28 July 2005 21:10
hi. hola. whichever. i'm halfway between starved and sated. hopefully i'm moving in the direction fo the latter. i'm somewhat dubious becuase at the moment i'm slurping cock soup, a jamaican specialty that if nothing else, will "awaken" you from whatever lethargy you might find yourself in. the "cock" in the title demonstrates its faint resemblence to chicken noodle soup, but that's about where the resemblence ends. it's not really for the faint of heart. or faint of palate, whichever. i usually manage to bring tears to my eyes, but that might have somethign to do with drinking it from the bowl instead of using a spoon like civilized peoples. or that i tend to use about 75% of the water recommended...which does nothing to dilute whatever falls under the rather general title of "spices" on the ingredients list.but it has occured to me that i never really posted what went down with emily. i could do it in one word: nothing. for kingston anyway, southwestern portions of jamaica suffered heavy rain falls and flooding. for us in kingston though, emily was much tamer than dennis, who wasn't bad in the first place--even though the eye of emily passed just 130 miles south of kignston.
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The Terror of Emily.
16 July, Saturday: 1206
I just moved my seat of operations down to the salters.. just in time for the rain to stop. we're supposedly in the midst of the hurricane, it's about 130 miles SSE of here (though looking at the map it looks more like SSW, I'm sure the weather channel knows what it's talking about). roland and I buttoned things down yesterday after our dispersal flights before he fled the country. again. he left around 1345, after a struggle getting his flight plan through. i was listening to manley tower throughout the afternoon, they were having serious issues keeping communications open with kingston center in town. one of kingstons typical afternoon cells moved in from the NE coming off teh mountains and took out both the phones and the juice at the CAA, so they were hopping to stay on top of things. i heard today then that roland made it into mexico okay, though i didn't hear whether they had to shell out the bucks to keep the airport open past seven for him. he probably scraped in just before closing.
meanwhile i finished things at work and put CP to bed, this time we buried her even farther in the AirJ hangar, right in front of an A319 with it's left wing hovered protectively over our plane. awwww, cute. i stole my stereo (i think i should be allowed to do that) as well as the computer. Although emily is turning out to be even tamer than dennis, she had the potential to be a lot worse to us here in kingston. roland and i boarded windows and shipped our air compressor and similar items to the veterinary center in town. not wanting my stereo to get wet if the office got pounded i decided to move it to a safer location. this meant the backseat of the toyota overnight, since i wanted to bring it here to the salters for the day, but didn't feel like carrying it inside just for the night. "safer" might be a misnomer, since i went to take some stuff out tot he car this morning around seven and accidentally left it unlocked until i left at 1130.
so we've got the stereo plugged in (i stole the ups from work too, though that's probably not mine to keep long-term) and some fleetwood mac going. bring on the storm.
it's been raining since about nine, i 've been productively watching movies. (i turned the tv on to watch the weatherchannel. i should have known better). coming down here was the typical deal of driving through the gutter system (aka streets) in an inch or so of water. no gullies overflowing yet, it's been raining steadily, but not tremendously--i was able to unload the car without the aide of an umbrella. talking to my personal weather technician (eric in mexico looking at radar on the internet), he said there was a band of tstorms headed our way. until they arrive, we've had absolutely no wind, the rain has been falling straight down. it's like living through a rainy day in virginia. low visibility and steady light rain from a stable air mass with stratus clouds. absolutely nothing at all to indicate there's a substantial hurricane centered just 130 miles south of here.
1434
no thunderstorms have materialized, and the rain has actually lessened. doc and tessa left to walk over to ron and gussie's to pick up something, the rest of us are here in the lving room quietly listening to marley. jesse's setting up "the settler's of katan" a semi-board game, which we'll be playing momentarily. we've been enjoying ourselves, we listened to "the mennonite song" a song set at an mcc sale poking fun at the mennonite game. we then spent five minutes educating ryan on first cousins two generations removed, second and a half cousins, and being second cousins with one person more than once. he seemed to catch on fairly quick, only time will tell if it sticks.
in other news, i had my first ever pancake with chocolate chips in it. it's hard to go wrong with chocolate chips, and i don't think the standard was broken here. it might have to be a thing i partake of in the futre.
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that's about all the farther I got that day with the chronicles of Emily. we played some rook, jesse and i enjoyed forty five minutes of badmitton in the hallway (much to the enjoyment of the neighbor's I'm sure), then we decided to go crash a party that he was invited to. the teachers at the school he worked at this year had a party over by the red hills, so ryan karey and i decided to come along for the free food (of course). it was alright, but by the end i was tired to the point of entering zombie mode, and too far gone for my caffiene OD to help. we turned down an invitation to tag along with one of the teachers to The Quad, which is one of the clubs of kingston. it would have been interesting to drop in for half an hour to say we've been there, but an $800 cover charge and the prospect of beign up til three in the morning were very disuasive. it was 0130 before i got home anyway.
which made the planned 0930 departure the next morning that much more difficult. but ryan, karey and i headed for the north coast, intent on shelling out whatever parking fee they charge at the blue lagoon and living it up. blue lagoon is 8k east of antonio, an 180' deep cove of the best carribean blue one can find. random pic not by me. it is apparently a mix of ocean and spring water, creating some interesting temperature layers. and some more random trivia, it was the location for an early eighties movie "the blue lagoon". not that i've seen it (he adds in quick defence of his manhood).
there was some small trivial detail about a bridge collapsing over the rio grande that prevented us from actually making it to port antonio. i was somewhat dubious about it, after watching news segment after news segment of jamaicans complaining about the government not doing enough to help them survive hte hurricane, but the nice lady at the port antonio police department informed me in no uncertain terms when i called her on the phone that i was not to attempt to cross the bridge.
even though a very honest and upstanding citizen near the bridge had offered to show us another route for a "small fine", we decided to hold his ill-use of the english language against him and decline his services. i've been offered like assistance for a "small toll", or more commonly, "enough to buy me and my friends a drink" (english translation), but this was the first time i'd heard it called a fine.
i wasn't interested in the two hour detour (not that we'd've had the time anyway), and since ryan and karey were showing classic symptoms of the indicision syndrome, i went out on a limb and drove them up to the fox river. ryan asked me later how i'd found this place (as we were rattling down a gravel road with grass growing in the middle, dodging significant absences of road surface and fording multiple streams--although the one was probably more in the "sizeable creek" category as it was twenty-five feet wide and deep enough to nip the axels. not that it takes much to get to the axels on a toyota sprinter (the honda in a similar situation, though a good bit wider than 25')). i told him that it was a very good question. roland kyle and i managed to find this place because we were too cheep to shell out to the rio grande hawkers who raft people up to a place called "fox falls". making a huge leap of logic that "fox falls" were probably on the "fox river" show on our map, we set off in search of the latter...intent on hiking down to the falls instead of rafting up to them.
the short of it? we found them.
the long of it? it wasn't a short amount of time.
the beauty of it? well. it was beautiful
that spot off the rock is six feet deep, there were numerous other places to jump in well over eight feet deep. if you come visit me, you'd have a pretty could chance of convincing me to taking you there...
the salters by the way, left this past sunday. they will be missed, but i hope to see some of them again before a year is up...
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