Happy New Year 2010

2010 began with a bang, as Tom celebrated his 61st birthday by helping Alfred set up the annual Negril New Year's Eve fireworks show. Since then we've been doing a lot of gardening and modifying the landscape around the house. We've taken down most of the row of "junk" trees in front of the house that were growing up into our wonderful view of western Jamaica. We have been working hard on the network of paths around the house, paving them with white marl dust, and starting lots more plants. At the rate Tai Jean and JC are adding plants to the Yard, Tom decided he'd better get the paths established before there was no room to fit them in!

JC joined Tom down in the mosaic shop to design the mosaic work on the remaining three sides of the outdoor utility sink. She calls the design "Broken Dishes". Tom took a cue from the quilt pattern book, and has tiled one of the arches with Flying Geese.

The weather has been unusual, with much more rain than is typical for January - the plants really love it - and some of what passes for very cold weather down here. It actually got down into the low 60's a couple of nights!

Our social calendar is also in high gear, as most of our friends are coming down in January this year. Too bad that they got to experience our rare bad weather, but they said it still felt warm to them!

Though Haiti is quite close to Jamaica, we felt nothing here, except dismay at the scenes of devastation on the news. The outpouring of help from the Jamaican populace has been quite amazing - they say "You're never too poor to help out someone who has it worse than you".

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