Still Hanging Around

You'll see where I got that post title in a  moment.  It's more toward the DIY side of our life here and I like to  at least start these posts off with some colorful tropical photo.  Sunrises meet all those criteria and I fall back on those out of habit, mostly.  I mean we get so many good ones it makes it easy, but it doesn't always have to be about a sunrise.  Let's try something both typical, and atypical at the same time.   The view from da Conch Shack is pretty typical.  Looking across at Grace Bay on a choppy day with an east wind.   But that boat is not typical.

I took this photo specifically to show you that boat in the middle of it.  When I realized that the  anchorage  on that side of the reef is almost five nautical miles from here, I also realized how impressive it must be.  And I suppose that boat is  the wrong term  for that.  It's a yacht by any standard. We had to look into this one a little just out of curiosity.  Wouldn't you be interested in finding out the story about a private yacht a hundred meters long sitting in  the middle of your neighborhood?  That you could see from five miles away?  We were.

We weren't on that beach because of this interesting vessel, though.  We'd gone to da Conch Shack over in Blue Hills to meet some friends for lunch.    We saw some changes in the place and realized that we hadn't been here since last November.  So out came the camera.

It wasn't until I cropped that Conch Shack sign photo that I noticed the flying whatever it is just off the end of the post with the light on it.   I'm sure it's a commercial airplane. I hope.

The guys with the sunglasses up are Frederick and Phillip. Brothers from Belgium who are building a vacation home here on the island. They are doing it themselves, for the most part.  Freddie is a skilled carpenter and craftsman in New York for most of the year. And Phillip comes over from Belgium to meet up here for a working yearly holiday. They manage to fit several weeks of fun in with days of construction under the tropical sun.  The guy with the shades down is Preacher... well, him you already know about if you've been reading this blog for long.

All of us here are friends of Preacher's, come to think of it.  That was the first thing we had in common.  We all have met through Preacher.

I was somewhat remiss in my photo taking that day.  I'm not a very good photographer when it comes to people.  I let La Gringa handle that aspect of life in general, come to think of it. So of course I neglected to get a photo of all of us.  La Gringa would have gotten a photo of all of us. Best I can do at this point is to show you Beatrix and La Gringa, from a unique perspective.

I mentioned some changes since our last visit prior to this one.  Almost six months ago.  One of them is this new Free Library box.  What a great idea.  Now we know what to do with books we no longer want to store.

I have a hard time throwing books away.  Even now that I'm on my third Kindle.

Some things don't change much from visit to visit, while others do.  The clientele is a seasonal variable.   We could easily tell that this is a Spring Break week for some people, for example, here with children out of school. There's a local guy in the middle of that cluster, showing them  how to clean conch.

The whole restaurant was busy for a late afternoon lunch.  And it looked clean and colorful as usual.  I especially like the wall of conch shells out near the road.

I remember listening to a talk by a long-time Providenciales expat resident some years ago.  He had some 35mm color slide transparancies from the time when this was the first road on Providenciales with a man made surface. Photographs of  native island women sitting in the shade of tall trees bent in the tropical breeze.  It reminded me of old photos of my grandmother in Texas, who would have been a contemporary of those ladies.   And the sight of them sitting and talking as they worked evoked a feeling of what I imagine the social comfort of quilting bees must have been for my grandmother.  Except in these photos the women were each holding a hammer in one hand.  One of those masonry hammers with a chisel edge on one side.    And in their other hands these ladies had hunks of limestone.  The largest about the size of a cantaloupe melon.  And at their feet were piles of gravel.  This is somewhat different than quilting scraps, but you see what I mean.  This road was built by hand before being paved over.

Isn't it annoying when I drift off topic like that?  Drives La Gringa nuts sometimes. The original subject was that boat I started this all with.  We wanted to look it up, and we know that most modern yachts have what's known as an Automatic Information System transponder on board.  We used an AIS tracking service  to see which boats were in these waters.   La Gringa had already identified this yacht before we saw it, but after getting that photo I wanted to show it to you, too.

It was a couple of days after our lunch at da Conch Shack before I asked her to give me a screen shot of the yacht's position.  By then it had moved back to the other side of the island.  Right now, this yacht is anchored  near the luxury resort of Amanyara.   The AIS display looks like this:

If you can squint your eyes close enough you should be able to see there are two boat locations marked there near Malcolms Road Beach.  One we know well, the T&C Aggressor is a local liveaboard dive charter and underway.   The other boat is the one in our photo up above, and the name of that one is "A".

If we click on the boat symbol for the "A" we get this popup:

And if I blow up the portion of my own photo from da Conch Shack, I think we can pretty much figure out  whose boat this is.

Of course we had to Google up the "A" .  It's a fascinating yacht, and we found out that the name is derived from the initials of its owner Andrey Melnichenko ( Андрэй Мельнічэнка) and his wife Aleksandra.

And while searching, I found that one of the local newspapers has also taken notice of the Russian yacht in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Boy, you just never know what you're going to see in a place like this.  Almost makes me look forward to going out to lunch more often.

A little thought about it all and obviously we shouldn't be surprised that Russian billionaires are interested in this area.  We know that there are investors involved in the on and off again West Caicos development.  And with the present situation in Cuba who knows what kind of development deals may be in the works in the realm of those with seriously deep pockets.

Whatever else Mr. Melnichenko has going on, the man certainly appreciates a fine motor vessel.  And I'll be happy to tell him so, the next time I see him.
Okay that's enough about my admittedly unhealthy obsession with boats.  Speaking of which...

Guess what this is.

That's no fair, I already told you it's about boats. I was just wondering if you could figure out what it is specifically, and the post title is a clue. But notice that this thing is attached by means of not only three pop rivets, but two nuts and washers on what apparently are sawn off bolts. And guess where I found this? 

You're getting tired of this game. I can tell. Okay, okay. It's the mount for the radar that got fried when the lightning hit us just north of Chub Cay on our delivery trip down here with the boat.

I climbed back up to see what would be involved in removing this radar antenna.   I didn't have the tools I needed, because I wasn't prepared for dealing with rivets.  I'll have to drill or grind those out.   We don't have the resources to replace the radar at the moment, so I've got an idea what to put here until we do.  If we do.  Radars are expensive. In the meantime, I have other things on the mast that need repair or replacement.

The masthead/steaming light and  the overhead deck light have not worked since the lightning strike either.   This is the first time I've crawled "up the stick" to take a close look at them.

The steaming light is that black one, that is supposed to show forward in a total arc of 225 degrees when a sailboat is motoring at night.     The deck light is the white one, that is supposed to illuminate the foredeck of the boat when we need it at night.  That could include watching out for coral heads, or anchoring.   The rectangular mark on the deck is from where I removed an unused but out of inspection date six man life raft.   

Climbing the mast is not my favorite chore, but it goes with the territory. At least there's a pretty nice view from up over the spreader.  This is looking over the slips where the Molassas Cat I and II used to tie up. That ended when the West Caicos development project turned off again.  Which is because the Russian money is at a low value right now.  It still feels different here with them gone.  We were very accustomed to seeing them every day.  It also occurs to us that we live in a place where the local economy is very much tied to the rest of the world.  Putin flexes in the Ukraine, and South African and Haitian friends lose jobs in the Turks and Caicos Islands which is a British Overseas Territory near Cuba where the resident population is 58% immigrants.  

Speaking as American expats, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Dooley.

AND speaking of  different ways of looking at things (don't you just love groan quality seques?)  here's Bob's Bar from a level view landward.   Nice view of the new stairs, too.

Our nearest neighbor, for this week only, was the S/V Leela.  I'm mentioning them because we first heard from the crew of Leela via this blog.  They wrote us an email and let us know they were coming through, and staying at South Side Marina.    It's amazing how many great people we've met as a result of these posts.

During our early conversations with Graham and Janiki at Bob's Bar we found out that Graham and I both have backgrounds in the ROV tracking business and actually knew several people in common.    Like minded people, it seems.  We may be seeing them again someday, if our respective plans go anything near according to respective plans.   This is a better photo of the malfunctioning lights, and I noticed my feet had a pretty good grip on the old mast.

Who am I kidding?  You couldn't have stuck a tack in my butt with a three pound mallet.  I was some kind of relieved to climb back down from there.  This was my second trip up.  The first time I went up to reach the underside of the spreaders.  This time I was over the spreaders.  I'm working my way up to the climb all the way to the top.  I have a lot of work to do there.    I'd like to think that this is just me facing my fears, but the truth is  probably that I'm too cheap and proud to hire someone else to do it.   I get a lot of learning experiences that way.   I did think to take the camera up, and got a photo of my line tender keeping an eye on me.

This is going to be the end of this post.  I didn't get a good sunset photo this week, but I decided to make you one from scrap materials.   Kinda like back in Kindergarten when we stuck things to refrigerators with magnets.

Can you see a sunset in this?  Maybe if you lay on your left shoulder and squinted into the morning sun...

I guess it might be asking a little too much to see a sunset there, now that I look at it.  It might look familiar to someone accustomed to watching sunrises over curbstones.  I think I just found the opening line for my action novel... " Watching the sunrise over a curbstone is an astonishingly bad way of starting your morning..."   or something along those lines.

So here's the real sunset photo I took last night.  I was just  messing  with you about that conch wall thing.

Hey,  hope you weren't  expecting a Van Go from a TooLoose LaTrek...

Ooohhhh.   That was bad.  Even for me.  Sorry.

Check back on Monday.  There's always hope for improvement.

Bushwhacking for Boat Ramps

In which our Recovering Recluses Return to Fun Stuff and Exploring.
Some basic DIY projects with Salvaged Wood,
and Dooley Glares at Duct Tape.

This post is about what we were doing right before that little 3-post storm detour we just experienced. This one has no boats in it or nice turquoise kissed photos of gin clear water, colorful fishies and coral. We're skipping the standard boat trip complete with its random squall clobbering us briefly before we blithely coast back home along powdered sugar beaches under tranquil cerulean skies. Nah... Not THIS post. This post is about bush.



I probably should define the term 'the bush'. Bush is that part of the environment that has not yet been plowed under, paved over, developed or otherwise recently 'improved' by man. I mean recently because old improvements become part of the bush in many cases. And when we are not playing in the ocean we sometimes go explore some of it here. Of course the ocean is never very far away. This is an island, after all.

This adventure started because I was studying Google Earth's satellite images looking specifically for places to go check out. There are still large parts of the north west portion of Providenciales that we haven't looked at in any detail. This is where to find most of the still undeveloped land on this island.

See the little spot on the left side, circled, that says "Good place to launch boat?"? Well, that's what started this all. I saw this nice little road on this image and it appeared to me that this might just be a great beach launching spot for the Hobie Tandem Island. If we could trailer the boat to this spot, we could then use it to explore all the way up around the tip and extensive reefs off this side of the island. Sounded like a plan.



We took the Defender 110 on the first pass at this. I refer to it as the 'first pass' because it took us two days to find this spot. No kidding. If you read the other notes on that map, you can see where we went on that Saturday afternoon. We came in from the right side of the image. We made that hairpin turn to the south and drove completely by the spot marked "missed turn the 1st time". Well, to be accurate, we missed it the second time, too. After we turned around at the Amanyara Resort, and headed back. We drove back to the Malcolm Beach road, and then down to Malcolm Beach itself. Then we turned around and went home.

Here's a "quick" video of that trip, and you can tell from the 'bonnet' this is the Defender 110, without the aluminum plate. Correction, I should have said 'aluminium' plate. There's an extra "i" in the British stuff.

This is like a mini tour of part of the island. The last part of it is after we got back onto the pavement and drove through the Blue Hills section of Providenciales. We thought that perhaps you might enjoy seeing what it's like cruising around here as an alternative to watching on a sailboat.


Music is 'Suburbia' by Trombone Shorty

And yes, we do drive on the left here.

We went home frustrated that we had missed the turn and I booted up Google Earth again, and took a closer look. And this road looks good on Google Earth. I could see the image of a vehicle parked right on the beach, at the end of it. We wanted to go there. Then I noticed the date the image was taken, down in the bottom left corner of the photo. 10/4/2008. Boy, a lot has changed here in three and a half years. Obviously whatever project was planned for this property never got off the ground.



We decided not to give up. Realizing that the road really must be overgrown in order for us not to even spot it, we went back the following day with the shorter, beefier, Defender 90. We found the turnoff this time. And it was not what we expected. It took another half hour to get to the ocean. This road is not nearly as good as the one to Amanyara and Malcolm Beach.

This is the spot where we finally came to a halt:



We didn't drive the last forty or fifty yards to the actual beach. It was turning into soft sand. And we could see that the beach no longer looked like it did in '08. None of this road looks like it does in that Google Earth image. All of the loose soil that the bulldozers had leveled to make the roads has been washed away. There have now been three hurricanes and a number of tropical storms and depressions dumping huge amounts of rain here since those satellite images were taken. Dozens of serious thunderstorms with flooding.

The speeded up videos don't really portray how bad this road is. We decided to post a short, real-time clip of part of this journey, with the original audio instead of music. Most of the road was something like this. Except this is the level part as we near the beach and there were also steeper parts with looser rocks. And little gullies. Stuff like that. It makes for cautious driving in a land without AAA. This would not be a fun place to be stuck with two flats, for example.



And one could pretty much forget calling a taxi, tow truck, or pizza delivery. We are in the land beyond street addresses, again. Like our neighborhood was last year.

If you look at that last satellite image above you can see a large salina, or inland tidal pool, just to the south of where we parked. This is what that looks like:



And it's probably a good thing I can't accurately show you what it smells like at low tide. If I could adequately explain it, I suspect you would stop reading at that point. It's ugly. All I can suggest on this subject is that if you ever go here, either go at high tide or do what we did. Hold your breath and move out of the downwind side of this as soon as possible. Unless you're like Dooley the Degenerate. I suspect he actually likes these rotten marine low-tide kind of odors.

After the long sweaty trek to get here, Dooley was more than happy to be the first one in the water. As always. It's a matter of tradition with him, I think.



There really wasn't much to see in that short section between where we parked and the beach. Some old fishing or marker buoy washed up in some storm. I appreciated how it was made. Some steel rebar bent and welded and then a buoy inflated within the cage. Simple and effective.



I know I have mentioned this before, but there are two things we can pretty much count on seeing on any beach here these days. And those are empty plastic water bottles and shoes. Always, always there are shoes. Don't count the ones with feet still in them as trash. Not yet, anyhow. Those are my hiking boots.



Looking off to the south, you can see it's a pretty rough shoreline. Nothing like what it appeared to be in 2008.



The water is the typically clean and clear Turks and Caicos Islands water, though. It just looks a lot different when it's over dark rocks than it does over clean white sand or colorful coral.



This is looking up toward the north from where we intersected the beach. It's austere looking, isn't it. Rugged. No place for a tenderfoot, that's for sure.



One of the things I noticed here on the rocky shore was how many little "kettle holes" there are. Kettle is a geological term, but I think it's proper use is for depressions caused by melting chunks of glacial ice. There is nothing glacial about these, but I don't know what else to call them. Every few steps along the shore are these depressions where chunks of stone get trapped. The water rushes in and out with the tides with enough force to move the rocks around in the hole and eventually they get worn smooth.



I tried to get a photo of the process in action, but of course all you can see is a swirl of water. Underneath that frothy reflective surface there are some stones being moved around and around.



The result of this is that the stones get worn smaller and smaller, and smoother and smoother, and all the stuff that gets worn off of them eventually gets ground down into sand.



And when the tide runs out these little rivers of new finely ground sand are washed out of the kettle holes into the ocean . And this, friends and neighbors, is how beaches and sand bars are still being made the old fashioned way. Just like Mom has been making them for four billion years.



And if that's too much to think about, maybe you could just relax and watch some kettle holes in action. This is a soothing video. Nothing like those jittery fast motion versions:


Music is 'Triste' by Mythos

It's not all smooth stone around here, though. This is a great place to test out how tough your feet are.



As usually seems to happen on these trip, a series of squalls started headed our way. We were looking around to see where the nearest rain shelter might be when La Gringa saw the entrance of what looks to be someone's old camp site there in the bush.



I went in a few yards and wandered around. It's a very nice place to have a camp. Clean sand, plenty of shade. Open enough to let the breeze through.



It does look as though the site hasn't been visited much recently, though. After our drive in here I can see why. I found an old 'duck foot' style swim fin here. I don't see many of these any more. This one was rotten from UV exposure.



Of course there are shoes here, too. There are always shoes on the beaches. I suspect this is becoming a truism. I doubt we could walk a hundred yards on any south or east facing beach without seeing a shoe. There was also a few pieces of plywood lying about so we knew we had the basics for a temporary shelter if a squall caught us before we could get back to the truck.



While peering around in the bush looking for anything of interest I spotted a familiar sight from my past, almost hidden back in the thicker stuff.



I should have let the dog stand here for scale. This tube is roughly a meter long. These are used to store and transport air dropped sonar buoys used in anti-submarine warfare. This isn't the first one I've seen washed up here. I wish I could think of something useful to do with them.



Back on the beach there really wasn't much in the way of trash compared to some beaches. It's nice to find the clean beaches mixed in with the trashy ones. We like them both, of course. For different reasons. And this one has plenty of natural features mixed in with the man-made flotsam. I though about moving this bizarre brain shaped piece of coral.....



...over next to what looked like the entire list of components for a cellular phone. I could be sticking my neck out here, but I am willing to bet this one is not economically repairable. Still, it might be fun to gather up all the corroded pieces and see if I could get a warranty claim in on it. I was thinking of the word games I could play with the brain coral and disintegrating cell phone, and never thought to see if it still had a usable SIM card in it. Those things are sealed up pretty well, right?



The clouds were threatening us, and we were beginning to see flashes of lightning and distant but rapidly approaching rain squalls. So this is the maximum extent of our excursions to the north along the beach. Off in the distance here you can see one of the bigger local live-aboard dive boats. The reef drops off very quickly and close to shore here, and there are a number of good dive spots nearby. And that resort in the middle of the photo is the Amanyara.



I used the telephoto zoom to try to get a better photo of Amanyara, but it's difficult to do from this angle. The resort is very low impact, and blends in with the surrounding landscape very nicely. I've explained to a number of people who write us asking for recommendations that we have never stayed in a resort on Providenciales. I also would say that if we had the opportunity to stay in one of them, and had our choice out of all available options, we would definitely choose the Amanyara over any other local resort we can think of. It's got some class.

I was trying to show you how the shoreline changes here. There are a series of small coves, starting at the point of land where we were standing. As you move to the north, the coves get progressively larger, and eventually they're big enough to have their own little soft sand beaches. And these private, rocky coves with soft sand beaches are one of the main attractions at Amanyara. Maybe one of these days we'll figure out a way to get you some photos from within the resort itself. We'd love to sail the Hobie by here and get some photos from the water, too.



We wandered back down the beach on our way home just looking for anything vaguely interesting to take photos of. We were in a photo-snapping mood that day. We found plenty of uniquely shaped and eroded limestone along the shore. I think if I were a crab I would love this place:



The kettle holes produce some excellent skipping stones. I think I managed to get a dozen skips on the water with this one. Nice.



There is a huge difference in the shore here, from sharp, broken limestone 'iron shore', to this smooth worn limestone. I'm not sure why it's different, but there must be some geological reason some of the stones are so very smooth and others are too jagged to even stand or walk on. I imagine wave and water action is the shaping force here, but why does some of it wear smooth while other stones erode into jagged points?

The white stuff in the middle of this photo is evaporated sea salt. There is no shortage of salt in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Harvesting sea salt was the only real industry here for many many years. Generations of Turks Islanders were salt rakers on some islands here. I think it's a lot more fun selling coconut tanning oil than it was pushing salt.



La Gringa was on the lookout for additions to her shell collection. She found a few nice ones here. This beach is largely untouched for shell collectors. It's too difficult to get to for most people.



Eventually the squalls caught up with us and we had to make our way back to pavement. Not such a simple task. Here's a still photo from a little ridge we had to cross. Raindrops are beginning to fall. You might be able to vaguely make out the dive boat anchored off in the distance, though the rain.



We've made several boat trips since the last pre- Hurricane Irene post and I'll be uploading those photos in the next few installments. I thought you might appreciate a break from our boat photos, and that's why this post doesn't have any.

And in case you were wondering, the answer to our original question here is "No. We will not be attempting to tow our Hobie kayak trailer down to this beach behind the Land Rover. No way."

So far, I can't think of a reason we would drive back to that beach, either. There are a lot of prettier places a lot easier to get to. The terrain here sure does help in keeping the Amanyara Resort remote and private, though.

I also haven't posted any DIY photos in a while, but I assume anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis well knows that the DIY never stops here. Never. I just get so caught up in it, and it changes so much from day to day, that I no longer bother to snap photos of 90% of it. Between the house, the vehicles, and the boats... it's almost a full time job to keep it all going.

One of our readers had asked specifically for a photo of the tortilla squisher I made from wood scraps. La Gringa took a lot of photos of it during the initial process of actually using it to make corn tortillas. This started when we couldn't find any corn tortillas big enough at the grocery store. We could only find these stale little six inch diameter things. Not big enough for a proper wrap. So I figured out I could probably make a tortilla press that could handle say, a 10" diameter tortilla. And so I did. And so it does.

The red oak handle pieces came from the decorative trim from the front of the old Gilley's bar in Leeward, long gone now. The light wood around the edges is Casuarinas wood I had laying around here seasoning. It seasoned so much that fungus grew on it, and when I sawed it up into little planks, it now has what's called a 'spalted' finish. That's the dark streaks through it.

The dark wood on the top (and bottom) is from that 4x4 mahogany beam we picked up on our previous beachcombing trip to West Caicos. It was too split and worm holed for structural use, but I thought it looked cool enough to use for appearance.

I've discovered that if you design stuff to look rustic and beat up from the beginning, it saves a lot of time in sanding and finishing. I was trying for the look of an old tortilladora picked up at a yard sale in Mexico. How did I do?



We've got more photos of it open and in action if anyone is interested. You can Google up 'tortilla presses' and find out whatever you might want to know. You won't see one exactly like this, because I kind of made it up after looking at some other ones online. It's a a fun way to make really fresh corn tortillas. They taste completely different from the things we find in plastic bags in the grocery store. And we can make them as big as we want. This is a monster of a press, as those things go. Typical Gringo overkill, I suppose... you know how that thinking goes. 'If a little tingle feels good..... a hundred and twenty volts should be awesome, right?' Hey, I'm learning.

Now just for grins I want to show you another, typical, daily DIY project. This is the type of thing that falls in my lap unplanned. Necessity, I suppose. In fact, this is the one I was working on when we got interrupted by that last hurricane whistling through the slats of the crate containing our existence.

We had this house built about three and a half years ago. Not long after we moved in, La Gringa asked me to put up some curtain rods in the bedrooms. We went down to the local store that supplies these things, bought some curtain rods, and I installed them. Back in a previous life I would have expected curtain rods to last until someone either broke them or got tired of looking at them. That's always been my experience. Curtain rods don't wear out. Usually.

Well that's not the case here. After three years, La Gringa asked me "Isn't there something we can do about these curtain rods? They are rusting away and staining the curtains." And I took a look at what she meant, and she wasn't joking. These curtain rods should not have been left unattended, I guess, but what are you going to do, spray oil on them? Nah. You just end up with oily rust. Or rusty oil. Either way it doesn't work well with white curtains.



We went back to the local stores, and looked through all the options we could find for replacement curtain rods. And all of them were either plastic of a quality that gives plastic curtain rods a bad name...... or they were steel. Like that one above. Well let me tell you, in the three years since I put that brand new curtain rod up, I have learned a few things about steel. And aluminum. And brass, bronze, and zinc. There's no way I would just put up more metal curtain rods. So what to do.

I had an additional factor to consider in that I had already drilled holes in the concrete wall for the metal curtain rods. I mean why not? I figured they were good for twenty years. Ha.

So the obvious solution was to just make some non-corroding curtain rods and curtain rod brackets, and make them to use the same screw hole spacing. I had all these red-oak scraps still left over from Gilley's bar. And we bought some bamboo for cheap. How's it look? I think it's kinda tropical.



At least I am reasonably sure it won't corrode. I would be willing to bet it would last 20 years, too. Unless of course someone tears it down or gets tired of looking at it. You know, the normal life span of a curtain rod.

I was just finishing up three slightly different brackets for the next bedroom on the list when Irene came. Now I have to do a little archaeological dig on my workbench to see if I can get back down to that specific layer of DIY project. There is debris and tools from at least three other Irene related projects overlaying that little period of local history. I need to do it, though. I haven't actually seen my bench top in weeks.

I don't mean to sound like it's all DIY work here. I've left out the skiff steering issues, the dead fuel gauge, the failed brake line on the 90, or the damage to the house appliances caused by our lousy, substandard generator (Honeywell) and faulty house wiring installed by the irrigation people. I am leaving out the hole in the exhaust pipe, the defunct clothes dryer, the stopped up dishwasher, the hurricane smashed vegetation. I didn't say a word about the four flat tires I have dealt with in the past week.

Now there's a point. Let me stop my diatribe for a second just to mention this. I mean this blog is supposedly about what it's like to actually LIVE here, right? Okay, think about this one.

Think back to the last time you had a flat tire on a vehicle. For most of you, I bet that's years ago. Oh ,yeah, some of you will have had a recent flat, but I bet 90% of you haven't had one in years. Right?

Now think about the last time you had TWO flat tires in one week. Pretty rare, eh? Well, to put it into perspective, I've had to deal with four unrelated flat tires this week. And while four in one week is unusual, it's not totally unheard of.

The roads are strewn with sharp stuff. Especially after a storm. Roof shingles blow onto the roads, and many of them take those roofing nails with them. Even the lovely bougainvillea plants have thorns on them that can puncture a tire if you run over a large branch on the road. I can guarantee you a bougainvillea thorn will penetrate a Croc shoe with no problem whatsoever. I've lost count of how many flat tires we have faced in the six years we have been here. I would guess somewhere around thirty or so. And there will be more. This is part of the experience living here.

I was going to tell you about how many vehicles we see here with a front wheel completely torn off.... but will save that discussion for some other time. I'll collect a few photos first. It probably falls under the heading of "Things that once frightened and amazed us that we now take for granted".

But it's not all work. Oh no. In addition to all the boating and DIY we do fit in some fun. For example, I have a good time messing with the dog. Dooley is manic about lizards. He spots one on a wall and will dedicate the afternoon to keeping his eye on it. He whines, barks, and whispers outrageous promises and dirty threats to them. Of course they totally ignore him for the most part, unless they make the mistake of crawling to some place where he can reach them. Then they can no longer ignore him. And he's usually furious at being ignored by that time, but never mind. I don't want to go there.

But knowing the dog gets totally fixated on lizards, I took a razor and cut out some little lizard outlines in a roll of duct tape.



I stuck one of these on a sliding glass door. Another one high on a wall. Dooley went all goofy. I think he was totally astonished that lizards would have the unmitigated gall to invade his very fortress. Lizards running wild in Dooley's stronghold? Outrageous and unacceptable. He spent hours staring up at the duct tape lizards. Making threats. Promising treats and friendship one minute, and howling promises to shred them into giblets the next. You see why I worry about this dog? I stuck one of my fake lizards up on a piece of driftwood we pegged to the wall, and put the GoPro camera up above it to try to see if the video would be any fun.



The video isn't much good. The GoPro likes a lot of light and doesn't do well in low light conditions. I guess inside the house qualifies as low light. But to show you what a lizard might see if he deigned to look down, I did take one still frame from the video. Here's Dooley the Destroyer doing his Hannibal Lecter imitation for an audience of fake lizard...



Any lizard that could miss his intentions...... well... sayonara. He means what he says.

I just realized that this post has stretched out into one of the long ones. I'm not going to cut it up into two posts, because I want the next one to be nice blue water and fun stuff again.

That is, if Tropical Storm Maria doesn't come through here Monday and change our priorities for us. In the meantime, here's a recent sunset. One with gentle clouds, for a change.