Home Alone

Nicky's dad left on Sunday morning, accompanied by Nicky up to Miami. Because it is a shame to go all that way and not make the most of it, Nicky is up in Miami until Wednesday shopping: for fun stuff like clothes and flippers, but also for more mundane stuff like dumpy levels (nope, no idea either, but important for measuring the level of dumpies, apparently!), washing machine spare parts etc. It was very very odd for me to be saying goodbye to Nicky from Provo airport - and it is going to be even odder for me to be picking him up Wednesday night! So, here I am, the sole adult in charge of a 6 year old and a 17 year old for 4 days....Nicky (inadvertently) timed his departure with the start of the Easter holidays so the boredom potential is huge! You might ask yourself how one can possibly get bored here, but, with it touching 32 centigrade at midday, the beach is a no-go zone between about 12 and 4pm which leaves a lot of hot hours to fill. There is a cinema which opened recently, but not much else in terms of indoor, out of the sun, airconditioned entertainment to be had (save a trip to the bank, see below). So, today Osh and I tried to renovate the patio doors in his room (marginally successful) to wile away some time after I'd spent an hour in the bank to pay in some money. Speed banking is an unheard of concept here: in order for Tim and I to put some money into Nicky's account Tim spent 1.5 hours in one bank to cash a cheque whilst I was queueing in the other bank ready to receive the money in order to put it into another account. Daniel, fortunately, had extra classes at school, so was entertained for most of the afternoon and was all bouncy and smiley when we collected him at 5.30 (a huge improvement on the monosyllabic teenager we'd had moping about the place at the weekend!).

So, having renovated the patio doors (sort of) and tidied up (Chiquita is due tomorrow and she is a fiendish tidierupper and you stand zip chance of finding anything afterwards!) and sorted out the cabling for Daniel's computer we went to the beach. The islands are normally buffeted by the trade winds throughout the year - and when those winds drop you sure do notice the heat. The past 3-4 days there has been no wind at all - which is great in some regards (preserves the hair do for longer) but does raise the temperatures somewhat - but last night they returned and about 3pm we had a rain shower - great big FAT raindrops for about 5 mins and then the wind really picked up. By the time Osh and I got to the beach we had the place to ourselves and the sand was being driven at sand-blasting speed horizontally along the beach. No idea what the wind speed was, but you could just about lean into it. The waves were huge, the sea had turned a milky turquoise and was very warm - far warmer than on previous days. As a result of the drop in the air temperature (now a pleasant 25 degrees or so at 8pm) I'm in long trousers which feels all rather cosy!

Osh has a heap of homework to do over the holidays to help him catch up with his reading and writing - a good 1 hours work a day to plough through. Actually, there is probably about 20 mins worth but with Osh's attention span and utter inability to focus, it takes him about an hour to do it! Last night he and Daniel watched Howl's Moving Castle which was seriously weird but rather fun, today he's been 'Howl' all day....(check it out on youtube if you've not heard of it before).

I had the joy of a mocking bird singing outside the window for much of the morning: such a beautiful sound which I've recorded and will post here as soon as the camera battery is recharged. I'll also post photos of the pineapple which looks like it might have taken (or rather it hasn't died yet, so I may yet get some pineapples off it) and photos of my stunning native bush garden full of cacti and frangipanis.