Monday, July 27

Anniversary of 26 Years Ago!

The first few seconds of being awake on your birthday are always pure happiness. I let my memories flood back into view and think about all the times I bounced out of bed, rushed down the stairs, and searched high and low for something wrapped on the table, a card tucked under my breakfast plate, and/or a hug from a loved one. Today, my moment of pure joy was seeing a short video of Hokie singing, which mom recorded and then e-mailed to me. I do love my doggie.

The day got better with every hour. Congo Cay and Grass Cay quickly filled up my morning as I hopped aboard the Low Key and set off to be a rescue victim for day one of the rescue class. I was even told I was the Meryl Streep of panicked divers today, nearly convincing the captain he needed to call the coast guard. Either he was making fun of me or genuine in his review of my performance. Either way, I'm going to take it as a compliment. I flailed around and tried to tear off masks, grab snorkels, act scared, all the things that very well could happen in a real dive scenario. The students responded as they are trained to respond and things went well. Most of the scenarios today invovled work on the surface. With a pretty strong current, we had to pause every so often to swim back in the direction of the boat. At the second stop, Grass Cay, I even spent some time underwater, which amounted to about 26 minutes at 25 feet. It was fantastic.

Back on shore, I headed for the office for a half-day of work. Kevin, one of the maintenance guys at the park, was really helpful in getting my new housing unit ready quickly so Beth, Oliver, and I could move in and get away from the ratty Island Fancy. I wrote him a nice thank you card and he was very appreciative of the card. I think simple things like thank you notes are forgotten all too often. Speaking of thank you notes, I need to write another one. There are many folks that have been very friendly and done a lot to make me feel at home here on the island. I got cards from a handful of people here in the park and I am grateful for their thoughtfulness and kindness. I really would like to stay here beyond September! The happy gestures continued through the day. For lunch, I was treated to a tasty lunch at La Plancha, which I can now say is definitely one of the best places to eat lunch on the island. For $10 you can get lunch a ton of places, at La Plancha, it's around $8-$12 for a lunch item, plus the building has AC, it's easy to park, and the service was friendly. I'm going with a few thumbs up.

For dinner, I took the evening to cook up a delicious Four Bean Pigeon Pea Chili. I've not had pigeon peas since my arrival in the Caribbean. Think: lima bean and chickpea, mixed together, greenish in color. For the chili, I mixed kidney beans, black beans, pigeon peas, butter beans, rice, cheese, taco seasoning, salt, and pepper. Wow! It's a simple meal and requires little more than cooking rice and using a can opener, but it came together to be quite a tasty meal. With 6 cups of rice and four cans of legumes, things came out to around 4 servings. Yum.

I almost headed for bed rather early, but then I realized, I had not yet had cake! What sort of crazy-talk is it anyway, no cake on a birthday! Willing to avoid the proposterous, I happily joined Oliver on a trip to Starfish Market. With a large slice of red velvet cake and cream cheese icing in hand, I felt like my birthday was complete. My final birthday present to myself, a good night's rest.