Friday night in.....

So. I stayed in tonight...a Friday night...go me!
And yet here I am, nearly 3AM, watching a movie (While You Were Sleeping) I've watched a thousand times before...why?
Bored? Restless?
I could have gone out....Jillian and Michele are out...Cindy and Graham are out...Patricia called and wanted to do something...without a doubt Bobby is doing something....and there's always popping over to Bruce's for a drink.
Just needed to choose that night in, I guess.
Hey....I did accomplish some worthwhile 'chores' tonight...colour sorted all my glass beady-marble-thingies....emptied the drying rack and washed some dishes, filling it up again....sigh.
Ate some dinner!
All in all it's not been a bad night....but I miss seeing my buds...I'm antsy...and HELL, I've got to go to bed!
G'night folks...thank everything it's beach day tomorrow!

Oh my....

....busy!

So, a joke.....
What do you call 3 blondes standing on thier heads?
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give up?
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ready?
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3 brunettes!

Ha ha! Thanks Jay!
Hey! I'm blonde.....I'm allowed!

Wow....

...what a day! A great group of friends on the beach, one on a suprise trip from the UK, body-surfing again, not just one, but two adorable toddlers' beach-delight, T.Rex boogying...and then just-out-of-the-ocean tuna on the BBQ with fresh Bermuda corn-on-the-cob and summer squash.
You cannot beat a day like that!

T.Rex...yeah baby!!

My CD of Marc Bolan and T.Rex's greatest hits finally arrived. I've been wanting this CD for ages...ever since a friend of mine who is in advertising created an ad for a local cellular phone company using 'Ride a White Swan'...I eventually got around to ordering it and now it's here and I've been rocking out!! And considering I've also been body-surfing (at the beach, cheap seats!) all afternoon I'm wondering how my body is going to feel tomorrow!

I'd almost forgotten the thrill of body-surfing...last summer I was post-accident and it was out of the question to throw myself into a huge cresting wave and ride it to shore...so far this summer I have usually had a just-3-year old attached to me, and much to my credit, and I'm sure his Mummy's relief, it just hasn't occurred to me.
I made up for that this afternoon!
The waves were perfect, enough to get a good ride, not so much that it bordered on dangerous.
At one point a friend, Dave, who was at the beach with us, joined me and having never done it before was all up for it. I took him in on one small, tame wave first and oh yeah, he was ready for a full-on breaker! We didn't have to wait long before I gave him the signal and off we went...coming up gasping in the gritty surf, laughing. I had lost a bracelet, pulled right off my arm by the force (pretty, but cheap fortunately), and caught up in it all I started to stand in the surf shouting to Dave about my bracelet...not realizing that I had also lost my top!
Luckily Dave is a gentleman and a little later, sitting drying off on the beach with the rest of the troupes, denied seeing anything. Sorry Mark, he's NOT going to tell you!

Hmmm....seem to have gotten a bit off topic.....

T.Rex.....how I loved them. When I was young my father used to regularly get a compilation album called 'Top of the Pops' and it gave me a love of certain music that other Bermudian children weren't hearing. My lasting favourite T.Rex song is 'Ride a White Swan' hence the inspiration to finally buy a CD. However, in listening to the CD I've remembered that way back then my faves were 'Hot Love' and 'Jeepster'....I was 6!!! Jeeez. If you know these songs you may wonder at how completely inappropriate that is!!
I blame the clapping bits and the la-la-la-la's...awfully compelling to a 6-year old!

Besides, during this same stage, I also inherited a t-shirt from my aunt (who is only nine years older than me) that had on the front of it a picture of a Tall Ship and the words 'Friggin' in the Riggin''.
It was a favourite. And I never heard a word about it.

I guess, in both instances, my parents figured it was all just best left unsaid. Afterall, it's not like I asked them what 'friggin'' was....I just thought I was wearing a cool teenager's t-shirt and dancing to my parent's tunes!

My brother is 40! Yikes, I'm old!

This picture is of me with Alexander and Jonathan in 1974, Christopher was born the following summer. You can tell this was taken in winter-time as I've got a robe on, Alex is in PJs, and Jonny's wearing socks! How cute are they?!





Last Sunday Alex celebrated his 40th birthday. He had been fretting a bit about it but I reckon he'll say now, what we all say, "That wasn't so bad!"
I had to dig out some old photos for his friends to use to decorate for the party, and ended up as I always do when I go looking through my photographs, spending a good few hours reminiscing.



This one was taken in 1978. I love it as it's such a true snapshot of life. There's no perfect posing, one is picking his nose and the other is about to bawl (don't you just love that face?!) In case you're wondering, they are decorating the Christmas tree. And the little gombey-man decoration that Alex is holding in the non-nose-picking hand is part of a set of 6 which my Mother lovingly preserved, and a few years ago gave them to me. They were bought in 1970, so were already 8 years old here.
I'm really lucky with all my brothers...they're all fantastic people, kind, funny, interesting, smart and gorgeous...but the great part is that we're good friends as well.

Alex and I are particularly close...as is natural with us both being in Bermuda, so far away from the rest of the family. Knowing that I have him to talk to, and that I can be there for him, it just means the world. The fact of the matter is that Alex is the first person, besides my parents and grandparents, who I consciously loved. He was the first baby that I ever held, and fed and cared for, and felt that nurturing, motherly, protective love. I still feel it today, though thank goodness he doesn't need his diapers changed anymore!!

Alex always had the strangest hair and my mother tried everything under the sun to get it to be soft and smooth....mayonnaise, beer, eggs....it never was soft or smooth, but it probably tasted pretty good! After university, through which he had one plaited bit of hair at the nape of his neck that had already matted, he let the rest grow and started working it into dreadlocks....he's had them ever since, and with them came the nickname Dready. Sometimes it takes people a minute to figure out who I'm talking about when I call him Alex! He's talking about cutting them off, as he does every now and then...but he's never done it. When and if he ever does, he's going to do it for charity...I reckon he'll make a ton of money...some people have been offering to pay him for years to cut them off! Hee hee.

Anyhoo...happy 40th birthday Alex!!! Love ya!

Before and after....

Okay...so this is Grape Bay last week.
The surf and swell from Bertha has probably already done quite a bit of damage and I reckon I won't even be able to stand in the same spot tomorrow.

Well, I was right I couldn't stand in the same spot, so this is Grape Bay on Sunday afternoon (the day before the storm hit), taken from much higher ground! And no, it's not out of focus, that's sea spray!

I wonder if Bertha left any sand behind for us to lie on this weekend? Better take a cushion!

Tease

There are plenty of clouds in the sky.
We have our usual summer heat clouds that form over the island and sit there, heavy and brooding.
And we have clouds banking to the south, being pushed slowly by hurricane Bertha as she churns her way towards us.
These clouds are dark-bottomed with lovely water but they are selfishly hanging on to it.
Then, last night as I drove home from work, I felt a splatter on my face and I thought "Yes! I don't mind getting wet as long as we get some rain! YAY!"
Well it didn't. Rain that is.
Must have been bird pee.

Today I observed something I had completely forgotten….watching a cloud form.
When I was a child I would watch the clouds all the time. Lying on my back in the grass, or on the sand (keep it clean, cheap seats!) …or on a lilo floating in the sea…or in the evening on the garden wall, or the hood of my parent’s car. Watching clouds and the shapes they made.
Later in my teens I would stay out even when the sun went down, watching the stars instead. Usually in the summer of course, when Scorpio is visible in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m a Scorpio and I loved being able to pick it out and as the summer passed, watch it move from one horizon to the other.
I still love looking up at the sky at night and gazing at the Milky Way, the Big and Little Dipper…and my Scorpion.
And clouds have continued to fascinate me as well but I have focussed on it differently as I got older. I love to photograph clouds now. Wispy horsetails, funky shapes, brightly-glowing-sunset-painted, heavy-rain-filled-squall….clouds.
This morning I stepped outside the office for a cigarette and looked up to see a large cloud hanging over Hamilton. It caught my interest because it was darkly and heavily bottomed and I hoped it might deposit its load before moving away from the island. Had I mentioned before that we’re in a bit of a drought? Yes? Oh, okay.
And then my eye was caught by a fragile patchy little mesh of cloud nearby the big one. I was trying to figure out its shape, what it might be, but it was changing too much. Frustrating. Until…until I realised it was also billowing…blossoming and blooming under (well, OK, above) my very eye. It has been years since I witnessed this.
It was very nearly right above me as we are not far out of the City, but not so much that I had to crane my neck too hard to watch…and watch I did. That tiny little patchy near-nothing began to pull previously invisible wisps into it, became more solidly white, starting to billow like smoke out of a stack, expanding as if someone was blowing it up like some oddly shaped, marshmallowy balloon. When it got to about half the size of the original cloud it started to shadow around the bottom, and as it grew so did the shadow.
By the time I was ready to go back inside it had surpassed the first cloud in size!
I had forgotten the wonder of watching a cloud be born and every time I stepped outside again today (ahem) I scanned the sky hoping for another opportunity. Sadly, the sky remained its clear, blue self, apart from the now two huge clouds hanging over Hamilton.

If I believed in ‘God’ maybe I would be accrediting this miracle to him. But I don’t.
I sure do give Mother Nature a pat on the back for it though.

And, no, it did not rain. That’s why Mother Nature only gets a pat and not a high-five.

Big Bad Bertha? Hope not!

Bertha, Bertha go away.
Don’t come back another day!
Great…we’re in a drought with no rain for weeks…and now there’s a hurricane threatening. It’s the first on the books for the year and it’s aiming right at us. Great.
According to the weather news this evening it’s still a little too early to tell but at the moment it looks like it’s going to be a real close call. We’ve been warned to check our emergency supplies and to set our radio dials to the government warning channel for regular updates.
How the heck, when the electricity goes off, are we going to be able to pull buckets of water out of dry tanks? How????
Earlier this afternoon the clouds gathered…every day the rain clouds, but no rain…and all of a sudden big fat drops fell from the sky. Yay! I thought…finally!
Two minutes later, and no more than those fat drops, and it was over. The tease was enough to set the tree-frogs singing, but they soon gave up, slowly silencing as they realised that there was going to be no lovely downpour after all.
Unfortunately a hurricane doesn’t necessarily mean rain…and even if it does bucket down, it is usually caught by the wind, which is an inescapable part of a hurricane, and doesn’t make it into the tanks, or is so mixed with salt spray that it is undrinkable.
Storm rain is rarely what we call ‘tank rain’…that straight-as-an-arrow-from-the-cloud-to the-ground-rain that will flood the roofs, down the pipes and into the tank. Wind is the enemy in that equation!
I guess we’ve got a tense week ahead. Keep you fingers crossed for us.
Stupid Bertha.

So, Sunday evening and another weekend bites the dust.
How is it that two days side by side in the middle of the week take FOREVER to pass, and yet these two days at the end of the week fly by at supersonic speed? It’s just wrong.
Today was another truly Bermudaful day. Lying in the sun and swimming in rock pools. We weren’t venturing into the ‘blue sea’ today due to a blitz of newspaper warnings about Portuguese Man’o’War…a curiously beautifully coloured type of jelly fish with an insanely painful sting. It’s very long tentacles will wrap around you and are murder to get off…and can reach you even if the body looks like it is too far away.
Having been stung a number of times as a child I am particularly wary…and I certainly can’t imagine having to ask Jillian to pee on me! Mind you, Lucas would do it in a heartbeat, but I think Mum is trying to discourage behaviour like that!
Jill and I had been staring at this woman who had just arrived because she had abs that belonged in a workout video…it was kind of like when you drive by an accident, it sickens you to look but you just can’t tear your eyes away. Then she did something that made us feel better. She spotted a Man’o’War that had been washed in and stranded on the beach….and she covered it with sand! This is something you don’t EVER do! Some poor unsuspecting person strolling down the beach could walk right on it and get one helluva nasty surprise. So unless you’ve got a handy DANGER sign in your beach bag to put next to where you buried it, you leave it and let the un-missable blue and purple be it’s own warning signal
We decided she can have her abs…we’d rather have our brains! And our Cheatos!
We found a sandy-bottomed rock pool that would fit all three of us and spent the next few hours ‘swimming’. Lucas broke in his new mask and float vest and I love seeing a child get enjoyment out of something I have given them….proof that I can occasionally make the right choice!
And now I’m home, sun-burnt and covered in sand and salt. Most people would be straight into the shower but I love this feeling. It means it’s the weekend, that I’ve been at the beach, and in the sea.
Having a shower takes me that much closer to Monday.
Ug.
Oh, and if anyone’s wondering what happened to all the sand on Grape Bay…don’t worry, I’ve got it. I brought it home with me. Inside my bikini bottoms.
I’ll bring it back next week, K?

OK. So it’s been a busy few days…not for any particular reason…the heat just makes it seem so…whatever. Fine! I’ve been lazy! Again!
But seriously, the heat…and the dryness…we’re living in a desert out here…an island desert! Somebody, please, do a rain dance for us. The lawns are crunchy, the tanks are dry. Did you know that we get our household water by collecting it from our roofs and storing it in tanks below our houses?
Yes. Well. Not so much these days.
After the deluges we had a month or so ago, when we thought we might get flooded, some of the trees and shrubs are absolutely loving this. They have used it all up and are putting forth a display, with all the current sunshine, that is in my memory unrivalled.
I went out and took some photos of one of my favourite trees, the Royal Poinciana. In full bloom this tree is magnificent…you can hardly see the leaves for the blossoms. And if you look closely, each individual bloom itself is SO lovely! My pictures are of the tree at Admiralty House just around the corner from my house. I have never seen it in such a glorious display.


This afternoon was Lucas’s 3rd birthday party. I spent a very pleasant afternoon with lots of kiddos, lots of Jill’s family, and after it all we sat on the patio, sucking down our cigs, discussing out plans to give up. Right.
Everyone had a good time, though cake is a tad over-rated for me and always has been.
No one got hurt, although Cole, Lucas’s cousin, let his balloon go the minute he stepped outside the front door so we owe the ecology, and possibly one hapless turtle, our apologies….’course how were we to know he would let it go in the open air, just as they had been doing inside all afternoon? Doh. Lucas was very concerned about this and asked questions ad naseum afterwards…think I may still be fielding them when we get to the beach tomorrow!
For his birthday I bought Lucas a mask (in the shape of a giraffe…cause giraffes are known beach lovers??? Only one they had!} and a flotation vest . We are going to have SO much fun looking at the things under the water in the rock pools….and I will have great relief not having to carry that full weight through the surf!

I have been going through my collection of quotes and poems recently. One of my faves is:

I come again with greetings new,
To tell you day is well begun;
To say the leaves are fresh with dew
And dappled in the early sun;
To tell how over everything
Delight is blowing in the air –
I know not yet what I shall sing
I only know the song is there.

I have always attributed this to Keats, don’t know why. Have googled it and all…still nothing…if anyone knows where this comes from let me know!

It came up at the Minton dinner table this evening that Bermuda is the second most isolated island in the world. Hard to believe when New York and Boston are a mere 2 hours away via airway and Miami and Toronto a mere three hour flight.
We did do a little Wikipedia search, but the BBQ beckoned and we abandoned our investigation.
Continuing it at home, these are the facts I came up with:
Bouvet Island, a Norwegian island 994 miles to the south of Antartica is THE most remote island in the world but for some reason they don’t include it as it is uninhabited.
Tristan de Cunha, part of the British Crown Colony of St. Helena, is 1,750 miles from South Africa in the south Atlantic, and is considered the most remote inhabited island.
Bermuda, 640 miles from the USA in the north Atlantic is considered 2nd, but as it consists of more than 130 separate islands, this honour is sometimes disputed.
But…..Tristan de Cunha is an archipelago as well and no one is disputing their placing. Be fair oh thou gods of lists and statistics…or at least be consistent!

Ashley was at dinner tonight…in fact I think he was somewhat the reason for tonight’s impromptu gathering (like we’ve ever needed an excuse) as he and Lecia leave to visit her family in western Canada tomorrow… for a whole two weeks! Holy crap! Must have a BBQ to see them off!! Anyhoooo…he brought a disc of pics from a recent dive out at the tower at Argus Banks (long way off Bermuda) which he described as the Jurassic Park for fish. And yeah, the huge schools of huge fish were certainly impressive. Unfortunately they also captured shots of a few (he said they saw about 6 in total) Lion fish. They have been illegally introduced to local waters recently by disgruntled aquarium owners and have taken a very firm foothold. It’s a shame as they are very predatory fish and detrimental to the fine balance of our reef life, and we are fighting hard to save what is the most environmentally unchanged reef in the world. Elsewhere global warming and shrinking seas are causing reef bleaching. Being the most northern reef in the world, we are still unchanged by this. As yet. Not that the Lion fish are going to affect that, but it is a fine balance out there and any change to the worse is worrying.

Gem: As I swam out through the surf with Lucas on Sunday afternoon, it was quite rough and I battled to jump above each wave crest that I would normally just dive through, wondering all the while if my arms would give out (he’s a very solid 3 year old!), and Lucas was shouting with pure joy.
Then he looked at me with his chubby little grin and said “I am so happy.”
Well, buddy, if you are then so am I. How simple is that?