No, not that kind of shots! Just a few photos from our day. :-)
2 Comments
Ugh. Don't you hate it when you write a whole lot of whatever, be it an email or a blog post, hit a key, and it goes "poof"? Well, that just happened to me. It's my own fault as I should have been saving all along. Weebly does not do this automatically, and it's something I am prone to forget when I get on a roll. I was simply removing a caption for a photo, hit the backspace key, and back I went to the previous page, with all the work I'd done on today's blog entry gone. I tried everything, but it's just gone. I guess I should start composing these entries in a separate file that autosaves the text, so at least I wouldn't lose that part. I'll do that from now on, but for today's entry, I'll be brief. I just don't have it in me to rewrite the entire posting. I rearranged the living area furniture today. Now we have an even better view of the sea, which is rightly the focal point of the room. Here's the old arrangement: Here's the new arrangement: And now for something completely different...
We rode our bikes into town today after morning rain had passed. To procure this haul took visits to two fruit stands, the beer distributor, bakery, and three grocery stores! In the US, you would easily be able to buy all this in one large grocery store. As we were leaving town, we noticed that the skies to the north and east were darkening again, and we had to make tracks to get back to our place before the rains came. We made it just in the nick of time, and not five minutes after we got all the food and bicycles inside, it was pouring out. Lucky us!
First off, I have to give Barry credit for the title of this blog post or he'll never forgive me. :-) A tropical wave came through today, so we awoke to rain, rain, and more rain. Today was a running day for us, and we ended up deciding to go in the rain after all since it was a nice warm rain, and we didn't want to miss out on a beach run when it wasn't blazing hot and sunny. The rain got heavier during our run, and by the time we got back, we were SOAKED to the skin. No photos of this, though they would have been pretty entertaining. After we peeled off our dripping running clothes, we put on our swimsuits and swam in the rain for awhile, which was very pleasant, actually! Again, no photos. You'll have to take our word for it. The rest of the day was devoted to projects, as it continued to rain on and off all day. We got two out of three of our window shades installed (bedroom and living area), as well as as some holdbacks for the bedroom curtains. We discovered that we needed these as when we are able to turn off the A/C and open up, the curtains get sucked into the screens, blocking the airflow. We got stymied on the kitchen window shade as we needed wood spacers on top, and the piece of finished wood Barry found that we could use for this purpose was wet, so we need to wait for it to fully dry out. Here are a few photos of Barry installing the shade in our bedroom: After the window shade project, we reorganized our master closet, and Barry reversed the door on our dryer so it would swing in a more convenient direction. At some point early in the afternoon, our internet went out. We called the front desk, and finally, around 4:15 pm, it was restored. Whew! Would have hated missing out on having that in the evening. Sounds like they need to take it down again tomorrow to do some more work, so hopefully that will be tomorrow while we're in town -- if it's not pouring! Here's a photo of another wave of the storm taken right before dinner. Needless to say, we didn't get to eat on the veranda tonight as it was soon raining again. For dinner we had bean, corn, and cheese tostadas with salsa; Barry's homemade gazpacho, and salad. Delicious!
Today the Grand Caribe folks took care of the majority of our remaining punch list items, so we had to hang around the condo waiting for work to be done this morning and after lunch. Between times, we still managed to walk into town for our usual daily marketing. We did another long walk to south San Pedro as the protein powder we'd ordered had arrived at GoNature health food store. In addition to that, we purchased some other good items there (chia seeds, vanilla, walnuts, and local cocoa powder) and had a delightful chat with the young owner, Taz. We also hit a couple of grocery stores for a few other items. Here are a couple of photos of some of our recent cuilinary creations: Today we did laundry for the first time. We go through a lot of clothing here since we come home from our beach walks sweating profusely from the long walk in the heat and humidity. Since we've had an old-style washing machine for years, we were fascinated by our new high-efficiency washer and all its smart sensing technology. Yes, we are easily amused! Here is another favorite new toy. We scored this heavy-duty clothes drying rack at the hardware store yesterday. It quickly became apparent that with all the sweaty clothes, bathing suits, and beach towels, we needed something like this. It wasn't cheap ($100 BZD = $50 US after our 10% local discount), but we will use it every day, so it was money well spent. It fits right in our huge shower so is a perfect addition to our little household. We are pinching ourselves every day when we realize that we actually live where we can see a view like this right out our sliding glass doors every single day. We feel truly lucky and blessed!
Whenever you move to a new place, it seems like the list of needs is endless. If you move across town or even across country, you are able to take a lot with you, but moving to a foreign country means leaving most of your possessions behind. Although we're shipping a pallet of boxes down, it's not worth the cost to ship all the little things you need when setting up a new household. Spices, condiments, various household potions and cleaning products, paper products; all these have to be bought fresh for our new condo in Belize. Since we are living car-free here and our beach cruiser bicycles are in the shipment that we're waiting on, that means a lot of walking back and forth to town carrying what we can manage. Yes, we could take a taxi or water taxi, but we're living on a budget, so we choose to operate on our own power whenever possible. It's about 2 miles to town, and a lot of that is on the beach, so it's great exercise and quite a nice walk if there's a breeze and your load is not too heavy. On our first two days, walking into town we battled mosquitos, as the breeze was nearly non-existent. Today, however, the breeze finally picked up, and it was absolutely gorgeous. No mosquitos bothered us at all, but the sun was shining warmly, and we were sweating profusely as we walked from place to place. We had bank business in addition to visiting a multitude of shops. In Belize most stores are small, so you end up going multiple places to do your marketing. It's actually a lot of fun, but we are looking forward to having our bikes with baskets, which will enable us to travel faster and carry more. Today we made it all the way to the south side of San Pedro for some good deals at the less expensive grocery stores there (Marina's and Super Buy South, which we noticed had lower prices on some items than the in-town Super Buy), and visited our two favorite places to buy fruits and veggies: Maria's fruit stand, and Zac's Healthy Belize (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Healthy-Belize/145912062138566). At Maria's, we were helped by Jose and his son (also Jose). The fruit there is fresh and inexpensive, and they threw in a free cup of freshly squeezed OJ. As hot and sweaty as we were, that OJ might as well have been manna from heaven. Yum! Here is what we bought at Maria's for $15 BZE ($7.50 US), after eating two of the four bananas: At Zac's we picked up a great assortment of fresh organic veggies we'll enjoy for the next few days. We have been eating mostly bean tacos (with tomatoes, onions, chipotle peppers, and cheese) for dinner since arriving here so were very ready to stock up on some green stuff as well as a couple of dragonfruit! Here's what we got for $46 BZD ($23 US): We also visited the GoNature health food store (https://www.facebook.com/pages/GoNature-Health-Food-Store/173156749407154) for the first time and had a nice chat with the owner, Taz. We ordered some whey protein powder and also mentioned a few other items we would like to buy there. We were happy to see that she had some great healthy items, and a nice selection of locally produced items. It will not be hard to eat healthy here at all, and the fact that most of the healthiest food is available on the south side of San Pedro while we're living on the north side will assure that we stay fit as well, since we have to get down there on foot or bike to purchase it. Barry estimated that we walked about eight miles today while visiting seven different establishments.
Here are a few other assorted photos from the past two days here: |
UPDATE!
|