Pink DMs: 02/13/07

Pink DMs

Life in Barbados with sheep, cows, chickens and dogs. As far removed from the Civil Service and building sites as you can get.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

New Woman


Hello World,
It's been a while since the last Blog and there are reasons for this.
The most important one (and I shall only list one, the rest of the reasons will be the blog) was because our computer was subjected to a couple of power surges when the local electricity company had an island-wide blackout, caused, allegedly, by a monkey swinging on the power cables. (No, I'm not making it up!) The effect was that as Michele was turning on the computer, two seconds later the power went out. Eventually the power came on but the computer wasn't quite the same so she left it for a couple of days then powered on again. Just at that exact same time, a second power outtage happened in a local generator serving the airport. Talk about timing! Well, that did it for good. The darned thing would not work, it had a siren and an alarm going on the tower, the monitor wouldn't start; nothing worked. It was only when a computer technician came to try and sort the problem did we find out that the two power surges were what affected the computer despite us having at least three separate power surge protectors. Well, the upshot of it all was a phone call and a letter were sent to the electric company; they put their insurance agents to sort it and a very nice man came, took away the computer tower and brought it back to us, fixed, on Christmas Eve. Okay, there were a lot of phone calls made in between and visits to shopping malls for an estimate of the price of a new tower, calls to the insurance company, calls to the electricity company, calls to local computer shops to send estimates - which they all said they'd do but not one of them did, etc, but we don't need to go there.
We're run ragged off of our feet, looking after the animals and the house, etc, as Pops is in England for a holiday. He is bringing Mum back for their Golden Wedding Anniversary in March. Fifty years! As Tony says, "You get less for murder!". Just goes to show how loving our family is.
Tony's sister came down for two weeks before Christmas for a break. We had excellent drinking time with her. Not many people who holiday in Bim can say they spent a whole day at an abattoir; Barbara can! The bottom line is - two weeks weren't enough, so she's coming back!
Tone's been helping a friend build a house, so it's just Michele home most of the time. What with driving Josh to school and back, shopping, cleaning, laundry, hoovering, mopping, washing, finding new uses for old limes, making Bajan cherry jam (with a little help from Delia Smith) etc there's been hardly any time for sitting and reflecting on the day's activities before sleep takes over and a new day begins again.
Well, boo hoo to me. I'm in Barbados where it's hot every day, it hasn't snowed, nobody's died and the skies are not cloudy or grey!
Anyway, a new string to Michele's bow - take a look at the picture accompanying this blog. Yes. Michele is holding two of the new pups after she washed, dried and de-flea'd them! [If "de-flea'd" is the wrong spelling or whatever, please do let me know, I couldn't find it in the dictionary.]
Again, yes, Michele is holding two live animals.
She actually mentioned in an email to her friend that she thought the pups were cute but the friend said that without pictures it's all hearsay. Josh has named the pup on the right Simba and the one on the left Hector. There was a third, a girl pup called Squirt (she had the squits from the time she was weaned) but she's on the dog-pile now or should we call it Tony's "mass grave".
We've cut down the tallest pawpaw tree Michele grew so the young ones can grow up.
Last Sunday for dinner we had home-grown chicken, home-grown green beans, home-grown pumpkin, home-grown eddoes, home-grown yam, home-grown cucumber, home-grown tomatoes and "Irish" potatoes from Idaho in America, all washed down with limeade from our own trees! We spent the evening on the sofa at home and groaned from our full bellies.

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