They had a pretty good selection of fresh produce but no bags of the hydroponic leaf lettuce and almost no dairy items, also no bacon. (We encountered the same problem the other day up in French Harbor. Curious.) So next we went to Sun where they also had no bags of lettuce and limited dairy items. This is serious! I eat a lot of salads. We did notice that produce prices have increased. We paid almost $1. per avocado (from Mexico - out of season here) Four big, beautiful tomatoes were almost $3.00. We eat at least one fresh tomato per day.

The banana crop also slows down in January. Dennis had delivered one nice stalk of little apple bananas to our deck the day we arrived. And no mangoes right now. Lots of little key limes available on our hill.

We're cat-sitting for the next 10 - 11 days while Colin, Kaleen and Kelly go back home to Florida for a visit. It was raining when they left, so they left Moe up at their house and gave us the keys. We'll walk up the hill in a bit, play with Moe for awhile, watch Oprah or something (we still have no t.v.!). We may bring Moe back down with us if he seems to get too lonely up there, otherwise, we'll go up twice a day to take care of him and play for awhile.