the doldrums

it has been very hot and still here the last few days, with no wind or rain, perhaps some in the night but that’s no use as it’s then hot and still again during the day. we have mainly been staying inside with the air conditioning on, i’ve been doing my accounting (the numbers add up even less in this kind of weather). this is what it must be like when you are on a boat and go into the doldrums where there’s no wind. robert once sailed back from hawaii to the mainland, los angeles, which took 21 days, on a sailboat that had just raced the same route but the other way and much quicker. they went through 4 days of storms, where they had to strap themselves onto the boat so they didn’t get swept overboard when the waves hit. then they had 4 days of doldrums, where they didn’t move at all as it was totally windless. they ran out of food nearing the end of the journey, and all got a huge craving for ice cream which they indulged when they go on shore, apart from one boy who by that time had gone a bit mad apparently, and didn’t want ice cream.

this reminds me of the area called the horse latitudes. this is a particular latitude where the wind is always very calm, so much so that the sailors used to have to throw their horses overboard as they didn’t have enough food to keep them alive on board ship. i guess they didn’t kill them to eat them as they didn’t have freezer space to keep the meat fresh.

it was around this time last year that we left belize to go up to montana and spent those 3 months in monty the motorhome. she is still parked in mexico waiting for us to come back one day. how i loved getting off the plane in to the drizzle and grey skies and huge mountainous scenery, it was truly amazing after the belizean weather and lifestyle.

last night we watched the hurt locker, the film that won the best picture at the oscars, to the disgust of james cameron who thought his avatar would win. well it’s quite obvious that the hurt locker is a more important film in lots of ways, dealing as it does with the iraq war and war in general and what it does to people.

here is a quote that actually referred to a powerpoint presentation:

some problems in the world are not bullet-izable. H.R. McMaster, Brigadier General, US Army, Iraq War veteran (b. 1962)

this week we met a girl called steph, she come to yoga sometimes but we’ve never really met her. she used to have probably the most interesting job i’ve ever heard of and is really cool. she is here in placencia doing volunteer work and teaching and doing fire dancing and things like that. i asked her if she used to  be a teacher in the states. no way, she used to train surgeons to use bio-medical surgical robotic equipment. ie the robots that go in and do the operations instead of the surgeon, so she had to re train surgeons to do the same operations they’d been doing for years, but by directing the robots to do them. robots don’t drink and therefore wouldn’t have shaky hands, so it removes the chance of human error and makes the operations much quicker and safer. she used to demonstrate the equipment on live pigs (anaesthetised), she once saw a person having brain surgery and felt pretty sick, but other than that she is totally not squeamish, you could hardly do that job if you were. she said they are going to be using nano bots soon, which are like tiny weeny robots, so she might go back to work for them again as that’s pretty exciting.

america's got talent

so, one of the things i have always hoped wouldn't happen to me has happened. a few days ago i was putting on my sandals, with bare feet, and my right toe touched something soft in there. maybe it's a leaf, i thought, and squirmed my foot back out. on shaking my shoe upside down, i found a large dead spider, it's legs all bent back, like it had folded its arms, or was doing a yoga move. ugh yuk, that made me do a little dance around my shoe for a while and feel really squeamish. i brushed him outside with the broom and thought well it could have been worse, it could've been a scorpion, or a snake, or an alive spider.

we are in the city tonight, trying to find which channel america's got talent is on (like the x factor but of all kinds of 'talent', not just singing - sharon osbourne is one of the judges, i like her. piers morgan is one of them, he's a total wally, i think he's going for the simon cowell style, but it doesn't work. anyway,  we took robert's son tim to the airport today to fly home to albuquerque. this was sad, as it was really nice to have him here, he's been here 6 weeks. he likes playing computer games, and is doing computer animation at college. when he arrived here in june, they asked him where are you staying in belize, and he said i don't know, because he didn't know where we live. they made him sit there until he knew, and he saw a van saying radisson hotel, so he said oh i'm staying at the radisson. when we went to mick's to swim in the pool tim swam a whole length under water. robert gets a little bit competitive dad syndrome when tim does things like that, so he did it too. they had a push up contest one night too after some drinks, which was very amusing. they were going to carry it on with a sprint down the road, but i warned them it was pitch black, the road was potholed, and they had had some drinks, so maybe it wasn't the best idea.

last week we moved house again. we're now living back in cayo in the west near the guatemala border, where we used to live last year. we are renting a place from luz, the lady from columbia. this is because the plan is to fly the planes there from the runway and hangar that robert built. there isn't a hangar in placencia we can use otherwise we would stay there. the ultralights arrived from australia the other day, which robert was very excited about - it took them about 5 weeks to get here on a ship. he has flown one of them so far, it has a white wing and goes really fast, they flew over me while i was sleeping yesterday morning, it sounded like they were going about 100 miles an hour. i like living in cayo as i can cycle, there's some good hills, and our friend mick lives there down the road, who i cycle with. the house we're renting is actually for sale, and some people came to look round it with a view to buying it. we told them it was awful and they'd hate living there, because we don't want them to buy it. it is a lovely house in a really nice place, with tons of nice trees and flowers, and birds, it's a really nice place to wake up in the morning.

while in the city last week we went for some ice cream at the western dairies shop. there was a little sign up saying no samples. after tasting the ice cream i now realise that if they were to give out samples, they would not actually sell any ice cream, as it was disgusting. mine was chocolate chip, but actually they should have called it salt and small hard blobs. i gave mine to tim who ate it after his first one, even though he hated both of them. there were a bunch of 10 year old kids lingering around outside passing the school holiday time kicking the pavement and stuff, robert shouted to them all the come in. the ringleader kid for a second looked all defensive as he thought he was getting a telling off, then the communal penny dropped all at once, and they all pegged it in to the ice cream shop and straight to the counter, shouting their orders out. this cheered us right up after our let down of an ice cream, and was worth every penny to see a bunch of temporarily happy belizean kids. they all said thank you very politely, which really impressed me too.

i have finished reading the quiet american by graham greene. he's really a genius, all the books i've read by him have been amazing. sometimes i feel my intelligence level doesn't quite match his, as i have to read some paragraphs a few times and i'm still not sure what he's saying, it's so profound. this book is set during the vietnam war and is also a love/murder story and is really very good as both a novel about the vietnam war and about love and jealousy and innocence. i'm now reading a book of essays by a a gill, that english journalist who writes about food in the times, and other things too. he's really a great writer, very acerbic and harsh though, and like someone on the back of the book says, much as i admire him, i really don't think i'd like to meet him. there are lots of travel essays in there, one about haiti, before the earthquake - it sounded like absolute hell on earth then so imagine it now. and one about a man who looks after the beetle collection in the natural history museum. another man that works there, his job is to take the little pins out of the beetles that keep them lined up in their glass cases, and replace them with new pins. this is because the old pins are made of brass which contains copper, and the copper was reacting with the fatty tissue in the beetles' bodies and making a gas which was making the beetles explode! this book was written a few years ago but i'm sure that man is still replacing those pins as there are 12 million beetle samples there.

[we have found america's got talent - it's debatable - at the moment it's an old hippy singing with his guitar and his dog is there, and i think the dog is somehow meant to be acting out the song words, but all he's doing is sitting looking at his owner, not knowing what to do, poor little puppy. he's probably never been on stage before in front of all those people. before that was a 12 year old who was amazing at skipping, and after that was a man juggling burning pizza dough].

here are some other things we've seen recently:
* a white london hackney cab in belmopan. weird. we peered through the window, it was all like a cab inside too.
* a meteorite! i didn't see it. we were out on southwater caye, an island about 14 miles from dangriga (see map on previous blog for location). it was robert's birthday, and we'd had dinner and went to look at the stars, which were incredible out there, with no light pollution nearby. anyway i was looking for the plough, or big dipper, or small dipper, whatever they call it, and robert and tim suddenly screamed as they had seen a big ball of light going across the sky with red flames coming off behind it and it lasted for ages. i told robert i'd arranged it for his birthday. i think it must have been a meteorite burning up on entering the atmosphere. i kept looking for another one as i felt a bit left out, but all i saw was some lightning behind a cloud.
* some spider monkeys in a tree at xunantunich - how much nicer it always is to see animals in their natural habitat rather than in a cage at a zoo. i also thought this when snorkelling at southwater caye - i felt like i was in a cartoon film, like finding nemo. you wouldn't believe the amount and variety and colour and size of fish down there. a whole school of black fish with blue electricity swirling round their fins went past - robert swam down into them and they moved apart then swarmed back together again. i saw a spotty sting ray at a distance which was pretty cool too.
* a black snake, seen by tim, when we were in toledo. apparently there is a rhyme which goes - red and yellow will kill a fellow, then something else about other colours which the person telling us couldn't remember. i guess this black one was safe as it isn't red or yellow.
* us eating yoghurt with plastic forks, as we didn't have any spoons. we had tried to buy some plastic spoons but they only sold tiny little ones by the sack of 10000 load, so we grabbed a few forks instead. it worked ok as we had put granola in the yoghurt to give it more structure.

well that is today's update. tomorrow we are back to placencia to get the rest of our stuff for living in cayo, after doing some work related things in the beauty that is belize city, we'll spend a few days in placencia and do some yoga classes, then head back to cayo at the weekend. hope everyone is well. i'll let you know if it turns out america has any talent. xx