Tori went out back this morning, as she does most mornings because the mosquitoes tend to congregate out front in the a.m., and came back in looking quizzical.
She was wondering what the horses were doing in the back yard.
Two horses. Can't say I've seen them before. We've got a couple of horses that live in a lot down the street and wander a bit, quite a lot actually, but these two are new to me.
We often have chickens in the yard - there are chickens all over the island that don't seem to belong to anyone, they just wander around making more chickens (and roosters do crow at sunrise, but only because roosters crow all the damn time, sunrise, sunset, 2 in the afternoon, 2 in the morning) and we get iguanas back there, big ugly guys, sometimes as many as four at a time. I often wonder how iguanas ever reproduce because they're so ugly they must be ugly even to other iguanas. And other birds, lot of white egrets. No goats – the goats seem to congregate on the center of the island, not so much here on the west.
Oh, and two night ago, around 10 p.m., I was driving Millie home from the theater down the island's one multi-lane highway. We glanced over the divider and there were about half a dozen cows and a bull wandering east down the road while we headed west. I hope they stayed in the slow lane.
But these are the first horses we've had actually in the yard - that I know of. All I can guess is, I was up late last night and didn't close the gate until after 2 a.m. They must have wandered into the yard, and then got caught when I locked up. Either that, or they wandered in and don't really care where they are. One place is as good as another to horses.
I'll keep an eye on them, because what the hell am I supposed to do with them?
Max, of course, wanted to ride them to school.
jb
Friday, May 15, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Extreme Frustration
Sorry about being gone so long. We've been extremely busy between work and school and the theater and stuff.
I'll talk about those next week – promise. Right now I just need to vent.
I knew I had a car problem, Bertha was dripping brake fluid for a couple of weeks – not a lot but noticeable. I planned to nurse it along until the end of the month. Keep a close eye on the fluid level, watch the drips in the carport.
That's not the frustrating part. A week ago Wednesday, on April 15, Tori got in and the brake pedal went down to the floor. Not because she has such powerful leg muscles (although she does) but because the slow leak had suddenly become a really bad one. You could sorta pump up the brakes, but it wasn't what you'd call a safe ride.
Last Friday I took the car down to the shop – THAT was an exciting ride, let me tell you. I got there, the guy said the calipers were shot. Not a surprise, I'd seen fluid leaking out from inside the brake unit. Had to be something like that. The problem - the part did not exist on the island. The part is never on the island. It had to be ordered. It would be in Monday.
It is now Friday and the part is still not here. It got shipped, it went through Miami, it got as far as San Juan and then disappeared off the face of the planet. Puerto Rico is the bottleneck where mail to and from the Virgin Islands goes to die, and this is gone. So they've re-ordered the part and with luck and help from the post office we'll have a car – next week. Which, not that I think about it, is just about the end of the month, which was my original plan but no real help.
Talking on the phone wth the guy at the mechanics, I could tell he felt awful, and I apparently was not the only customer who had this problem this week. So yelling wasn't going to do any good. But man, it's frustrating.
Meanwhile Tori and the family have had to get too and from school every day in a cab, which is not money we'd planned on spending. And I've been walking everywhere, taking the island's taxi vans (they're actually kind of cool, you can get anywhere on the island for $2.50, if you're not picky about when you get there.) Can't get to the major grocery store. This is getting old. Old old old.
There. Needed to get that off my chest. No, I don't feel one bit better, but at least I got the chance to vent.
jb
I'll talk about those next week – promise. Right now I just need to vent.
I knew I had a car problem, Bertha was dripping brake fluid for a couple of weeks – not a lot but noticeable. I planned to nurse it along until the end of the month. Keep a close eye on the fluid level, watch the drips in the carport.
That's not the frustrating part. A week ago Wednesday, on April 15, Tori got in and the brake pedal went down to the floor. Not because she has such powerful leg muscles (although she does) but because the slow leak had suddenly become a really bad one. You could sorta pump up the brakes, but it wasn't what you'd call a safe ride.
Last Friday I took the car down to the shop – THAT was an exciting ride, let me tell you. I got there, the guy said the calipers were shot. Not a surprise, I'd seen fluid leaking out from inside the brake unit. Had to be something like that. The problem - the part did not exist on the island. The part is never on the island. It had to be ordered. It would be in Monday.
It is now Friday and the part is still not here. It got shipped, it went through Miami, it got as far as San Juan and then disappeared off the face of the planet. Puerto Rico is the bottleneck where mail to and from the Virgin Islands goes to die, and this is gone. So they've re-ordered the part and with luck and help from the post office we'll have a car – next week. Which, not that I think about it, is just about the end of the month, which was my original plan but no real help.
Talking on the phone wth the guy at the mechanics, I could tell he felt awful, and I apparently was not the only customer who had this problem this week. So yelling wasn't going to do any good. But man, it's frustrating.
Meanwhile Tori and the family have had to get too and from school every day in a cab, which is not money we'd planned on spending. And I've been walking everywhere, taking the island's taxi vans (they're actually kind of cool, you can get anywhere on the island for $2.50, if you're not picky about when you get there.) Can't get to the major grocery store. This is getting old. Old old old.
There. Needed to get that off my chest. No, I don't feel one bit better, but at least I got the chance to vent.
jb
Monday, March 9, 2009
Plenty of daylight here
So back there on the mainland, you've all switched over to Daylight Savings Time. You're getting up in the dark for the sake of squeezing a little extra sunlight out of the late afternoon. Either that or you've been an hour late for everything today.
Here in the U.S.V.I. we don't worry about DST. People here are too relaxed to get all excited about the clock, which explains why islanders can be late for something without having daylight savings to use as an excuse.
Here, this close to the equator, the sun rises every morning right around six, and in the evening it sets right around six. And that's good enough for everybody.
From our perspective all your switch to DST means is that instead of being one hour ahead of the East Coast, we're at the same time. And instead of being four hours ahead of our friends and family on the West Coast, we're only three hours ahead. And all that means is when sending an e-mail you have to adjust when you send an e-mail how long you expect to wait for a reply. it also changes the calculations when making a phone call.
And it makes watching TV a little more convenient. I love "The Daily Show," but waiting until midnight is just too much. 11 to 11:30 I can do.
Enjoy your new schedule.
Here in the U.S.V.I. we don't worry about DST. People here are too relaxed to get all excited about the clock, which explains why islanders can be late for something without having daylight savings to use as an excuse.
Here, this close to the equator, the sun rises every morning right around six, and in the evening it sets right around six. And that's good enough for everybody.
From our perspective all your switch to DST means is that instead of being one hour ahead of the East Coast, we're at the same time. And instead of being four hours ahead of our friends and family on the West Coast, we're only three hours ahead. And all that means is when sending an e-mail you have to adjust when you send an e-mail how long you expect to wait for a reply. it also changes the calculations when making a phone call.
And it makes watching TV a little more convenient. I love "The Daily Show," but waiting until midnight is just too much. 11 to 11:30 I can do.
Enjoy your new schedule.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
There'll Always Be An England
SPORTS UPDATE: You will be relieved, no doubt, to learn that England has regained its cricket form and now beaten the West Indies team twice in a row after losing the opener of the series, which I wrote about here.
Or, as the AP has it, "Swann helped dismiss the home team for 285 in reply to the visitor's first innings of 566-9." Actually, the more I think about it, the more comprehensible that becomes. Quick! Must stop thinking!
No stunning yorkers or nudging to second slip in the AP report, but I was delighted to read that "the seamers did such a good job with the reverse swing ..." I imagine you're delighted, too.
Just thought you should know.
Or, as the AP has it, "Swann helped dismiss the home team for 285 in reply to the visitor's first innings of 566-9." Actually, the more I think about it, the more comprehensible that becomes. Quick! Must stop thinking!
No stunning yorkers or nudging to second slip in the AP report, but I was delighted to read that "the seamers did such a good job with the reverse swing ..." I imagine you're delighted, too.
Just thought you should know.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Physics update
A friend writes to say that St Croix must be "an entropical island."
Wish I'd thought of that.
jb
Wish I'd thought of that.
jb
Friday, February 13, 2009
Today's physics lesson and what it means
"As entropy increases, order decreases."
That's physics. Some rule or something. I heard it in college a gazillion years ago, although what I was doing in a class where someone was talking about physics I can't now recall. There must have been a reason.
But that little kernel of information remains with me, one of a small handful of facts that I have unaccountably retained over the years, stubbornly clinging to the inside of my head like a sodden Wheaties flake that dried on the table and now can't be scraped off. What it means, if I remember rightly and that's almost certainly not the case, is that entropy is a measure of order or organization, the lower the entropy the higher the organization. A heavy element, with it's cloud of electrons and it's massive nucleus has more order than a hydrogen atom. A molecule represents more order than an atom. A galaxy has more order than a diffuse cloud of gas. (I'm almost certain I'm getting this wrong, because I don’t think I understood it completely in college and that was a long time ago.)
And, in this universe we live in, the tendency is for entropy to increase. Order is always breaking down, big things slowly devolving into their constituent parts until someday (hopefully not soon but you never know) the entire universe (including all of us) will be one evenly spaced field of sub-atomic particles a tiny flicker of a degree above absolute zero.
Something like that.
And what in the world am I writing this for? Even if I'm right, and that seems highly unlikely, what could possibly be the point of wasting blog space on it?
Another way of stating that law - As entropy increases, order decreases – would be this simpler statement: Stuff breaks. A new law of physics! Call it Baur's Universal Constant.
That seems particularly apropos today. As I've noted, we had car trouble the last couple of months. We've had water problems. And those problems have redoubled this week. The water went out Wednesday, here it is Friday and we still don't have running water in the house. The plumber (nice guy, moved here four months ago from Texas) is here again and has tracked down three leaks in the supply line that feeds from the cistern to the pump. It doesn't mean water's leaking out, it means air is leaking in, the pump can't hold the prime and I can't take a shower. And I really need a shower by now. Three days without running water. I think I've told you the process I have to go through to flush the toilet, I won't belabor the point.
What's weird is (and here's where the physics lesson comes in,) nothing happened to suddenly cause these leaks. It's not like I ran over the pipe with the car, or a meteor hit or something. Tuesday everything worked fine. Wednesday, not. I can only think it has to do with a sudden, localized burst of entropy.
Bertha (our car) is similar. We bought her from a guy moving back to the states, so it's not like he was dumping a lemon. She's been a good rig for us. Until the ignition problem started in December. Then a brake problem in January. And a tiny leak in the cooling system the mechanic couldn't find, but he told us to keep an eye on the radiator level and carry a jug of coolant with us at all times. That's how it is with cars, they run great, but once a problem starts, there's a cascade effect.
Tori was driving to school yesterday morning with Max and Millie in the car. They had just turned off the highway (the island's only four-lane road) and were heading up East Airport Road when there was a tremendous crashing/grinding sound, as if they'd been hit. Tori pulled over and looked. No damage. She got back in and started driving - and immediately the car started shaking violently. It was barely controllable. She pulled into the gas station just up the road and looked underneath. The rear torsion bar had snapped like a twig. Had it happened 10 minutes earlier, when she was driving 60 on the highway, it's horrifying to think what might have happened.
As luck would have it, the gas station she pulled in at was not more than 200 yards from an auto repair place. She VERY slowly drove to it, then called school and got someone to come out and pick them up.
The guys at Unique Auto Repair were able to fix it at a fraction of what I thought it would cost. There was no replacement part on the island (that's often the case) but a torsion bar isn't a big, complicated thing - it's a bar that essentially holds the rear wheels in place while you drive. No big deal. They welded it back together, reinforced it, and charged us very little. When school was over she was able to get back out there, pick it up and drive home, rattled but otherwise safe and sound.
So that story has a happy ending. Considering how it could have ended, we'll take it.
But it's just another warning to be on the lookout for entropy in your life. I've got a birthday coming up, and ever since I turned 50 I've felt my personal entropy rising exponentially. Here on St. Croix, it's even more so. This is a high-entropy part of the universe. So perhaps for my birthday I'm going to see if anybody sells an entropy meter. Probably Radio Shack. Or Kmart. Or Mr. Dollar - one of our favorite stores on the island. He sells everything, and like the sign out front says, "If we don't have it, you don't need it." Since I need a personal entropy meter, it stands to reason that he must have it. Although I recall vaguely from another college class (Logic) that "universal affirmatives can be only partly converted" - whatever that means - so I should probably call ahead first and ask.
But that'd be a really useful tool to have. It wouldn't stop entropy from increasing, but at least it'd give me a warning. That's all I ask. Although, given local entropic conditions, the meter would be the next thing to break.
That's physics. Some rule or something. I heard it in college a gazillion years ago, although what I was doing in a class where someone was talking about physics I can't now recall. There must have been a reason.
But that little kernel of information remains with me, one of a small handful of facts that I have unaccountably retained over the years, stubbornly clinging to the inside of my head like a sodden Wheaties flake that dried on the table and now can't be scraped off. What it means, if I remember rightly and that's almost certainly not the case, is that entropy is a measure of order or organization, the lower the entropy the higher the organization. A heavy element, with it's cloud of electrons and it's massive nucleus has more order than a hydrogen atom. A molecule represents more order than an atom. A galaxy has more order than a diffuse cloud of gas. (I'm almost certain I'm getting this wrong, because I don’t think I understood it completely in college and that was a long time ago.)
And, in this universe we live in, the tendency is for entropy to increase. Order is always breaking down, big things slowly devolving into their constituent parts until someday (hopefully not soon but you never know) the entire universe (including all of us) will be one evenly spaced field of sub-atomic particles a tiny flicker of a degree above absolute zero.
Something like that.
And what in the world am I writing this for? Even if I'm right, and that seems highly unlikely, what could possibly be the point of wasting blog space on it?
Another way of stating that law - As entropy increases, order decreases – would be this simpler statement: Stuff breaks. A new law of physics! Call it Baur's Universal Constant.
That seems particularly apropos today. As I've noted, we had car trouble the last couple of months. We've had water problems. And those problems have redoubled this week. The water went out Wednesday, here it is Friday and we still don't have running water in the house. The plumber (nice guy, moved here four months ago from Texas) is here again and has tracked down three leaks in the supply line that feeds from the cistern to the pump. It doesn't mean water's leaking out, it means air is leaking in, the pump can't hold the prime and I can't take a shower. And I really need a shower by now. Three days without running water. I think I've told you the process I have to go through to flush the toilet, I won't belabor the point.
What's weird is (and here's where the physics lesson comes in,) nothing happened to suddenly cause these leaks. It's not like I ran over the pipe with the car, or a meteor hit or something. Tuesday everything worked fine. Wednesday, not. I can only think it has to do with a sudden, localized burst of entropy.
Bertha (our car) is similar. We bought her from a guy moving back to the states, so it's not like he was dumping a lemon. She's been a good rig for us. Until the ignition problem started in December. Then a brake problem in January. And a tiny leak in the cooling system the mechanic couldn't find, but he told us to keep an eye on the radiator level and carry a jug of coolant with us at all times. That's how it is with cars, they run great, but once a problem starts, there's a cascade effect.
Tori was driving to school yesterday morning with Max and Millie in the car. They had just turned off the highway (the island's only four-lane road) and were heading up East Airport Road when there was a tremendous crashing/grinding sound, as if they'd been hit. Tori pulled over and looked. No damage. She got back in and started driving - and immediately the car started shaking violently. It was barely controllable. She pulled into the gas station just up the road and looked underneath. The rear torsion bar had snapped like a twig. Had it happened 10 minutes earlier, when she was driving 60 on the highway, it's horrifying to think what might have happened.
As luck would have it, the gas station she pulled in at was not more than 200 yards from an auto repair place. She VERY slowly drove to it, then called school and got someone to come out and pick them up.
The guys at Unique Auto Repair were able to fix it at a fraction of what I thought it would cost. There was no replacement part on the island (that's often the case) but a torsion bar isn't a big, complicated thing - it's a bar that essentially holds the rear wheels in place while you drive. No big deal. They welded it back together, reinforced it, and charged us very little. When school was over she was able to get back out there, pick it up and drive home, rattled but otherwise safe and sound.
So that story has a happy ending. Considering how it could have ended, we'll take it.
But it's just another warning to be on the lookout for entropy in your life. I've got a birthday coming up, and ever since I turned 50 I've felt my personal entropy rising exponentially. Here on St. Croix, it's even more so. This is a high-entropy part of the universe. So perhaps for my birthday I'm going to see if anybody sells an entropy meter. Probably Radio Shack. Or Kmart. Or Mr. Dollar - one of our favorite stores on the island. He sells everything, and like the sign out front says, "If we don't have it, you don't need it." Since I need a personal entropy meter, it stands to reason that he must have it. Although I recall vaguely from another college class (Logic) that "universal affirmatives can be only partly converted" - whatever that means - so I should probably call ahead first and ask.
But that'd be a really useful tool to have. It wouldn't stop entropy from increasing, but at least it'd give me a warning. That's all I ask. Although, given local entropic conditions, the meter would be the next thing to break.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Waiting for the Plumber
Here's the thing about water on St. Croix and most Caribbean islands - There isn't any.
Oh sure, we're surrounded by water - we're on an island, after all, and from almost any vantage point we get views of some of the most spectacularly blue waters on Earth. But it's like in the Coleridge poem:
Water, water everywhere,
and all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
(Yes, I know most people think it's "but not a drop to drink." Tell them to look it up.)
But all that water is, of course, salt water. You can't drink it. St. Croix doesn't have any huge freshwater aquifer to drill for, no rolling rivers or reservoirs to draw from. We've got -
The rain. Virtually all the drinking water on St,. Croix falls from the sky, runs down your roof and is funneled into a cistern below the house. Then it's pumped up by your water pump and that's your water supply. So rain from time to time is a very good thing. (And by the way, rainwater doesn't have any minerals in it, so residents are advised to take a vitamin supplement with minerals. Just thought that was interesting.)
So fresh water is a pretty valuable commodity, and a Crucian takes pride and/or comfort in a large, brimming reservoir the way friends of mine back in Oregon take comfort and pride in a huge wood pile for the stove or fireplace.
This all comes to mind because there's something wrong with our pump today. We actually have two cisterns - one under the front porch and another under the kitchen, with pipes and valves to switch from one to the other. Between them we can probably store around 10,000 to 12,000 gallons of water. But the back one is empty, and the front one is kinda low. But more to the point, the pump is not drawing water out of the cistern (yes, I've checked, the valves are set for the front cistern, but thanks for the suggestion.)
To flush the toilets while waiting for the plumber (due in about another hour) I have to open the cistern (the concrete lid of the thing is heavy, maybe 80 pounds or more,) drop a bucket down on a rope to pull up a couple of gallons to pour into the tanks. Same for washing dishes last night.
It doesn't pay to look too closely into the reservoir. A big concrete space, and when they're empty a kind of creepy nothing. They are not particularly clean. The water is clear, but there's "stuff" in there. That's why we have a filter on the kitchen tap, and buy bottled water for drinking. Showers are short - Navy showers, where you get wet, turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water and rinse off. And you don't flush for just anything. In fact, there are actually restaurants down here with this little jingle posted on the walls:
In this land of fun and sun
We never flush for Number One.
Just to keep the poetic theme going.
I also suspect our gutters may be plugged, which would explain why the cisterns don't seem to charge the way I'd expect despite the fact that we've had a couple of good rainfalls. But that's a different problem for a different day and a different blog post.
Right now I'm just waiting for the plumber, because I tried everything I know and there's still no water running in the house.
jb
Oh sure, we're surrounded by water - we're on an island, after all, and from almost any vantage point we get views of some of the most spectacularly blue waters on Earth. But it's like in the Coleridge poem:
Water, water everywhere,
and all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
(Yes, I know most people think it's "but not a drop to drink." Tell them to look it up.)
But all that water is, of course, salt water. You can't drink it. St. Croix doesn't have any huge freshwater aquifer to drill for, no rolling rivers or reservoirs to draw from. We've got -
The rain. Virtually all the drinking water on St,. Croix falls from the sky, runs down your roof and is funneled into a cistern below the house. Then it's pumped up by your water pump and that's your water supply. So rain from time to time is a very good thing. (And by the way, rainwater doesn't have any minerals in it, so residents are advised to take a vitamin supplement with minerals. Just thought that was interesting.)
So fresh water is a pretty valuable commodity, and a Crucian takes pride and/or comfort in a large, brimming reservoir the way friends of mine back in Oregon take comfort and pride in a huge wood pile for the stove or fireplace.
This all comes to mind because there's something wrong with our pump today. We actually have two cisterns - one under the front porch and another under the kitchen, with pipes and valves to switch from one to the other. Between them we can probably store around 10,000 to 12,000 gallons of water. But the back one is empty, and the front one is kinda low. But more to the point, the pump is not drawing water out of the cistern (yes, I've checked, the valves are set for the front cistern, but thanks for the suggestion.)
To flush the toilets while waiting for the plumber (due in about another hour) I have to open the cistern (the concrete lid of the thing is heavy, maybe 80 pounds or more,) drop a bucket down on a rope to pull up a couple of gallons to pour into the tanks. Same for washing dishes last night.
It doesn't pay to look too closely into the reservoir. A big concrete space, and when they're empty a kind of creepy nothing. They are not particularly clean. The water is clear, but there's "stuff" in there. That's why we have a filter on the kitchen tap, and buy bottled water for drinking. Showers are short - Navy showers, where you get wet, turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water and rinse off. And you don't flush for just anything. In fact, there are actually restaurants down here with this little jingle posted on the walls:
In this land of fun and sun
We never flush for Number One.
Just to keep the poetic theme going.
I also suspect our gutters may be plugged, which would explain why the cisterns don't seem to charge the way I'd expect despite the fact that we've had a couple of good rainfalls. But that's a different problem for a different day and a different blog post.
Right now I'm just waiting for the plumber, because I tried everything I know and there's still no water running in the house.
jb
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