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Monday, May 31, 2010

Hi. Well I guess it has been a good solid month since our last blog update. We have had a lot going on. Shortly after our last post, we returned home to the U.S. to visit Kater's family in South Carolina for a wedding. We had a great week and some good quality time with Kater's family. Now that we are back on the island, We have moved to an off campus apartment in West Farm, which is just two roads past school. This makes it easy to walk back and forth in about 10 minutes. We were really excited for this because we didn't want to have to rely on a vehicle everyday... so many things go wrong with cars here. I've attached some photos of our little place below. Take a look around!
(Our front porch, we are in the first door.)
(The 'country' as it is called here, from the porch.)
Don't be alarmed by the burglar bars on the doors and windows. Ross requires all apartments housing their students to provide this extra safety features.
(Ocean from the roof.) This neighbor has a small nursery.
(The ocean, also from our porch- facing the opposite direction.)
It's great to be able to look out and see the mountains and the ocean everyday. We also have a regular herd of goats that forage all along our street daily. They are a riot to watch. There always seems to be one young one left behind, bleating like crazy trying to catch up to the rest of the herd.
(Small side yard/grass alley along our apartment.)
I've hung up a small clothes line to help dry our laundry, as our dryer is pretty lousy. It works, it just only allows 10 lbs at a time and takes over an hour to two hour to dry anything.
(This is our main yard, taken from the roof.)
As with most buildings here, they didn't finish constructing the upstairs, so it is open to go up. There's not much to see besides a lot of cinderblocks and rebar.
(This is a side patio area. Here we have access to the laundry room and garbage.) Our neighbor here has a really nice dog named Riley. He's a big Weimaraner and a goof ball. I like to visit him when I do laundry.
(This is our car, "Dina" short for Toyota Caldina. We've split the car with our friend John and it's been pretty good to us so far- we really like it.)
(Now to the inside, nothing special but it works well for us. This is the view from our door. The kitchen, living/dining room, all are one space. In the back are the bedroom and bathroom. We have a gas stove so when we lose power we can still cook food. This is a nice feature because power outages are very common on the island.
(This is another view of the living area. The apartment came with a T.V. and basic cable package- which is a good number of channels. The couch and chairs aren't the most comfortable we've ever sat in but they do just fine.
(Lastly here is the kitchen. )
I like the way it is spread out, we have a lot more room to work on cooking. Last week I made baked chicken which I breaded with crushed corn flakes. We also had rice and green beans. It's so nice to have an oven again.

That's it for the pictures. The bedroom is a bedroom and the bath a bath... no need for photos.

So what else is new? Other than where we're living... Kater continues to work with the sea turtle monitoring project, walking the beaches at night. I went once with her and saw a leather back! There is a lot of support from the military and special police forces there so it makes us all feel very comfortable. I'll be coordinating the in-water tagging branch this semester, and we are currently working on organizing that right now. We should be starting up in a few weeks. I just got news from the Bermuda sea turtle project that I won't be accepted this year. Dr. Stewart is trying to get me into one in Barbados... We'll see what happens.
I'm also still taking Jules out three times a week. Her cancer has returned so her mom wants her to have as much fun as possible with the time she has left. We have a lot of fun together and I will miss her a lot when her time comes to go.
(Here's a picture of us I took after a day at the beach. We were both pooped!)
I have also joined a Judo club. A friend of mine has been teaching for over eight years and he started a club through Ross. We practice twice a week and it has been a lot of fun so far.
I'm still trying to be an artist, although business is slow. I've done a few more t-shirt projects for different semesters as well as one for the VIPs. I'm also working with second semester on developing a yearbook as a fundraiser. Work with the children's book is non-existant at this point. The writer asked me to begin on another story, as the Sam and Jam one was not interesting to publishers. I sent her an illustration and just haven't heard anything back. I'll be checking on it, but honestly I'm pretty close to bailing on it. It stands to be a great opportunity but I can't control things on her end, and nothing is happening.

Well, this has been a long enough post for now. Hopefully I/we can post updates more than once a month. Thanks for reading.