Yardwork

An update on how the yardwork is progressing. Above is a "before" photo of the fallen Pride of Barbadoes shrub laying across several hibiscus bushes.

This is "after" the cleanup and trimming. Of course, the trimming always removes most of the flowers on the bushes, but they were pretty wild. New flowers should appear soon.

This is taken from our bedroom window, looking at the steep slope down the side of our house.

This is where Don is building the stairway down the slope. I'm not allowed to go down there right now - it's so easy to slip on the loose gravel and keep on sliding. 

He's got a pretty good start on the first section of stairs. I'll sure be glad when I can go down there and tend my garden myself. I want to put a compost bin down there, too; our soil needs a bit of enriching in order to grow some veggies. I had a little herb garden started behind Don, but it hasn't survived our long absences. Soon, I'll be able to start fresh!

2 great iPhotos

I've gotten a bit lazy about blogging. After a crazy busy week, we had a fairly quiet weekend. It was nice to have Bob and Debi back on the island and share a sunset, a taco pizza, and a game of cribbage.

Debi took this shot of us on the deck with the last glow of the sunset behind us. That's Bob's arm on the right. Obviously, I haven't yet learned how to use the new photoshop elements 8 software! 

A Very Full Day

Yesterday I took our friend, Kristin, in to Coxen Hole to shop. She still needed a number of things for her newly rented house, like pots and pans, trash cans, a hamper, miscellaneous kitchen items. We wandered up Market Street, looking in all the small shops along the way. It is amazing what they carry. Nearly every tiny shop carried some school supplies and children's school shoes (the children are required to wear uniforms and a certain type of black shoe, different for each school). Several of them also sold pedestal fans. We looked but didn't buy one. We walked up the block to Back Street and found the pots and pans store next to the Pepto Bismal pink building (hard to miss!). They had several sets of pans - two in stainless steel, although not the best quality, and one aluminum with a non-stick finish. We discovered that they also carry very large, restaurant-sized pots and lots of plastic items, like dish drainers and storage containers. Yup, she needed those, too. We stopped across the street at the office and school supply store to buy copy paper, then headed back to my car to unload.

This is another shop where Kris bought linens 

Next stop, the Flying Fisherman. Thursday is the day they pack boxes of fish for export and fill orders for local restaurants. We had to settle for frozen fillets unless we wanted to come back on Friday when they process the smaller fish suitable for our needs. We bought some of the squirrel snapper for about $4.00/lb., which the sales woman said was very, very good. On the way back to the car, Kris bought some large, fresh Honduran oranges for 1 lempira each (5.29 cents). She also got a huge papaya for about $2.00.

There was a cruise ship in port and lots of cruisers were out in the streets. It was getting hot, too, so we quickly finished our grocery shopping, first at Warren's and then up the hill at Plaza Mar, one of the more Americanized groceries. Kris was hoping to find stainless steel mixing bowls, but no luck.

This is Plaza Mar. The taxi drivers often bring cruisers up here because there is a nice view of the cruise ship dock. 

I took Kris home and we unloaded her groceries. Thankfully her security guard came up the steps just in time to help carry her purchases down the many steps to her house, cause I was ready to go home. I was so hot, my face was beet red, I was thirsty, and I was getting pretty hungry.

 After a quick lunch, I walked up the hill to visit my friend and neighbor, Tia (who is our pastor's wife). Her mother, who has rather advanced Alzheimer's, lives with Tia and it's getting pretty stressful. Pastor Chuck took her mom out for a long drive and a stop at the coffee shop so Tia and I could have a nice visit. 

But the day wasn't over yet! Dennis and Merlin picked us up at 6 p.m. to go to a benefit concert for Haiti being held at the new mall near French Harbor.  This was an outdoor concert, held by the fountains at the front of the mall from 5-10 p.m. We missed the first band and only heard part of the second band's performance. Paul, the fire dancer, also performed and puts on an incredible show. There were a total of 6 bands who performed for free.  During the concert, large 5 gallon water jugs were passed around to collect donations for Haiti. The money will go to an organization called Avaaz which is already in place in Haiti. 

It was a beautiful, clear night, with a great breeze which grew steadily stronger and cooler as the night wore on, but perfect for sitting outside. This mall has two American restaurants; Applebee's and Wendy's. Applebee's is near the fountains and has a large outdoor patio so many concert goers sat there and ate during the show, others wandered in and out. We ate at the smaller Big House Burgers (which also makes great Honduran "fast" food, all very good. This was also right next to the fountains, so we could still see and hear much of what went on.

When the last band finished, Merlin walked over to the new casino (the island's first casino - sad, but true...way too Americanized) and tried to round up her three friends who had also ridden with us. They were much more interested in playing the slot machines than in the concert, and were also reluctant to leave. Dennis finally had to go in and get them. 

It was a long, tiring, fun day. 

TheTaming of the Jungle

We finally have a gardener at work on our hillside, and so far, we are quite pleased with his work. We returned to the island after a six month absence to find everything very overgrown. Normally, we ask our friends, Dennis and Merlin, to hire a gardener to trim and clean up our property before our return. For some reason, that didn't happen this year. I think Don forgot to ask Dennis and, as we learned after our return, Dennis and Merlin gave all their workers the entire month of December off. 

This is the "before" view, looking over our deck down onto the hill below. What you are looking at is mostly our huge Pride of Barbados tree that fell over but continued to grow......sideways.....across the top of several hibiscus bushes. This tree is probably actually a shrub since it has multiple trunks. Two of the larger trunks fell over, two small ones grew up between the floorboards of our deck, and five more small trunks are growing up along side one of the support posts for our deck. These have now been thinned out.

Enrique and a friend of his chopped off the two fallen sections of the tree/shrub. They had quite a little struggle pulling those sections free; the tree/shrub must have been 15 feet tall and was enmeshed with vines and overgrown branches of hibiscus and bougainvilla plants. The "Pride" also has nasty thorns, so Enrique and his pal were happy that we provided nice thick work gloves for them.

I took a walk early in the morning before Enrique arrived. This is looking down the hill just below our property. I walked down to where there appears to be a cross in the grass and then part way up the very steep hill to the left.

My objective was to take this photo looking up at our house and at the jungle below it. This shows pretty well how overgrown everything had become. We are just ending the rainy season, which explains the lushness. I don't want a severe trimming and cleaning like some of our former gardeners have done. I just want a healthy trimming to maximize the beauty of the flowers, and to eliminate some excess of the more invasive plants and shrubs. For example, those large green and yellow-leaved trees behind our house all started from one small tree that someone gave Merlin. They are beautiful, but get very large and are now nearly surrounding our property, much like the banana trees have done. Because they are so large, they tend to block some of the breeze, coming from the east especially, and block the view in other directions, so a trimming is in order.

I really appreciate that Enrique will call me to look over what he is doing and ask if it meets my approval. When he began trimming the hibiscus bushes, he asked if that height was ok; I asked him to leave the others just a bit taller, and he did. I really hate to lose any of the flowers, but unfortunately, they seem to grow at the end of wild 8 foot long branches. Once trimmed, they will soon begin flowering on the shorter branches. 

I'll post some "after" photos later.

Oh the Joys of a High-Tech World

I really have a love/hate relationship with high-tech devices. Much of the time, I know just enough to be dangerous. I hinted at a serious problem I was having in one of last week's blogs and promised to talk about it later....when I COULD talk about it. Last week, I thought I had somehow lost my entire iPhoto library...7000 photos....gone! I was loading photos from my camera to my computer  and had just ejected the camera (properly, I might add!) when something crashed. I got a message saying that a device was improperly disconnected and data may have been damaged. The hard drive was still connected via the hub and the camera was unplugged correctly. But the pictures were gone. I was speechless, then tearful, then speechless again. Finally, I calmed down enough to reassess, call my son who also uses a MacBook, and then follow his advice.

Here's what lead up to this catastrophe. I had too many photos stored in iPhoto on my computer and not enough storage space. First step was to add extra memory. Then we realized that wasn't the kind of memory needed. The internal memory, the start-up disk, was nearly full. I already had my photos backed up on an external hard drive but,  to my dismay, they were on there in wildly random order, not in neat folders, so it was formidable trying to find anything. I did not realize that I should have moved the entire iPhoto library, not just pictures, to the hard drive. And besides, that hard drive was too big to carry around in a purse or bag if I wanted to show my pictures to someone while traveling. I needed to get the entire library off the computer's internal hard drive.

The next step was to get another, smaller external hard drive, one that could easily fit in my purse or even a pocket. This time I tried to carefully follow the directions Dave gave me. I loaded the pictures from the bigger, bulkier hard drive back onto my laptop, which caused the "warning! start-up disk nearly full!" messages to pop up again, but had to be done so that I could then load everything onto the new, smaller hard drive. But, somehow, I messed that operation up and started reloading iPhoto back onto the laptop, so I cancelled that operation. Back to the instructions and finally, I had everything copied onto the new hard drive and eliminated the library from my computer.

Everything was working just fine until the connection to the hard drive crashed and the pictures disappeared. Whenever I tried to open the library, I would get a message saying "rebuilding thumbnails". This was probably a good thing, I reasoned, but alas, it was not. I made the unfortunate decision to just eliminate some extra stuff that showed up on the new hard drive when the library was trying to duplicate itself and then when I opened up the library, I got messages saying "rebuilding the thumbnails" but no pictures. And, to make matters worse, I was still getting messages about the start-up disk (internal hard drive) running out of space. Aiyiyi!

I called Dave who suggested that I go online and search for solutions since he doesn't use iPhoto (probably for a good reason, huh?) .  So I searched and read and was finally ready to act. I then discovered that I still had 3 copies of the iPhoto library, two of them on the start-up disk and one on the external hard drive. Good grief!! I just really wanted one! But, after carefully reading sage advice from Mac experts, I knew how to eliminate the two on the start-up disk, so I drug them to the trash and then emptied the trash. I was feeling pretty good at this point. I was learning.

Then I opened up the library via the external hard drive. Ah! all the thumbnails had recreated themselves; surely everything was ok. Nope. It wasn't. The thumbnails were mostly all there, but many of the photos were not. When I clicked on a thumbnail (tiny picture), it produced a dotted outline with an exclamation point in the center. Turns out that when I made that unfortunate decision to eliminate some "extra" stuff, I actually eliminated some of the links to these photos. Permanently. More agony.

But! Remember the other, bulkier hard drive? Left that back home in the States. I also had most of those older photos additionally backed up on CDs, also back home in the States. My hope is that when I return, I'll be able to reload those photos and re-establish the links to the thumbnails and then everything truly will be ok. Oh, I hope so.

Shopkeepers For The Day

Yesterday Don and I played shopkeepers. Our friends, Bob and Debi, who built this shop for an island couple and who man the shop two days a week, are off island on a little vacation. We agreed to fill in for them on Tuesdays while they are gone.  This sweet little girl is Jennifer, the niece of the island couple for whom the shop was built. She came and spent the day helping us. She's only 9, but she's a pretty good little salesperson and just a delight. You may be wondering why a 9 year old isn't in school on a Tuesday; this is the last week of her school's two-month winter break . She was happy to have something fun to do and, being an extrovert, loves being around people. The cruisers were quite charmed by her. Plus, she is a fountain of information. Our friend, Kristin, came along to spend the day, and Jennifer was able to tell Kris and the cruisers where to find certain things that they were shopping for.

This is the inside of the shop. It was built to provide an outlet for local artists to sell their work. Most of the money from sales goes to the artists with a small percentage being kept by the shop owners. These small paintings were done by Luma, who painted the beautiful murals on the walls of our church.

I took this picture standing in front of the shop. That is the cruise ship behind the palm trees (you can just see the top 2 or 3 decks of the ship). That's how close the shop is to the pier. It was pretty cloudy all day, so, the sky looks gray behind the ship. We were thankful for the clouds though as the shop faces east and has no shade from the sun.

We met lots of interesting people, mainly Americans and Canadians, a lot of people from Ohio and Michigan. We met farmers from Illinois and Ohio who were glad to escape the cold. We met a couple who live part of the year in Seattle and the other part in Hawaii. Don had quite the conversation with them, discussing the price of electricity. We pay 18 cents per kilowatt hour here on Roatan; (as compared to St. Louis' low 4.5 cent/kwh); in Seattle, the rate is 9 cents/kwh and - get this! - in Hawaii (on the big island), it's 33 cents per kilowatt!! People are always interested in the cost of living here, in hearing our story and why we live here. One of the Ohio farmers said he sure would love to do what we're doing.

It was a pretty slow day for sales. Lots of people looked, many more just walked on by, not too many made a purchase. Our friend, Kristin, had a great day of shopping and found many things for her newly rented house. We bought baleadas from one of the local shops for lunch and coconut ice cream for dessert. Baleadas are handmade flour tortillas filled with mashed beans, a little cheese, choice of meat and sometimes, other things like onions or avocado, and then folded in half. These were pretty plain but also pretty cheap.

It was a slow day for the shop owners, too, who are usually busy giving island tours to the cruisers, so Marco came to relieve us early. We stopped at another shop to pick up some of Kristin's larger purchases and then made our way home, anxious to see if we had a working pump in the well house. We were unable to reach Dennis until this morning, so we weren't sure about the water situation and continued to use it carefully. Everything has been replaced and is working normally, so I've been busy with laundry, dishes and cleaning.  It's so good to have plenty of water again.

Water, Water Everywhere...Except Here

We have a serious water shortage up on our hill, and the timing was really lousy. I had been putting off doing laundry for a couple of days, but when I realized that we had no more clean underwear after today, I decided I'd better get busy.

 I had the first load in the washing machine when Dennis called to report trouble with the pump on the deep well...and, to make matters even worse, the two huge (750 gallon) water tanks that collect and hold rain water were empty. Our house and Chuck and Tia's house have been using mainly rain water, while Dennis's house and several others are getting theirs from the well. When the rain tanks are empty or low, he refills them with well water. Well, that explained the lack of water pressure while filling the washer. In fact, I'm not sure there was ever enough water in the washer to fill it.

Dennis said the pump has been acting up, leaking and/or clogging the filter. He's repaired a leak in the pipe a couple of times already. He was heading in to town to get all the parts he would need to replace the pipe and calling an electrician to come out to work on it tomorrow. So, virtually no water until it is fixed. And we can only hope and pray that it gets fixed right the first time.

Hmmmm. So now I had a load of wet clothes through the wash cycle and ready to go into rinse mode, and no water. I took them over to our friends' house on the beach to rinse them and spin dry. And I washed out enough underwear by hand in water from our hot water tank to last us a few days.  Everything else will have to wait.

We picked up drinking water from our friend's house and we have enough hot water in the tank for a couple of quick showers, but we'll have to be very careful otherwise. Water is one of those things that we Americans take for granted, and we've been very blessed to have adequate water from the deep well and rain water up on our hill, courtesy of Dennis and Merlin. Others on this island are not so fortunate, especially on the beach where the water table is so low that often they cannot drill wells. In areas where there is community water available, it is often not safe to drink. In the colonias, where mainland Hondurans are establishing communities, water is a big problem. There are water ministries who are attempting to dig community wells for them, but with hundreds of families sharing the water, conservation is still vital. Most people on the island buy their drinking water in 5 gallon jugs and use community water, if it is available, for washing, laundry, and cleaning.

So, while life on an island is a dream come true in many ways, there are still challenges associated with living here. Hopefully our water crisis will be resolved in a day or two and I can finish the laundry. Until then, I'm making every drop count.