Oisin the budding movie maker

Osh has discovered the video function on my phone....which certainly keeps him entertained! He managed to complete jam the phone memory last night so I decided that it was time to edit some of the movies out and upload some of them for all your entertainment. All the videos are shot inside the house and whilst you'll not get much of a feel for the house itself, you'll certainly see Osh in all his toothy glory!


OK, so I've struggled to get the other videos to upload, will try later.


Other news: the container of trees arrived from Miami on Sunday and we spent a long hot and sticky day emptying it. The May rains appear to have arrived (better late than never) and so Saturday night there was an almighty rainstorm and most of Sunday morning too. Fortunately, Sunday afternoon was dry so emptying the container was easier (although the rain cools everything down, it is soooo heavy you can't actually see what you are doing what with rain in your eyes and everything). Osh had lots of fun climbing up on top of the trees but was most useful when he was set to task with the hosepipe to water the plants as they came out the container. Small boys and hosepipes are a magical combination! Buried underneath the coconut trees was a pile of other stuff (ahem!) like my brand new side by side American fridge with ice maker and water dispenser and my all singing all dancing red washing machine (this is a real treat: a front loader that has a steam funtion and sings a little tune when the wash is over!). But you didn't hear any of that from me and I've no idea what you are talking about if Customs come calling!

Having unloaded the trees we now have to get them in the ground which is what is happening today - although the boom truck being 3 hours late didn't help matters or tempers much!

What's my favourite TV programme?......

Yesterday was a HUGE day. First, we discovered (Thursday night) that there was to be a meeting at the school today for the teachers and parents about the fly problem, with Environmental Health officers there too. There is a considerable problem at the school - millions of flies everywhere! - and of course the school being slap bang next to a sewerage farm is probably not unconnected. So, mindful that things with the neighbours were hotting up, Nicky had everyone on board late Thursday night spraying what few flies we had at the farm (nowhere near as many as at the school and oddly enough, the flies on the farm were buzzing around the new sheets of plywood and the chopped down pawpaw tree and no where near the sewage truck!) so that we could go to the meeting this morning hand on heart and say that we'd done all we could to alleviate the fly issue next door. Whilst most parents have no idea what is next door, Kenrick (Chief Env. Health man) knows full well and he was presiding over the meeting at the school. The meeting went well - the school are obviously as worried about being shut down on health grounds as we are (although there is no evidence that we are causing the problem but we are aware that we are probably not helping much either!) and Kenrick noted that there is a considerable problem with illegal dumping in Kew Town (sofas, TVs, old cars and food garbage too). At 5 to 10 we had to make our excuses and leave for an interview with Immigration.

They took Nicky in first and interviewed him for about an hour: what was my favourite TV programme, which side of the bed do I sleep on, when did we meet, when did I meet his parents etc. They then grilled me for half an hour and I was under pressure to give the same answers Nicky had! We think, having analysed what we were asked and answered that we more or less gave the same answers. It was tough: it's not like Nicky or I have a 'favourite' food, we like a whole range of stuff so I had to hedge my bets and list a long list of foods in the hope that I matched some of what Nicky had said. Now we just have to wait for the board which meets sometime each month to decide if this is a genuine marriage or one for convenience! We both felt rather exhausted after all that, as you can imagine!

Although we profoundly disagree with the notion of dumping raw sewage in sink holes at the public dump, we've resorted to doing this: disgusting as it may be, it is legal whereas spreading the nutriant rich solution over the soil at the farm, though environmentally friendly is not legal and we can't risk getting caught right now. The dump was in the news the other day regarding the acrid clouds of smoke wafting all over the homes nearby. The smoke comes not only from the fires to burn the trash but also the fires started by the (illegal) rubbish pickers to keep the flies away. The receptionist at the doctors was bemoaning the fact that with no wind to disperse the smoke it is horrid at night: open the windows to cool down the house or keep them closed and keep the smoke out!

The long awaited container arrives on Sunday when we can unload the fibreglass materials to construct the missing tanks and get the whole sewerage system back on track. The cross beams on the big tank at the bottom of the hill (ie under the new house) are now poured and in about 2 weeks we'll have a huge enclosed tank at the bottom of the hill and four enclosed filtration chambers at the top of the hill. All this assuming that SPICE don't catch up with our illegal workers first.....SPICE (the immigration police) are out in force at the moment on road blocks and doing dawn raids in the bush and on construction sites picking up illegals - they are rounding up about 200 a week and if we lost Julio and Cholo right now we'd be stuffed (first because Nicky could face a $10,000 fine for each one and second because they are great masons!). So, Julio and Cholo (Colombians) and Nocius and Daris (Haitians) are instructed to walk into the bush if they see any government officers coming down the farm track!

On a happier note, my vegetable garden is making headway too. I've abandonded plans to have the veggie patch at home where there is no water easily to hand because there is space down at the farm which has a spectacular sprinkler system in place. Today we moved the seedlings out of the mist house (a 10 second burst of water every 10 minutes throughout day light hours) and onto tressle tables outside where they get more sun. Right now we have courgette, radish, hot peppers, aubergines, melons and tomatoes on the go. We can't get seed here,so I'm being frugal with the seeds we bought in Miami (all F1 hybrids so useless for using the seeds from this year's crop next year) - also to avoid having massive glut of fruit and veg! Potentially, I could grow all year round, so the seasons are not a problem. The courgettes (the biggest seedlings in the photos above) were planted on 15 May.......stuff grows very fast here if you water it well! I also harvested some Key Limes off the tree last week: very very juicy!

Oisin the master photographer

I finally figured out how to get the photos off my phone and onto the computer and here are some of them. First, the container with all my worldly goods in it (this arrive 2 days after mum and dad left and has been emptied).

Most of the boxes are still in the lock up (the building you see behind the container) as we have nowhere to put them yet....

Last night, after a particularly hard day - the hardest bit was probably Nicky, Tim and Daniel (Nisperos, our Filipino employee) going to the public dump to off load the contents of septic tanks and portable toilets. Normally, we process this noxious stuff at the farm but with the sewerage system being overhauled, we decided that the best place for it was at the dump. How on earth we can be allowed to pump raw sewerage into sink holes at the dump (natural 'wells' in the limestone rock) is beyond us, but, it is legal unlike pumping onto the ground at the farm which is not legal....anyway, the dump is 'a vision of hell' : hot, dusty, full of flies and smoke (all the rest of the rubbish is burned in open fires). Tim did a sterling job and got covered in poop to add to the misery! Osh took these photos at the Sharkbite last night to reward Tim for his hard work.

And this of course is Osh in all his toothy glory!

phew what a scorcher!

I like the sun, I like hot weather, not having to wonder if it's going to rain/sleet/be cold during the day because you know that every day is going to be exactly the same: hot and sunny. However, my love of such stable, mundane weather has been severely tested of late.

Friday last week felt somewhat warmer than normal - the wind had dropped to nothing and what little there was was coming out of the south (ie coming over the shallow Caicos Bank where it had no chance of cooling down). By 3pm Friday, I thought I was going to go mad: the coolest place to be was lying on the tiled floor in the bedroom in front of the open door. That night, I finally caved in and put on the AC in Osh's room (where we watched another episode of the new series of Dr Who) and slept in there on the spare bed. Saturday, the temperature climbed even more and hit a scorching 41 degrees Celsius outside. Now, normally that sort of number wouldn't phase me, PROVIDED I have somewhere to escape the heat. And at this lovely house there is no such cool nook or cranny to retreat too. Except the cupboard under the stairs and that is somewhat dark and full of suitcases and squatting in there with a book and a cuppa doesn't befit the glamorous image of living in the West Indies. As it was, I had a BBC World day (watching endless reruns of the same bits of news and Panorama) in Osh's room, venturing out just to eat and drink.

The problem with the house is that it has an uninsulated roof which means that the sun hits the shingles on the roof, burns through them, through the roofing felt and then through the cladding and, having seared through, what 3" of material (I kid you not) it starts heating up the air in the house. We have cathedral ceilings in the main living area - ie they go all the way up to the rafters which is very dramatic and lovely to look at but bugger-all good at keeping you cool. So what with the 15' of hot air trapped at the top of the room, and a ceiling fan which manages to just spread the joy around (ie doesn't actually cool it down) things start to heat up. Add to that the fantastic storage heaters along the west wall of the house.....that is once the sun hits the west wall after midday the concrete blocks start to heat up and they keep that heat, pumping it out well into the night. The prevailing wind runs counter to the orientation of the house (which in many ways scores full marks in the 'form above function' test) so we don't even have the benefit of what little wind there is to ease the pain.

The thermometer in the house read 36 Celsius on Saturday afternoon - the hours between 3 and 4.30 are by far and away the worst! So, Sunday morning Nicky was made to do something about the AC our our bedroom which hitherto had been pouring water onto the floor within 10 minutes of turning it on. Several hours later, the application of some pliers (to modify the drainage system) and a knitting needle (to clean out the drainage holes) and a hammer (to make the metal box in which the AC sits big enough to accommodate the unit (different from being 2/8ths of an inch too small thus forcing it to tilt the wrong way and pour water on the floor)) later we were done and able to freeze ourselves to our hearts' content [monster sentence that, sentence ed.]. That done, we hied ourselves to IGA to buy sandwiches (they do a good sarnie), pizza, ice, beer and watermelon, oh and 2 beach umbrellas and then to the beach. Going to the beach at 1pm is not the best move really BUT it was far cooler on the beach than the house and once in the shade of the brollies was really all very civilized (sorry Dad!).

What is staggering is that whilst we were on the beach munching on sandwiches and slathered in factor 60 SPF (thanks Steph!) and sitting in the shade there was a couple not 10' away lying in the full sun......toasting.....how their brains didn't leak out of their ears is beyond me. The sea was not THAT refreshing on Sunday but was several degrees cooler than the air around us and those degrees become all important in the quest for sanity.

Plans are afoot - or rather awaiting planning permission - to build a roof over the deck all around the house which will help considerably in keeping the sun off the walls (thereby starving the storage heater of its, erm, heat) and Nicky plans to install a super duper AC unit in the main body of the house. You can imagine that with very high ceilings and an open-plan living area that is a heck of a lot of air to cool down. To do this, he has hunted down an AC unit that has the compressor (the thing that converts the hot air to cold - same principle as a fridge) that sits outside away from the house (which means and we don't have to shout above the din of the thing!). However, this is where life gets interesting.

Rather than have cables trailing from the transformer (where the power enters the property) to the current meter and then dig into the concrete path to get the cables to the compressor Nicky decided to install a new meter on the same side as the path as the transformer (thus avoiding digging up the path etc). So he goes to the power company and they come to the house and approve the installation of the new meter but says he has to go to another building to pay a fee to set up the new account. The young man in this office asked where the planning permission was for the new building (assuming that the meter was for a new dwelling....not an unreasonable assumption). Nicky explained that all he was going to do was put down a concrete pad for the compressor to sit on that was going via the new meter. Sorry sir, I can't authorise this without planning permission. So I need to go to Planning to get permission to lay at small concrete pad on my property says Nicky. Yes came the reply. You can imagine that going to planning for something so inconsequential is irksome to say the least. Besides that, Blue Loos (the business that rents out portable toilets and empties septic tanks) has now run out of toilets (they are all in use which is good news) and we need to be able to find around 20 for the music festival in August...which means buying a container full of them very shortly.....which means we have to decide between the new AC unit or a container full of toilets. Herrumph! Still, not sure how we were going to pay for the leccy bill once this new AC was installed anyway! [all very off topic, continuity ed].

Anyway, back to the hot house problem. Nicky pointed out that using the oven was not helping with the heat issue much, so I've now become something of a dab hand at using the BBQ as an oven. We have a gas BBQ - huge great industrial sized thingum with a huge lid that shuts down over the grill. Day before yesterday I cooked Bobotee (some Afrikaans dish - pork meat loaf really) on the BBQ (thanks to the open air cookbook I found on the bookshelf) and spinach and feta pastries yesterday. I put a sheet of tinfoil over the grill and because the flame sits so low down it is just like a gas oven. It sure makes the temperature in the kitchen more bearable. So anyone reading this that has other wizard recipes for cooking on the barbie let me know. My next challenge is quiche on the BBQ and souffle is where we are headed....though that may be a little ambitious. In fact my first challenge with quiche is the pastry - the only ready made stuff here is puff pastry which is useless for quiche (isn't it?) and I can't find lard anywhere and don't like to think how grey and greasy pastry could get trying to make it from scratch in this heat. Answers on a postcard to me please.

Today, it is lovely - it POURED with rain in the middle of the night and I mean full-on tropical rain which has not only replenished the water tank but cooled everything down too. More from the weather girl later.