How’s the Weather?

Pretty dang nice, thanks for asking.

Just to make all you frozen Minnesotans and Wisconsinites jealous, a few shots from our day at Larson’s Cove.

Thanksgiving, Tomatoes, and Bananas

Maybe that breadfruit tree isn’t the problem- our internet connection seems fine today.

This Thanksgiving it was too hot to cook the traditional turkey, so we went and cooled off at Sliding Rock with Lisa, Joe, and Sarah.  Afterward they came over to our house for dinner.  Joe and Sarah brought some barbecue chicken, Lisa brought a broccoli casserole,  and Mary made some roasted brussels sprouts and a pumpkin pie.  I grilled some wahoo (a local variety of tuna) and some potatoes.

It was a delicious meal, and it was a lot of fun to be able to cook and eat Thanksgiving dinner outdoors with bare feet.

My garden is coming along pretty well.  The topsoil in our yard is about two inches deep so all of my plants will have to stay in pots.

We’ve had fresh tomatoes almost every day for over a week, and plenty of basil too.  The eggplants got off to a slow start but they seem to be getting perkier.  The one on the far right is a decoy-  the neighborhood dogs pee in whatever I have at the end of the row, so I put some dirt and a stick in an extra pot to give them a target that isn’t one of my plants.

It’s not much of a garden by Midwestern standards, but it’s my first attempt and I’m really happy with how well things grow here.

We harvested one of our banana trees yesterday.  Each tree only produces one bunch of bananas, so you cut the whole thing down.

Banana plants are really soft and not woody at all.  It only took one swipe with the machete to take it down.

Soon a new plant will start to grow from the stump and produce another bunch of bananas in about a year.  Here are some that were cut down a few months ago:

The last step is hanging up the bunch where bats, rats, and birds can’t get to it:

Internet Problems

I haven’t posted anything new for a while because our internet hasn’t been working.  According to the guy who came this morning to try to make it work again, the antenna on top of our house is being blocked by one our breadfruit trees.  Hopefully, someone will come early next week and either move the antenna or cut down part of the tree.

In the meantime, we can only go online a few minutes at a time when the wind is blowing the tree out of the way.  I’ll have lots of new stuff for you guys once our connection is more reliable.

Termites, Softball, and Puppy

Mary and I were having a quiet evening at home on Wednesday when we started hearing tapping sounds on the kitchen lights.  We turned around to see thousands of winged termites flying in our house.

Regular wood-eating termites don’t have wings, but every so often a colony will produce a batch of winged termites who swarm around looking for place to start new colonies.  They covered every bit of our kitchen and laundry room, and we got quite a few inside our clothes.  Since they were attracted to light, we turned on the patio light, turned off everything inside the house, and opened the front door.

You can see some geckos on the white trim around the door.  They were having a feast.  I sprayed the termites with Raid as they swarmed under the light.  The whole ordeal was over within about 15 minutes but it was pretty exciting.

My softball season ended on a low note this week.  Because of the way they rescheduled games that had been rained out, we had four games in two days on Thursday and Friday.  I was really looking forward to that, but on Tuesday I sprained the heck out of my ankle playing soccer with one of my PE classes.  It’s still pretty swollen and painful so all I could do at the games was coach third base.  We won two out of four to bring our final record to 4-11.  Not very good, but it was a really fun season.

Aside from making new friends and the fun of playing the games, one of my favorite things about softball here was the stadium.  This is what the center fielder gets to see:

Regardless of our poor record, I will always be able to say that I was the best left-hand throwing third baseman in the Panamex Pacific American Samoa Coed Softball League in 2010.

We decided to keep our puppy.  We realized that if were going to give her away, we needed to have done it weeks ago.  She’s very comfortable here and is as attached to us as we are to her, but she’s still extremely scared of everyone except Mary and I.  She’ll get over that eventually but it would break our hearts to see her go live with someone she’s terrified of.  This is what she looks like now, at the age of (we think) 8 weeks or so:

The biggest challenge, aside from the fact that puppies in general are little tornadoes of destruction, will be transporting her back to the mainland.  We’ve talked to some people who have done it and they say it’s possible but difficult and expensive.

We’ve named her Palolo.  For those of you who haven’t heard that Samoan word before, I’ll have a whole post about it sometime in the next few days.

Sliding Rock

Last Sunday we went with some friends and their kids to a place on the west coast of the island called Sliding Rock.  The lava rock formations are really cool and there’s a big, deep tidepool full of little neon fish.  Mary took over as photographer for the day.  I’ll let her pictures speak for themselves.

When we were leaving we finally saw our first humpback whale!  It was about 200 yards offshore.  It came up and blew out of its blowhole three times.  Then we saw its tail completely out of the water, which even experienced whale-watchers don’t get to see very often.  The whales are starting to migrate north right now so it was great to see one before we missed our chance.