Replenishing the Stores

So far we are still in the grand opening phase of the vacation. This means a lot of cleaning, rearranging,    And oh the lists... So. Many. Lists.

The lists in hand, we made our way for the first serious shopping excursion. My mother was along to supervise this time and make sure we didnt just buy junk food and meat.

On the way home the other day, one of the car brakes locked up, spewing fumes into the car. Our first stop was to get an appointment to have it seen by a mechanic. Tuesday is a holiday in The Netherlands, and therefore on the island, so no one is working. My dad decided to tough it out with the car until Wednesday. 

First stop was the store the natives shop, called Bon-di-Gro. It was my first visit here. This is the entrance. Its not a pretty place. 

Inside is a lot like a post-apocalyptic Costco, with birds and no ac.

It is hard to find a building without birds of some kind in residence here. Most have open areas for air to come in, which also let in birds.

Next stop was the Lucky Mega Store, which like an increasing number of stores on the island is run by Chinese. These seem to be singularly referred to as "chinese store", despite the name of the store. There is currently one under construction near our place. They are pretty much what youd expect, except with dogs in the parking lot.

Dogs in the parking lot doesnt necessarily have a correlation with quality. We next went to Van den Tweel, the super-dutch supermarket, which also has resident rovers, just under the sign saying not to feed the dogs.

The atmosphere here is slightly different from Bon-di-Gro, in that you feel less like there might be a zombie around any corner lying in wait. It is well-lit, air-conditioned, and nicer than most American stores.

Since most of the product here is Dutch, you can spot Americans pretty quickly, as theyre the ones struggling to guess what stuff is.

My dad speaks German, and I have enough language background that we can usually figure out what stuff is without too much consternation. My mother reads the pictures and pokes stuff to see if its crunchy.

When we checked out, they gave us free eggs. We arent exactly sure why, a lady just came up and said "you want egg?" Her accent was strong enough i thought she asked if we wanted ads. My mother said yes as soon as she heard it "want", and we got eggs. Who knows what they will hatch into!

By the time we left, the pup had made his way inside. It is probably cooler here. 

Daktari, my parents car here, only really fits two people. so my mother rides in the back on a lawn chair when we all go out.

My favourite score from the trip is some kind of treat that can only be described (by me) as go-gurt for cats. i Cant wait to bring it home.

"If you have a wiggle eye, it means that you will never die."

So proclaimed the mighty crab hunter last night at 1AM when none of us could sleep.  She said this was an old crab saying. 

As it happens, she has wiggle eyes a-plenty. Some "volunteers" were rounded up last night, and Crabby Funland is now open for business.

Santa Claws left my mother a lawn ornament to share with her crabs this morning.

I took a nap this afternoon, and when I woke up, one crab had been granted immortality (and nail polish!) We have speculated that the shellface will scare off predators.

Meanwhile, Iguana Playland remains popular, possibly thanks to the fact that it remains out of reach of my mothers paintbrush.

White Sabbath

Sunday was a day of rest. I mostly sat around and read tourist literature about the island. This is more entertaining for me than it seems, because its a lot like reading damn you autocorrect. Most of the people on the island are proficient in multiple languages. The writers for some of the magazines, however struggle with cognates, homonyms, and idioms, which makes reading them as a word nerd extra fun. It makes me giggle that the dutch left behind donkey "bread".

One of my other favourite Bonaire factoiods appears on this page... Enslaved Africans called the island "White Hell" because of the salt extraction in which they were forced to participate. I have a feeling the title has been resurrected lately, as the Bonaireans are currently attempting to secede from Dutch rule. There is a pretty big financial divide between the locals and the tourists and expats. This divide also happens to fall squarely on racial lines.

Yesterday, I managed to experience my own white hell. My mother found a labelmaker. 

She experienced some kind of lable frenzy. Once she was done with the things she needed to label, she began actively looking for more things she could label. I fully expect to wake up branded. Yes, she has already said she will be labelling crabs. It is out again this morning. I can only hope she runs out of tape before she makes it upstairs.

I walked over to the beach briefly to test that my camera is working again. A tourist ship happened to be passing by. I grabbed a couple of pictures, but it was pretty grey by Bonaire standards.

Happy hour has become a tradition here in Bonaire. It mostly means eating wine and cheese at five every night. We sit outside in the front yard, and sometimes various neighbours join us. My dad fills some feeders with sugar for the local birds, so we had a few of them fluttering around. While we were watching them, I happened to look up into the tree above us. it turned out we were being joined by at least three iguanas. Here is the view of the happy hour table from my balcony, if you look closely....

...you can see our guests.

Happy Hour is open to everyone.

After dinner, my mother went on her first crab hunt of the season. I manned the 

flashlight for the roundup (I was only following orders), while we walked around the complex. i suspect we will feature prominently on the neighborhood watch facebook page today.

When the crabture was complete, we came back to the house. Only to discover that the bats had found the birdsugar. The front yard was swarming with them. I tried to get some pictures, but didnt do very well. Im going to try again tonight. They dont stay still to have their pictures taken and are kinda all over the place. There are three in this photo, none of which gave me rabies or got in my hair. Like any good goth, they just sort of wing around and ignore you.

Day one... Er two... Ive lost count.

I am a little disoriented. I just woke up, and it is 7AM. Which means at home it is still 3AM. Which means it is nearly my bedtime. 

I left my house at about 9:30AM local time, and arrived on Bonaire about 30 hours later. We decided to leave from Portland because it was cheaper, which means a 3 hour drive to and from the airport. Because this is relatively uncharted territory, my mother decided we needed to be a little early for our 10:30PM flight. After all, who knows what kind of savages staff PDX? We might be forced into day-long TSA lines. 

The drive down alternated between dark and gray, and dark and stormy. Most of western Washington is having flooding issues, having received 2.06" of rain in 24 hours, followed immediately by another storm. It was pretty dismal. This is the best picture I managed to capture of one of the rare rain breaks.

We got to Portland early enough for me to hit a Dead Robin with some of my friends, then headed to the airport. Having arrived a mere 6 hours early to our flight, we were ushered through TSA faster than I have ever seen. There was literally no line ahead of us, and the longest any of us paused was when one officer told me he was surprised they could ID me with blue hair. I pointed out it was blue on my passport and we were good to go.

My mother was pretty sure we could sneak into the first class lounge at United, so we went with that plan, which was much better than sitting at a gate with the rabble. Mostly because we got free wine, cheese, and cookies and fancy comfy chairs. This was the dinner of champions:

The Portland airport is very Portlandy. There are actual food trucks, and lots of farm-to-table, trendy restaurants. There is also an enormous Glockenspeil, which looses a "free-range chicken" on the hour rather than the traditional cuckoo. I made my mother stand next to it for scale.

The numbers are all Portland iconic things like microbrews, bicyles, and the weird little sparrow every trendy Portlander has tattooed on her chest to be original.

We made the flight without any fuss, it was a red eye arriving in Newark, NJ at right about 7AM. 

The Newark Airport is as aggressively New Jersey as Portland's is hipster. It is sort of like The Airport That Time Forgot. I saw several shops there that I literally havent seen since the 80s. I didnt even know The Body Shop still existed. Maybe it doesnt, it is just stuck in a pocket of time here with the Swatch store and some white courtesy telephones. 

After browsing one of the many Italian markets on offer, we boarded our plane uneventfully and I watched Ant Man for four hours until we were in Bonairean airspace. 

We landed about 3PM local time. The airport is decorated to the nines for Christmas... An event my mother promises me is less consumeristic and more religious than the US version. This sounds like my worst idea of Christmas, which I think should be more candy/less Christ, but it will be an adventure. You can see the bells blowing in the wind over baggage claim because the airport is largely open air. Someone has removed the clappers from them, so there was no accompanying cacophony, which i thought would have added some festivity to the claiming of baggage.

We got a ride to the house, and my mother began the traditional OCD unpacking/cleaning frenzy while my father and I headed to the store. It was a quick trip because we were tired, and although we managed to avoid many impulse buys, my mother was upset about the lack of vegetables we brought home.  (Im not sure if she meant bacon or not.) The most exciting part to me was that one store had Santa photos of children. Since the island is now officially Dutch, the children are also surrounded by the traditional six-to-eight black men. If you dont know about this tradition, or want to revisit it via the genius of David Sedaris, then follow this link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NYdpte1W0vk (The blogger app hasnt improved much in the year and a half since i last tried to use it, so you will have to copy and paste the link yourself. i promise that itll be that much more rewarding since youve had to put in this extra effort.)

We had a brief donkey visitation at sunset, which was so exciting that I broke my camera. Between my dad and i messing with it, I think it is back in order, so will hopefully have better-than-phone quality photos coming next post. After 30+ hours of travel, the disappointment of a broken camera was enough to send me to bed at 8PM, well before both the skinnydipping hour and my parents.

 

The Great White Hunter

I know everyone likes stories about my mother. Except, possibly my mother. So I've been saving this one up. You may remember her adventures as Head Counselor of Crabby Fun Land. This is a yearly summer ritual for her.

At some point after I left last Summer, she decided to expand the Fun Land by adding iguanas. The Iguana's are huge, and roam all over the island. They act a lot like prehistoric chickens. They seem to really enjoy fruit. My parents have a guava tree in their front yard, which the iguanas pilfer. My mother invariably names these fruit pirates either "Iggy" or "Lizzie". (Iggies being the iguana menfolk and lizzies are the ladies).

As the iguana are faster and more mobile than the hermit crabs, they required slightly more inducement to join the Fun Land. So my mother devised a fool proof trap (Photos courtesy of my father):

In case this needs more explanation, it is a trail of guava from the parking lot, into my parents front yard. I am relatively sure that she got the idea from a Looney Toons episode. The theory is sound. You know how this works: 

And because cartoon never lie to us, it seems that my mothers fruit actually... well... bore fruit. Lacking the advice of an Admiral Ackbar, the more reckless of the Lizzies made her way into Fun Land. 

Sadly, containment seemed to be a bit of an issue. The fence around the yard is far from iguana proof, and they don't fit in a tub. They also don't seem to sit still for nail polish painting. My mother addressed these issues when they visited over Christmas. The trap was reinstated, and she decided that the iguanas just needed training. She embarked on a campaign to make them learn tricks, which apparently involved using any leftover fruit food waste from the kitchen.

I can't say for certain that this was successful, my mother insists that they were learning tricks. I suspect the tricks were along the lines of "sit!" "look lizardy!" and "run away!".  She has had several months to come up with additional iguana curriculum though, so I expect they will be whipped into shape in no time this summer. 

Hibernation Hiatus

Ok I took some time off to sleep. And then there was studying. And then stupid, stupid life. Which is not to say that Things didn't Happen, just that I mentally saved them up to write about at a later date, and now they will have the sepia-toned quality of reminiscences rather than the colour of current events.

Work on the Violet Vengeance hasn't progressed much because I've been too busy. There is currently half a circus tent hanging in the living room begging to be worked on, but school has taken priority. I play to attempt to work on the yard this Spring/Summer, budge and weather allowing. And by that, I mean enough cloudy days to allow me to maintain my deathlike pallor without risking the tanz.

I did manage to get new toilets installed courtesy of the city. Being poor has its perks! The new ones are low flow, and I haven't yet decided how I feel about them, but they were free, so yay! I didn't take very good before and afters of them, so here's a picture of a penguin I took at the zoo the other day. This is quite a concession, as I mistrust penguins. My mother has a long history with them. More on that later, along with some more penguin pictures. Right now, one is enough!

I've also been volunteering at a local writing center/Space Travel Supply Store, which requires working with children. Not exactly my strong suit to begin with, but I've also learned that they have some sort of vampiric energy-sucking ability. It turns out they DO say the damnedest things, more on that later too.

In which I learn valuable lessons about hanging chandeliers while on Percoset.

Since I finished the kitchen hallway, I've mostly been hitting the books with my feline sidekick. (Please don't eat him, you know who you are.)

 

My photo stream has been a bit cranky, so I haven't really posted any updates on the few small projects I've worked on. Mostly right now I'm working on returning decorations to the living/dining rooms and painting trim and whatnot.

 

I did repaint the red wall in the living room, it had a few holes in it from moving furniture, and it was a slightly different red than the floor. 

 

 

I used some of the left over red porch paint. The colour change isn't significant, you can see it beloe at the top edge. It did take me two coats to cover the old red.

 

 

It probably could have used three, but its been hot and I was tired of painting. The supervisor contributed in his usual fashion: by eating. He managed to tear up the masking tape.

 

 

Once the red was revised, it was time to hang the world's most prideful chandelier. And put up pictures. The pictures part took a few weeks because I was trying to decide where to put everything before I put new holes in the walls. I think it's mostly under control now, but I may still switch things up a bit.

 

 

I also masked and painted trim pieces in both the kitchen and living room. Both of the horizontal pieces were the ugly orangey colour of most of the trim in the house, so this is an improvement to me.

 

I did, however, learn why masking tape is best removed when the paint is still wet, since I accidentally took off a bunch of paint with it. Learn from my mistakes, people!



Sometime between when I painted the trim and the present date I managed to aggravate an old neck injury at the gym. As a result, I've been put on high doses of Oxycodone and ordered to rest. I can't really sit up for very long, so I'm mostly stuck in bed, flat on my back.  Painkillers don't do anything to further my comprehension when studying, so I am mostly watching tv and trying not to scream at the pain. I got bored with this pretty quickly and wanted to work on the house. I decided I should hang my other chandelier, but this time I wanted it over Dracula's Dinette, and not in the living room. This necessitated a trip to home despot for a chandelier hook. I managed to get a friend to stop there on the way to a doctors appointment and decided to try to put it in today.

This was a poor decision. The hook was too big for the drywall anchor I had planned to use with it. I probably wouldn't even have tried had my judgment not been impaired.  What I managed to do was put a large hole in the ceiling, which is not coincidentally about the size of a drywall anchor.

 

I also got the anchor stuck to the screwy part of the hook. At this point I gave up and went back to bed for a while. After another dose I decided to try again. I spent a few minutes trying to get the anchor off of the screw, but it was way beyond my motor skills and grip right now (I'm having to do everything with my left hand, which is not optimal). I wound up with this, which is not helpful at all:

 

 

The hook had actually come with a toggle bolt, which I don't like to use because you have to drill 3/4" holes to put them in. As it turned out, I already had a hole of that variety, so I decided to give it ago. It took about an hour for me to figure out, but now the chandelier is hung!

 

My vision for this space is to make it a spooky little dinette set to match the floor. I may paint and re-reupholster the chairs to that end. Maybe I'll make a vision board while I'm in bed, that seems productive. The moral is: no more home improvements on drugs, it only leads to stripped screws and holes in the ceiling.