February 2 - 22, 2011

Lots of visitors early in this period. Jeff's 60th birthday party went very well - we were having too much fun to remember to take pictures. Mark and Janet Mara spent several days with us, and we went to visit the Royal Palm Preserve. It is an old eco-tourism site in the Great Morass near Negril, which is not very active at this time, but still offers guided tours along their extensive boardwalk. We hired Honey, one of our oldest Jamaican friends, to take us. It was good to see him again!

Up at the house we harvested our first plantains, and actually sold one bunch to Bev, our veggie lady. Tom finished tiling the concrete sofa and JC designed the tiling for one side of her sink and worked with Tom to get them set and grouted.

Charlie Mayer and his lovely daughter Lily visited, and at one point Lily came rushing into the house, announcing that she had heard a Puma! An interesting concept, as the nearest Puma is probably at least a thousand miles away. She then announced that she had found some dinosaur bones in a cage. This had us scratching our heads until she took us downstairs and showed us the dinosaur bones (bovine leg bones, to be exact) that we had inside the grate of our water tank room. Lily also pronounced the concrete sofa as "really, really amazing".

We have also started creating a place to park cars behind the Spiegel residence. This will involve building a retaining wall and leveling a lot of marl fill. While beginning this we uncovered a "forty legs", a very large Jamaican centipede with a very vicious and painful sting. We quickly chopped off his head and then got both the head and the body into a rum bottle with some overproof rum. This is the local remedy if we should ever be unfortunate enough to have someone stung by one of them - applying rum in which the forty legs has been steeped is the best available antidote. Here's hoping we never have to test this!

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