Paradise Preoccupied

Some days my life seems like one big pile of poop.

I’m not speaking metaphorically here, by the way. No, it’s real poop that sometimes surrounds me on every front … like I’m sitting in a giant crap caldera. Take today, for example …

It began with me hurrying into the shower with an eye toward starting off fresh rather than spending the entire day in my jammies, only to discover a hefty deposit of cat excrement in the corner. Oh, joy! The smell, the smell!. Even after dousing the tiles with bleach and scrubbing away, the pong still pinged, creating a pungent undertone my sweet orange and cedar body scrub couldn’t begin to mask.

Moving right along, Cj managed two … count ’em, two … huge diaper-fulls (diapers-full?) within about an hour this morning, the second happening sometime after I’d put her down for her nap. She naps in my office, the only room in the house with air conditioning, which means it’s cool and quiet, and shut up tighter than a drum. Sound cozy? Well, it is, and it hangs on to odors for ever. A drop of rose oil can keep the room invitingly fragrant for days … unfortunately, a half-pound of poop lasts even longer.

It’s now eight hours later and my eyes still water when I walk in. Phew! The lingering aroma of Cj’s nap time pooh may, just may, dissipate by tomorrow morning if I keep the door open all night. (That, unfortunately, has previously proved to appear an invitation for a cat to evacuate bowels in a new and exciting atmosphere … a potential eventuality that would defeat the purpose entirely.)

And, of course, we have puppy. Not our puppy. Well, she’s not meant to be ours for long. She was born to our dog, Dinah, and will soon find a new home with my dear friend, Gay.

But Gay is in France right now, driving around Province with her mother and sister, eating great food and enjoying the printemps du France rather than housebreaking her puppy.

Hence … and I do love ‘hence’ … her dog is shitting in my house — a lot!

I’ve picked up at least five piles of puppy poop today alone, and I have no doubt there will be more before the day is done.

A gecko shat on my shoulder while I blogged away on the veranda … Cj had my office, you see.

An Indian Mynah … a noisy and obnoxious pest of an introduced species of bird … buzz-bombed me and missed plopping on me and my computer by inches.

Darn good thing that our Aldabra Giant Tortoise doesn’t come in the house very often.

And that has been my day.

Ever find yourself praying for constipation?

Read Full Post »

A person would be forgiven for thinking that eleven-plus years of life on a dinky tropical island would have me prepared for the little inconveniences that interrupt the flow of productivity on a regular basis. After all, we have all this sunshine and these fabulous to-die-for beaches where warm, azure waters gently kiss the shore — blah, blah, blah — so some sort of a trade-off seems more than fair. And, heck!, when things get stressful we should just grab the snorkel gear and go … shouldn’t we?

Bollocks.

I have work to do, and the damned electricity has been cut off all day. Finally, finally, after seven hours the power rodent has managed to find his way back on to his wheel and he’s commenced plodding away at his normal barely adequate pace, but something about being unpowered for most of the day has the Internet in my neck of the woods dead in the water … azure and warm though it may be.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that I spent the entire morning trying to convince a two-year-old that it wasn’t my fault that she couldn’t watch “Grease” for the nine-kazillionth time … she goes joyfully ballistic EVERY TIME the balloons drop at the end of the dance contest scene and loves to sing along with Stockard Channing … neither fan nor aircon could stir the sticky heat and three loads of laundry were not getting any cleaner.

I really should chuck it all and head for the beach on days like this, shouldn’t I?

Read Full Post »

The news in Creole is on in the other room, prompting me to mull for a moment the election that will be held here on Mahé on Saturday.

Tonight’s coverage includes stories about voting that took place today. The citizens of Silhouette voted, as did people in essential services who’ll be working on Saturday … police, hospital workers and Air Seychelles employees who’ll be out of the country … who had a special voting station set up for them at English River, and apparently the turnout was good.

Last election saw more than 90% of eligible voters mark their ballots in the district I live in, and close to that everywhere else. Makes the 30% or less that bother in many US elections look pretty pathetic.

It really is all over but the shouting, campaign-wise, as we’re now in the “cooling off period”, a week of peace and quiet when anyone caught electioneering gets time in jail and a fine.

Such a fine idea! None of the last-minute hollering in hopes of changing minds, or pulling rabbits out of hats just before the polls open. Plus, it’s a whole week of time to digest without having new stuff stuffed down gullets in attempts to get people to choke.

And there’s none of this starting-years-in-advance stuff, either. This campaign lasted exactly 17 days. Seventeen days was plenty of time for all candidates to say their piece on TV and radio, for hats and t-shirts and umbrellas in party colors to be passed out, for rallies to rally and for as much debate as was going to happen to happen.

But this is a small country, and most people have known which way they’d be voting even before candidates were announced, so long, drawn out campaigns would probably only annoy the citizenry and inflame tempers.

International observers have arrived in the country, and everyone is ready.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Read Full Post »

Just had guests leave after a fab Thai dinner lovingly prepared by my dear husband … Tom Ka Gai, Kang Keo Wan, pork satay, fried eggplant. The man can cook! … and am pausing for a thought about how interesting it is to live with the diversity I have in my life.

A table of five adults and three kids … the adults were two Australian Jews, brother and sister, with the brother living here with his Seychellois wife and one-year-old son, and the sister a resident in Qatar … Mark, half Brit, half Seychellois … me, American born and bred, but now also holding a Seychelles passport… and our two kids, Cambodian born with citizenship here and in Britain, which means they are part of Europe.

The world is small, and I’m so pleased to have my nose rubbed in that fact almost daily.

Read Full Post »

Kansas is sounding good to me this week. Utah or Nebraska or Iowa … anywhere land-locked with a reliable electricity supply and Internet connections that run continuously for a few hours at a time.

The lack of both here had me ready to pack up, lock, stock and snorkel gear, and run away to somewhere, anywhere, no matter how boring or flat. I’d had it up to my none-too-patient-under-any-circumstance eyebrows with an island work ethic … now there’s an oxymoron! … that allows for outright lies to substitute for customer service and finds any inclination to hurry a distinct minus.

“Hang loose” may be the theme song for the arm wattle that flaps when I wave these days, but as a mindset it’s beyond my scope. I’m a problem-solver, not a sit-back-and-waiter, so when things go wrong, I want answers and I want them NOW.

What could a week like this one inspire in me, then, but a powerful urge to flee? I’m introspective and self-critical enough to notice that I simply may not be hardwired to survive the slow pace of Seychelles incompetence and slovenly performance. Perhaps, after eleven years on this island I’ve had enough, reached my breaking point and need to look at moving back into the real world … the world that works and works fast, puts up with little that doesn’t meet perfection, that demands the best, the fastest, the sleekest.

Ummmmmmm.

But, then again …

There’s the gun thing.

No such thing as school shootings here. (The crazies tend to drink themselves into early graves to which they go alone.) The very concept is so foreign that I’m being asked to explain how such a tragedy could possibly happen … me! as if I have an inside track to the mind of psycho America.

I left the US BOJ (Before OJ), so have missed what must be the strangest period in the country’s history and have no clue, no clue at all, how or why a VA Tech could happen.

You know? Now that I think about it, I guess I’ll get the candles out, put pen to paper occasionally, and stay put.

Read Full Post »