dinner in the dark

last night the power went off just as i had started cooking penne pasta with garlic courgettes (am trying to be vegetarian again, which generally is going well other than the sausage pizza i recently ate - it wasn't that good either). i carried on cooking in the dark with my headtorch on, which made me feel like i was camping, but in a house. we ate it with our headtorches, out on the balcony, and it was really tasty, like camping food always is. the power stayed off for about an hour. we've had lots of stormy weather recently, the internet tower over in guatemala was hit by lightning so our internet went down for a few days.

i am currently at this moment also doing the accounting for the last few days, this is known as multi-tasking. i'm hoping the numbers will add up but they never quite seem to, naughty numbers. i even bought a bigger calculator with a bigger screen and bigger numbers, but it didn't help.

tim (robert's son) is painting a wooden carving we bought. we have a few of them and will decorate the island with them, once they're painted. i'll put a before and after picture of them once done. if we prefer the before version i guess we can sand off all the paint.

animal related news:
we found a few sea horses (caballitos de mar) the other day, and kept them in a bucket to put in an aquarium, but the aquarium never materialised so we freed them back into the water where they were much happier than in the bucket.

we watched kevin the fisherman chop up and gut and fillet a 90 pound grouper, down on the pier. we bought some snapper fillets from him and cooked them, super fresh, they were really good. frozen fish is so rubbish by comparison. robert went fishing with doug and chris and they all caught a few barracudas. robert videod part of the trip, and it turns out not only do you have to hook the poor little fish but once it's lying on the floor of the boat you have to smash its head in with a hammer to give it a nicer quicker death. this made me feel a bit sick, i'm very glad i didn't go with them that day. kevin the fisherman said that the fishermen eat the eyeballs and brains of fish, to make them think and see like fish. i said yuk that's gross. it's kind of like eating carrots to make you see in the dark but not quite.

a gekko went in my guitar for a while, so i didn't play it. tim plays guitar better than me, so i let him play it until i was sure the gekko wasn't in there anymore. i haven't been playing guitar much, but when we went bowling the bowling alley lady was playing her guitar which reminded me to play mine so i did a bit. i haven't learnt any new songs or chords, streets of london is still my favourite.

a spotty manta ray swam really close to us when we went out to the island the other day and had gone for a swim. i was freaked out in case it was a little shark, it's hard to tell when you don't have your glasses on. so i swam/stumbled back to shore through the prickly sea bed and sat up on a fallen palm tree in safety. i didn't want to meet a steve irwin style death.

we watched big fish, by tim burton, with ewan mcgregor. this film is very cool. technically this isn't animal related news, but it almost is. 

boat related news:
i saw a massive tanker over in big creek called lucy pg

we went on a really rough boat ride to try to get to a place called monkey river, where we were supposed to be buying an engine for a boat. we couldn't find monkey river in the end, then the waves got big and it was getting dark and i got scared and started yelping. carlos the boat driver did really well navigating the waves and robert was good at telling me everything was really fine. i still thought that was the end though. it made me think of that bible story when jesus comes out and calms the waves. where is jesus when you need him?

name related news:
we spoke to a lady called kitty fox, at the insurance department. she should be in a bond film with a name like that.
we met a lady called candy powers at a place where we bought a trailer for the new truck. this is also a pretty cool name. she had 10 cats, one was fat and had one eye only and was half blind in it, he did heavy cat breathing too. she had founded the placencia humane society 10 years ago.

sports related news:
well we didn't win the world cup, and lance is not doing well in the tour de france. he's somewhere like 22nd, 17 minutes behind andy schleck the leader. this is quite sad, as this is his last year of cycling. he has had bad luck for sure, i'm convinced he could still win it otherwise. if all the other riders ahead of him crashed or died then he could still win it this year.

random piece of news:
after the big storm we had (tropical storm alex), we could see honduras, which we hadn't been able to see before. the storm must have blown away the moisture in the air and made things clearer. we saw it for a few days over the water: we are in the bay of honduras here.