Saying Goodbye to Belize

On Saturday we are leaving Belize. We have been here for just over nine months and it is time for us to move on. We have had a wonderful time here and I know we are all going to miss this place in our own way, but we are definitley ready to return to our lives in Seattle.

We have had so many unforgettable experiences here--snorkeling with sharks, turtles, and eagle rays; watching an octopus change colors as it swims among the coral; climbing to the top of an ancient Mayan pyramid in the middle of the jungle at dusk while listening to the cries of howler monkeys; holding a wild crocodile; sailing on turquoise blue waters; making chocolate from scratch with the Mayan farmer who grew the beans; learning how to play drums from a Garifuna musician; marching in the Belizean independence day parade; exploring caves filled with the reamains of human sacrifices; watching toucans and parrots fly from tree to tree; catching lightning bugs in the empty field just down the road.

The boys have become excellent swimmers and snorkelers and are extremely confident cyclists. They've made friends with kids from all over the world and learned how to fit into a very different culture. We've all become more laid back and more patient, and have enjoyed having a lot less stuff but a lot more time to do new things and just be together.

But there have been frustrations. The same laid back attitude that we usually appreciate can be maddening at times, particularly when something actually really truly does need to happen at a specific time or in a particular way. Our rental house has been in a more or less constant state of repair since we moved in. We've dealt with giant black scorpions, cockroaches, ants, mosquitoes, sand fleas, and dozens of other species of insects in our house on a daily basis. I was stung by jellyfish pretty much everywhere on my body. At times it seems like everything we own has either rusted, rotted, molded, fallen apart, or been lost or stolen. And most of the time it is SO.FREAKING.HOT.

I love biodiversity. But not this particular manifestation of it, and especially not in my kitchen cabinets.

Jellyfish stings on my leg.

Baby, it's hot outside.

I am sure the frustrations will diminish in our memories over time and the many, many happy moments will stay with us. The day-to-day memories that I will cherish include the daily bike ride to school with the boys, hanging out with our friends at the beach, watching the fishing guides catch baitfish in the shallows early in the morning, and listening to the geckos chirp while I brush my teeth (eat more of those bugs, guys!).

After Lochlan's party, we invited all of our friends to join us at the Catamaran Beach Bar for a farewell drink. Not everyone could make it, and we didn't get pictures of everyone (so please don't be offended if you don't see yourself here!), but it was a wonderful opportunity to see most of our friends one last time and say goodbye.

Erik, Ana, and Lochlan

Kelly and Dawn

Randy (Liam's sailing coach)

Renita and Cindy

Anthony and Teacher Lisa

Robert, Oscar, and Jeffrey

Lochlan and Carlos

Sirwin and Lucy

Teacher Susan, Paul, Liam, and Lochlan

Rachel

Lochlan and Louke

So we are looking forward to going home. BUT FIRST--we are going to travel through Central America. Our first stop is Guatemala, then on to Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. We will fly back to Belize for a day to pick up our stuff and then north to Seattle!

To the new friends we've made here in Belize:  thank you for being part of our lives and making us feel so welcome here! To our friends in Seattle:  we will be home soon and we are looking forward to seeing your smiling faces!

Goodbye Belize!

Lochlan's Birthday

We celebrated Lochlan's eight birthday weekend before last with a party at Caribbean Villas. The day started with cards from Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa Kaplan, and Grandma and Grandpa Stevenson.

Lochlan opening cards while his Bro and buddy Kerry look on (Kerry was at our place for a sleepover the night before)

We asked him what type of party he wanted and his immediate response was "pool party!" Amy talked to Cindy at Caribbean Villas and made arrangements for us to host the party there. She also lined up the Toucan Jumper, a portable bungee jumping contraption the boys had used once before during a party at Caribbean Villas.

Unfortunately there were some broken parts on the Toucan Jumper that could not be replaced or repaired in time so they had to cancel at the last minute. This actually turned out to be OK because the kids had just as much fun (if not more) swimming in the pool, playing on the beach, making scrounge art, playing "pin the tail on the spotted eagle ray" and coconut bowling. We had lots of snacks and a delicious cake from Annie's. The party went very well thank to Amy's hard work making all of the preparations. The weather also cooperated fabulously--this was the first sunny day we'd had all week!

The pool was a big hit

Lochlan and I carved a shark out of a watermelon!

And Amy made palm trees from oranges, bananas, and kiwis

Even the bar wished Lochlan a happy birthday (that is Paul the sailboat guy in the background)

The tailless eagle ray (drawn by Liam with a little help from Dad)

The kiddos waiting for their turn to pin the tail on

Nathan lines one up

Aiden puts his tail on the board

Coconut bowling! (the pins are old coke bottles filled with sand)

Birthday Boy with his family

My favorite part about the whole party is that Lochlan decided, completely on his own, to not ask for presents but rather to ask for donations to three different charities--Saga (the local humane society), Belize Red Cross, and Liberty Children's Home (a big orphanage in Belize City). He raised just over $80 for each of the charities and delivered the money in person later the following week. He even made it into the paper! There was a bit of a mixup and they put down his brother's name, but that is definitely Lochlan.We are so proud of our birthday boy.

Lochlan with his donation box

Making the donation to Liberty Children's Home

Making the donation to Saga

Later in the week we finished Lochlan's birthday celebrations with dinner at his favorite restaurant, Caroline's Kitchen.

Lochlan getting a big birthday hug from Caroline

Mothers Day on the Island

For Mother's Day the boys made cards and helped me select a bouquet of colorful flowers from the garden. We made her a nice big breakfast (veggie omelet with toasted cinnamon bread from the Baker) and the boys gave her the cards.

Wake up call!

Cards and breakfast for Mom

Garden flowers

Liam caught a "Mother's Day" anole for his Mama

Then we headed downtown to watch the finish of the big kayak race. It was a very windy day--about 20-25 knots--and the kayakers were running a couple of hours late. We visited a couple of galleries, but mostly just sat on the beach and enjoyed the sun while the boys played in the sand.

Enjoying a cold fizzy on the beach

Huge waves were booming against the reef, and even inside the reef the waves were quite impressive. As we sat on the beach enjoying the sunshine and watching the boys play in the sand, I saw a skiff towing all of the Optis that had been sailed north the day before. Then, I saw a sailboat! It was making close to hull speed under storm jib alone. My first thought was "Who are those maniacs?!" so I took a picture and zoomed way in, and sure enough, it was our friends Sirwin and Lucy! (Well done guys, and sorry for thinking you were maniacs.)

Optis getting towed south

Sirwin, Lucy, and Gabby sailing south (maniacs, I tell you!)

Eventually we were too hungry to wait any longer, so we got a table at Caliente, a Mexi-Belizean restaurant we've been wanting to try for some time. We had a great view of the ocean from our table and were able to run out to the beach to watch the finish as it happened.

The winners cross the finish line

Kayaks on the beach after the conclusion of the race

The food was delicious, and it turned out the restaurant is owned by a parent from the Island Academy. Her daughter is not in either of our boys' classes, so we had not had many opportunities to talk to her, but she was super friendly and very chatty.

Waiting for lunch

A boy and his Mama

We rode our bikes home in mid-afternoon with full bellies and big smiles.

The Things I Fix

I am not a naturally handy person. When I was a kid, I enjoyed building things with Legos, but was never really into taking things apart to see how they worked, tricking out my bike, wood working, electronics, or any of that 'handy' stuff. When Amy and I started dating, she had about 10 times more tools than me (not a difficult feat, since the sum total of my tool collection consisted of a small Swiss Army knife).

However, this has slowly changed over the years to the point where I can sorta kinda fix some things some of the time. Within the past few years, I rebuilt the inside of a sailboat (with the use of a boat shop, some sweet tools, and a lot of really good advice from my friend Chris), rebuilt our back deck, and started doing my own bike maintenance. I also started to do more and more of the repairs to our house, but only up to a certain point.

Since we've been in Belize, I've had to fix a lot of things, mostly bicycles as I've blogged about before. On the bikes, I've replaced three bottom brackets (one of them twice), wheel bearings, headset bearings, pedals, many inner tubes and tires, and entire wheels; and just recently I disassembled and overhauled the coaster brake on my rear hub. Here in our rental house I've repaired door mechanisms, toilets, and light fixtures (the bigger stuff I've left to our property managers)

About three weeks ago I was faced with a very, very big repair challenge. My desktop computer had become increasingly noisy and was getting hotter and hotter. Several months before we moved to Belize the machine was doing the same thing, only much worse, and it got to the point where it wouldn't even boot. I took it to Progressive Tech to get it looked at. Turns out that even though I regularly blow the dust out of the case with compressed air, the cooling system in my graphics card is poorly designed and it traps dust inside the card. So the PT guys took the thing apart, cleaned it up, and it was good as new.

It is pretty dusty here during the dry season and I knew I was dealing with the same problem. I'm pretty comfortable with computers, but not so comfortable with disassembling the components. So I had a look at the tech shop here in San Pedro, CSM 2000, and after perusing their website for about 3.2 nanoseconds decided it would probably not be wise to entrust my family's livelihood to that guy.

However I did buy some thermal paste from CSM 2000, which turned out to be the last tube on the island (whew!).

Here is how the repair went down:

My computer, a Dell Studio XPS

The inside of the computer. Doesn't look too dusty, right?

The graphics card, an ATI Radeon 5770. It is a fairly decent graphics card (very nice for the mapping work I do), so it has a lot of memory and the memory gets very hot. Therefore, it has its own onboard fan. See that blue cable in the upper right hand side?

That blue cable is how the hard drive communicates with the motherboard. Note that it runs through an opening in the graphics card. Very important to do everything in the right order.

The graphics card has been extracted.

I loosened the bracket that holds the heat sink, and the entire card, together (it's the little quasi-x-shaped bit in the upper left). There's a fair amount of dust on the top of the fan housing. Also, note the gray square in the middle of the GPU heat sink, just to the right of the fan housing. It is thermal paste and was dry as a bone and cracked.

Here is the heat exchanger, which I pulled out of the  housing. That's a lot of dust!

I cleared out the dust, removed the nasty old thermal paste, then wiped everything down with alcohol wipes. I applied the new thermal paste, put everything back together in what I hoped was the right order, crossed my fingers--and the machine worked!! And it was much, much quieter.

The most stressful aspect of this entire operation was knowing that if I screwed it up, it would be extremely difficult (or impossible) to get replacement parts. Fortunately for me, my family, and especially my clients, the repair was successful (thus far) and I learned a lot about graphics cards in the process.

Household Topography, and a Mini-Break on the South Island

A few days before the Moores arrived, I was busily working away at my desk and the boys were relaxing on the couch in front of the air conditioner after a very hot bike ride home. A couple days previously a cold front had moved through, but now it was hot hot hot. I had my head phones in and was listening to the usual work mix of death metal/thrash/hardcore/reggae when I heard a POP! Then another POP! I took off my headphones and turned around, fully expecting to see the boys smashing light bulbs against their foreheads (or something similarly loud, destructive, and life threatening) but they just stared at me with eyebrows raised and a quizzical expression on their faces.

Then we heard it again--POP! POP! It sounded like it was coming from the floor near the fridge, and then I notice the tiles were no longer flat, but sloping up towards each other. Then I watched about ten more tiles pop up one after another in a line from our kitchen to the far wall. It was pretty crazy. The end result:  the bottom floor of our house now had topography.

Newly formed mountain range through the living room.

Houston, we have a problem.

An unfortunate consequence of this new found topography is that it was now very tricky to walk through our house, and a couple of the tiles broke, exposing some pokey shards and sharp edges near the broken bits. We told our property managers about the situation, they consulted with the owner, and we were given the option of fixing the floor right away or just living with it until we move out. After discussing it at length with Amy, we decided that having to cope with the repairs for a few days would be a hassle, but having to walk around busted and uneven tiles every day for six weeks would be an even bigger hassle, so we told them to go for it and have the floor fixed. 

When the tile guy came by to scope out the job I told him that I'd relocate my office upstairs and we'd clear out most of our stuff from the ground floor. I asked him if he would please be sure to cover the opening to the stairwell with a tarp, blanket, or some other suitable covering (there is no door). "Oh yes sir, no problem." And could they cover the gas stove too? "Yes, of course."

About five days later his demo crew showed up. I helped them move the fridge out of the way, covered our bookcase with a sheet, and confirmed that they would be covering the opening to the stairwell and the gas stove. "Yes, sir, no problem."

So I went upstairs and started working. About a half hour later the demo started in earnest and the noise was quite loud, so I popped in my headphones. About an hour later I thought I'd go downstairs and check on things. Absolutely everything in the ground floor was covered with dust. There was no tarp, blanket, or other suitable covering blocking the entrance to the stairs. There was nothing on the gas stove except a thick layer of dust. I asked the demo guy why he didn't cover anything, as I had asked. He just stared at me. I said "You didn't bring anything, did you?" He looked at me, and smiled, and said "No sir, I don't got nothing. But if you had some plastic that would work." I pictured my computers clogging with dust and ran upstairs to grab a sheet, which I jammed in place using a shower rod I swiped from the boys' bathroom. That kept most of the dust from making its way upstairs.

Gecko footprints in the dust on top of our bookcase. This bookcase is about 20 feet away from where the work was taking place, and it was covered.

However, the main floor of our house, including the kitchen, was pretty much unusable for four days. Our wonderful property managers invited us to spend the night with their family at a large rental property they manage on the south part of the island. We happily took them up on the offer, not only to get out of our dust-caked house, but also because our kids and their kids get along together so well.

The house is farther south than I had been before, about 3.5 miles south of the town center. Just past Victoria House the road transitions from cobblestones to dirt, and it starts to feel a bit more like Caye Caulker. There are a lot more trees and we noticed many birds that we don't commonly see near our place.

The house itself is right on the beach, with a pool in the yard. There is a dock that provided endless hours of fishing entertainment to Liam and Nicholas, and I don't think Lochlan left the pool the entire time we were there. I split my time between throwing the kids as high as possible in the pool and helping the fishermen with their gear, setting bait, and removing hooks from toothy fish.

Lochlan enjoying the pool

Alexandra, chillin'

Liam and Nicholas scouting the fish

The barracuda Liam caught

The barracuda Nicholas caught

They also caught some very cool looking paddle crabs (which were all released)

The two fishermen caught a barracuda (!) each, and I cleaned, scaled, and cooked them up for our communal supper. (As an aside, I cleaned the fish on the breakwater of the property, and I chucked the head of the bigger fish into the water in front of me, about 15 feet away. About two minutes later, an immature magnificent frigatebird swooped down and plucked the head out of the water, threw his head back, and swallowed it in mid-air right in front of me! It was a very awesome moment.)

Before dinner the four adults took a walk down to the end of the dock to enjoy the sunset and a cold beverage. A huge spotted eagle ray swam right under the dock and we watched the pelicans and frigate birds patrolling the waters around us.

Our hosts, Erik and Ana

Amy enjoying the sunset

The eagle ray that swam beneath us

Barracuda is surprisingly tasty, and although the bigger fish can accumulate dangerous levels of mercury, these were fairly small juveniles so I felt comfortable trying a few bites.

Barracuda in the pan!

Ready for dinner

The next morning was very mellow and relaxing, with more swimming, fishing, and lounging. There were plenty of birds flying around, and Liam spotted an indigo bunting and a scarlet tanager--in the same tree! We packed up our stuff and biked home around noon, grateful for the opportunity to relax with friends in such an amazing setting. It really felt like we were in a completely different place, not just a few miles down the road.

Amy was up super early and caught this shot of the sunrise from the end of the dock

Liam and I were also up early (but not that early) and caught this enormous stone crab. At first we were going to kill it, eat it, and keep the claws as souvenirs. But Liam thought it over, and decided it would be better to release it. He thought it was just too beautiful to kill. The next day he told his teacher about it, and she said "Oh, well, I have a stone crab claw and was just about to throw it away, so you can have that one!" He has since had it made into a necklace.

The owner of the house very graciously agreed to pay for someone to clean up all the dust, and she showed up the next day. Everything is just about back to normal now.