Wow! We're watching the news with interest as the cold air envelopes all of you in below freezing conditions with snow and freezing rain. Icy wind is blowing across the country from kids in Oregon to Mom in Missouri to Paul in Chicago and to Colette in North Carolina. Berit and I are feeling a little guilty here on Bonaire. The water temperature has dropped from 84 degrees to 79 degrees and we've added hooded vests to our normal 3 mil exposure gear and still get out of the water talking about how cold it has become.
I suppose "hardship" is truly relative and in spite of the many hard knocks we all take in life it's important to count our blessings and focus on the positives in our lives.
We enjoyed seeing you all over the holidays and sharing in your joys and helping to shoulder your pain as life continues to bring each of you a measure of happiness and sadness along with myriad challenges and daily opportunity for choice in future direction. We're constantly amazed at the courage and strength you each demonstrate in your lives and are very proud to know we are your parents. Our advice to you is this: take courage.
We returned to Bonaire to find Rexx in fine shape for a 15 year old dog, and in spite of his advanced age he can still sometimes run and jump around and act like the puppy he once was.
Uncle Paul flew back with us and for a week we were able to relax and share memories and catch up on family news and still find time to double his diving experience in our warm blue waters. We were lucky to find octopus, squid, turtles, eels and of course lionfish at some of our favorite dive sites.
Berit and I have found the reefs have been helped a bunch by the efforts of the hunters and sometimes we can't find a single lionfish on our dives. We were lucky to have been invited to dive with our friend Hagen in an area off limits to divers and found the reef teeming with the invasive fish. It goes to show what the situation would be all along our reef without hunters. We took 150 fish that day without effort.
Our latest quest has been to find the elusive seahorse and have found one at Oil Slick Leap and heard tell of three more at Salt Pier. We're looking forward to the arrival of our friends Doug and Dianne from Canada to continue the search.
We get far less news here from abroad, but are watching the machinations and national political chaos with interest. I feel pretty good about the way things are going back home and have hope that more will be accomplished in the second term than I had expected. Go Barack!
We're also watching Tiger on his comeback trail at Torrey Pines and have heard rumors that he's getting back together with Elin. The rumor is he's willing to sign an agreement that says, if he cheats on her again he'll forfeit a 300 million dollar trust fund. Wow! That's an expensive dalliance. So much for our telenovellas.
Robert says "Hello" and is very much a part of our lives here as usual; he has a new puppy named Bumpy.
We were disappointed that we were not visited during the last three weeks by Splitty McForkson and believed he'd become iquana stew for someone, when he finally showed up looking fit and happy. We wonder now if maybe Splitty is actually a mom and was off tending to her new family. We have seen a new crop of small green iquanas but of course have no way of knowing who belongs to whom. We're calling them Scrappy Doo, Scrappy too and Scrappy three, because we can hardly tell the apart!
Local government issues remain strange but manageable, and there have been a couple of recent changes. The iconic Netherlands Radio broadcast towers at 1000 Steps have been removed and the decades old brothel, Patchi Place, has been closed. For even casual visitors to Bonaire, these were places synonymous with the island and landmarks everyone used for directions. Time marches on.
As for us, we're still waiting for Frank at De Freewieler to receive shipment (from Holland) of Berit's new bike, and we're working our way through season four of The West Wing which remains one of our all time favorite programs. It's amazing how these ten year old story lines could be taken verbatim out of the current headlines. Aaron Sorkin is a genius!
Thanks to our friend, Jerry, we have a new acquisition for the garden; a Flame Tree which we're told will bloom with vivid red flowers in a couple of years. So, you see, we too are planning for the future!
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| Digging the hole. |
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| Mission accomplished! |
Hope all is well with you.
Love,
Dad
Dad
P.S. STAY WARM!!
