Resurrection?

It appears that my computer has come back from the dead. This morning I was about to take the hard drive out to hand it over to someone more likely to pull important info off it than I and I figured what the heck, might as well just push the on button one last time, can hardly hurt to beat the dead horse... and the Dell startup screen appeared. I have to say I'm a little wary of this whole situation as it reeks of something supernatural and lacking in explanation and I have no idea if this is a permanent visit from the great beyond or only a temporary one. But even just for the day it's pretty exciting to have it in functional mode again, as much as I was excited about my new paperweight. Work officially starts here at school tomorrow as the teachers are planning to come back and get things set up. The students should be arriving in a couple of weeks so it's time to start thinking about the school year starting :) In other exciting news, my house and the whole school compound has been without water since last tuesday- apparently the main pipe broke. I finally decided I wasn't that rugged and called a plumber today after an exciting episode that involved Andrew and I attempting to patch the leak ourselves with some saran wrap and duct tape and then having the whole thing explode as soon as we turned the water back on. Maybe I'm not as handy as I thought I was. I'll stick to making clothing and curtains.

Mold

Let me start out by saying that I love my house. I really do. It's really cute and perfect for me and I couldn't be happier. Unfortunately for my personal belongings, however, mold loves my house as much as I do. It seems to be the perfect breeding ground and happy home for all sorts of little fuzzies of various colors that enjoy making their meals off of my unsuspecting imported items. My computer is officially dead, in case anyone was waiting with baited breath on that front. As is my ipod most likely. Silly me bringing electronic items to a tropical country. I expected they might not last the whole two years but I was hoping for a bit more than three months. Sigh... At any rate I found out yesterday that the fact that my closets are actually not inside my house at all but more these boxes that stick out randomly from the walls outside of the building proper means that they are extremely susceptible to rain leakage, say, in tropical cyclone-type weather. Probably just in regular old tropical weather as well. Result: all of my skirts and dresses and shoes have become covered in... mold. La la la. So yeah I spent a good few hours bleaching the clothes I thought might be salvageable yesterday. It looks like I will probably manage to save some stuff as long as I don't mind the little black spots, but it means I probably can't store anything in the only storage space my apartment contains which poses a bit of a conundrum. Perhaps I should just pile everything up in the living room in the middle of the floor as far away from all windows and leaky walls as possible? Oh well. I didn't come here to be materialistic, right? Perhaps this was some greater way of my being told to let go a bit more. I'm working on it... :)

Rebellion

Okay, so I’ve spent the past week or so away from home. I figured I would take advantage of my vacation time right now to not be tied down to the place I know I’ll have to be all the time in the future. I came home today hoping my happy little house would be thrilled at my return. But I guess while I was away my inanimate objects got a bit restless. I walked in to find that about half my living room floor was under a thin layer of water. This wasn’t hugely surprising since it has been raining torrentially here for the past week or so. It was a little strange that the puddle didn’t actually extend to any of the windows but whatever, I’m no hydrologist and don’t pretend to understand water flow patterns. I cleaned it up and went about my merry way. Upon opening the back door and preparing to go downstairs to do laundry another interesting discovery of unrest was made, possibly a justification of the first- a huge breadfruit tree from my neighbor’s yard had apparently decided to fall over into my yard, heavily compromising my laundry line (lying on top of it, rather). It’s a pretty impressive sight. Makes me wonder if perhaps in it’s throes of crashing down it somehow thrust large quantities of water through my windows and onto my living room floor? Perhaps a mystery that shall never be solved. Oh well. So then I went to go open up my computer to type up some emails and to upload my pictures of the disaster in my backyard. Opening it up, I notice a very strange sight. A sight one is NOT supposed to see on a computer, and most definitely a first in my lifetime. My computer is actually growing mold. Computers really aren’t supposed to be fuzzy. So, needless to say, I am currently one functioning computer short of my old house inventory. I have no idea if it will be reviveable at a later date- right now it’s hanging out inside a ziploc bag with my little dehumidifier who is hopefully working really hard towards the advancement of my cause. Ah, and apparently the right burner on my little two-burner stove has decided it doesn't like to work in the rain either. Hmmm... I have to say I’m a little afraid to further pursue the items in my house for fear of additional incident that I’m not yet psychologically strong enough to face. But hey... at least my phone line is working for a change :)

Keeping Busy...ish

For the past few weeks the country has pretty much been shut down for the holiday season. From right before Christmas until a couple of days ago a large portion of shops and general things going on were… not. It’s been quiet even right in town and has been a really nice low-key time. I’ve been doing a lot of resting up and relaxing and just getting settled in to life here, even if it’s not necessarily indicative of the life I will be leading since school won’t start for another couple of weeks yet so at the moment I’m a free agent. Since I have all this time on my hands to do with as I like I decided I would come up with some projects for myself. One of my favorite things to do when I’ve nothing better to distract me is to bake cookies- I think I made three batches last week. Fortunately there are many willing volunteers eager to help me with their disposal once I make them :) In my house itself there is no oven, only a little two burner propane stove, so when I bake there I make the food upstairs and then I carry it downstairs to bake it in the oven. It’s fun to try to maneuver the food in the rain! (This is “cyclone season,” which means it pretty much rains every day.) I also decided this would be a good time to approach some of the other domestic projects I had for myself- namely, sewing a whole bunch of stuff. I really wanted to make new curtains for my house to try and cheer it up a bit and make it look more like my own. I also have a bunch of clothing that has been made for me or given to me since I’ve been here that I would like to alter so that it fits me a bit better. So I spent all day Wednesday at the machine making forty yards of curtains (my house has a LOT of windows) and hemming up a bunch of stuff. I have a feeling the coming week holds much more of the same. It’s been entertaining and a good use of my down time, makes me feel nice and productive like I’m accomplishing stuff and so on. I basically haven’t written much because things have been pretty mellow, which has been really nice but I assume the minutia of my daily life isn’t overwhelmingly thrilling to the world at large, so I keep it to myself. Here’s a fun one though- last week I was in my house ready to go to bed and I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and glanced up at the wall to find the largest spider I have ever seen in my life (as in, not a tarantula but significantly bigger than one) with an egg sac that’s just opening up and releasing its babies out all over my wall. She was seriously one of the most impressive creatures I’ve ever seen in my life, although I must say looking at the babies starting to pour out of her sac I had visions of thousands and thousands of 4-5 inch spiders scurrying all over my house and was less than enamored with the image. It took about 15 minutes for two full-grown human beings to catch her under a bowl and transport her and her egg sac outside so that they could continue to live but in an environment other than, say, my bed. I was a little disappointed in our lack of prowess with the situation but at least we got them out without harm inflicted on any of the parties involved. Then a few days later I was hanging my new curtains and what did I see laying there on the floor in my spare-oom?
An empty egg sac.