Rain: My best purchase of the month, maybe the year (oh no, I bought my Kindle this year) is my shiny new, plastic rain gauge. I’m so curious about the amount of rain falling here nightly. During rainy season, we get the most incredible storms after dark and sometimes wake up to a village under water! I happen to live in a house that is surrounded my low area that likes to flood….. I call this The Moat. It’s at this time I don’t even feel the need lock up my bike because NO one’s coming through that swamp! We’ve been averaging about 13mm of rain each night (little over a half inch) but we had two nights in a row that had 80mm and 82mm, respectively…over 6.5 inches in two nights! And now I sit here and wonder…..how do I live here and not own any rain boots? Lesson learned? Buy rain boots? A small canoe? Check the yard during rainy season before renting?
Rat Suicide: See pictures. Found in cabinet three days after my students reported the area smelled like poop. Lesson learned? Never ignore smelly cabinets.
Fabric Softener: Since middle school, I’ve been doing my own laundry. Washing and drying in those big white magical machines. But a dryer in Belize is uber-luxury, and I’m lucky just to share two washing machines with the neighbors downstairs. I don’t mind hanging my laundry on the expansive lines around my upstairs deck, but my clothes sure do! Over the years they’ve become faded, speckled with random yellow spots, and stiff as a board. For a year I’ve been looking at the discarded fabric softener containers in my laundry room thinking, “I bet those neighbors are onto something. I need to try that stuff.” But all I knew about it was the …. Tide commercial? … that had the cartoon lady running downstairs exclaiming “I forgot to add the fabric softener!” Anyways, I bought some, added it at the appropriate time, and HOLY COW WHAT AN AMAZING DIFFERENCE in the feel and smell and overall happiness of my threads! Life changer! Lesson Learned!!!
Zowzers!
The next day I have to wade through my flooded yard holding the microwave high above my head to go back to the hardware store. Without question, they give me another one. They even opened the box and tried it for me, which I thought was a nice touch! I bring it home to finish microwaving my chili and its going great when it starts to dim out, sputter and all the electricity goes out. I wonder, is it just my house? Or the whole neighborhood? Did my microwave do that? Then I heard the generators go off next door….OK – it’s a village wide outage. (Those have been happening often!) I heat my chili on the stove and forget about the microwave.
