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.

Photos

I'm mostly done posting about Bonaire. I have a few posts half-written about the weather and the language, which may show up this week, but most of the good stuff is done. I took about 200,000 words worth of pictures (that makes 2000 I think, I don't math well), so what you've seen here represents only a small portion. They're all unedited, but I've posted them on Flickr here, so if you're dying for more vacation slides, there ya go. Any editing I've done for posts was just cropping/filtering via the Ipad... I'm not big on post-production.

Fine Dining

There's a pretty big difference between the local Bonairean joints like the one I wrote about here and the stuff that caters towards ex-pats and tourists. It's less like the difference between going to Azteca and eating from a taco truck and more like the difference between no stars and five stars.

The first fancyplace we went was my parents favourite. It's called At Sea. If you peruse their menu, you can see they're big on fancy European technique and serving things "three ways".

I had the Skirt Steak duo, which was tasty, but maybe a little too fancy for me to appreciate fully. The meal started with an amuse-bouche that was a shot glass filled with a raw wahoo salad topped with lemon foam.

 

Like most restaurants in Bonaire, At Sea is open air and near the sea. They have giant umbrellas which they put up as shade from the sun. I'm not sure what they do on the rare occasion when it rains, because very few of the tables are near any sort of shelter, and the umbrellas would just drop water onto the outside tables.

 

The second fancy place we went to is fairly new to the island. Ingridients was rum-punch-party adjacent.

 

They are located directly above the sea, and are also open air. We were there around sunset, which made for some nice photo opportunities (not just for eels.)

 

One of the resort dive areas is directly below where we were seated, so we got to watch a bit of a dive lesson, and a couple head out on a night dive.  

 

 

Ingridients is big on the spectacle, several of their menu items are prepared tableside, including a truffle parmesan pasta that they make in a big parmesan wheel, adding flaming cognac to get it melty.

I took a picture every few minutes after the sun set from our table, so consider this like a do-it-yourself timelapse. They lit some bonfires out in front of one of the resorts when it got dark, which was fun to see. The lights you can see furthest to the right are near the parental homestead.

 

 

 

On the way out we were also treated to a super bright full moon. Between the fact that we were near the equator and that it was a supermoon, it looked ginormous.

 

Dracula's Linoleum

The hallway is finished, and that means I'm completely done with floors... for now. I like the way it turned out, it looks to me like the type of floor pattern Bram Stoker's monster would pick out for his kitchen. I am now somewhat regretting not having pulled up the rest of the kitchen floor, but I know if I decide to I can always extend the stencil.

 

The good cat, on the other hand, decided to hit the books, which is good because school starts again next week.  

Houses

like everything else here, Bonairean architecture is a mixture of styles. Much of it is european looking, filtered through the island aesthetic. (which is to say things are painted more brightly than your average drag queen.)

 

 

 

The majority of houses here are made of concrete, either concrete block or poured concrete.

 

 

This means that even when the buildings are abandoned they seem to stick around, just waiting for another coat of paint.

 

 

This old theatre is next to the Cadushy distillery in Rincon. It is the oldest movie theatre on the island, and currently they are trying to raise money to resurrect it.

 

 

The inside is mostly empty, apart from some old projection equipment, and it needs a new roof.

 

 

Most of the photos I took of houses were taken from a moving vehicle, so apologies for the occasional off-focus/frame and motion blur. The best gauge for how bumpy some of the roads are is my mothers car decoration, which spends most of any ride earning her singles like a madwoman.

 

 

My last full day on the island, my dad drove me around so that I could get pictures of some of the islands less-fancy accommodations. I generally find these more interesting than the larger, rich-folk houses, which tend to be in more European styles.

 

The first thing we saw was some donkeys, which may or may not have been real estate agents. Or maybe they were just for sale.

 

 

 

We saw a few houses that were made from old cargo containers. I think the main thing about houses for the locals here is that they seem largely to exist only to have a place to sleep. Larger houses require more cooling, which is not something everyone can afford. Smaller houses let the wind go through both sides, keeping things slightly cooler.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see from most of these pictures, fences play a large role in island architecture.  There is a fairly large division between the have and have-nots here. Some fences are mostly ornamental and seemed designed just to keep out wandering wildlife.

The more seriously security-minded employ guard animals. Goose-stepping dogs...



Goats...



Even a donkey will do in a pinch.

 

My parents' complex, on the other hand, has chosen to employ a 24/7 security guard to deter crime in the area.

 Even the most hardened of criminals quakes in his boots when he sees Securitree!