Enjoyed a great supper which had been graciously left by a friend and then remembered the Christmas gifts from the western daughter which had been delivered at the tea stop. Pretty exciting to find a very large bag of Lady Hannah tea as well as a beautiful notebook with my initial on it – just like the holidays all over again. The second night shift started off with some excitement as I desperately attempted to retrieve the electronic triage information from my ‘still on vacation’ brain. The usual Saturday night ‘related to alcoholic beverages ‘ situations settled after 2 a.m. and I managed to survive in much better style. It goes without saying that my four days off were very welcomed.
When I came home from work on Sunday morning I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Bell tech support (couldn’t place the very strong accent due to a major speech impediment) because the turbo stick wouldn’t stay connected. I should not complain about this tech though as I later spent two and a half hours with two separate (more understandable but condescending geeks) who were not able to resolve the identical problem on my laptop although one did admit the changes were in the Bell system arggh. The late bedtime and rainy weather meant I slept the day which was likely for the best due to the power failure that evening. Finally crawled into bed at 2 a.m. after relaying phone calls to Nova Scotia Power for a frantic shore captain who had lost ‘a phase of his power’ at the lobster tank house and was dealing with aerators et al until the wee hours. Woke up in the morning sans power ourselves as apparently trees on the lines here put it out at 3 a.m. and we were 12 hours without so grateful for the propane range and generator. The propane fireplace (our auxiliary heat source for prolonged outages) however would not operate no matter how the shore captain jiggled the wires. The next day he ‘remembered’ that there was a battery in the thermostat (who knew that thermostats had batteries? Certainly not moi) and retrieved one about the size of a hearing aide battery.
So….on Tuesday I began the quest for the battery – not an easy task in the small local town as the hardware store would have one in on Friday, the smaller drugstore didn’t carry that size, the building supply center didn’t carry them at all but the larger drugstore rewarded me with the $2.75 necessity. After a great Frenchy’s shop and $335 in groceries (the highlight being I purchased a pizza stone – have wanted one of those for some time) I headed home to straighten the casa out thinking I was going to scrapbooking in the evening. Not the case as the community room was overbooked so an in-house session with a friend substituted instead.
Did some baking, unpacked and laundered + +, forwarded goodies from Cuba and for some reason a reorganization bug bit and I cleared out the bookcase and several drawers – not really sure what came over me with the domestic duties. On a more social note I did manage to transfer the trip photos to the computer and we had a little vacay replay to cheer ourselves up.
The trip (of course) was a great time. We visited with our friends, enjoyed the sun and food and generally enjoyed ourselves to the fullest. The weather was a bit cooler and wetter than we’ve ever experienced in the 13 years we’ve been traveling to Cuba but it sure wasn’t snow! It was difficult to believe that we had two weeks there as it simply flew by. Not sure if that was because we hadn’t visited for two years or we’re just getting older and time is moving faster. I’m thinking I’ll do a scrapbook on the ‘real’ Cuba – the one not of resort publicity shots but a bit grittier. I did some extra shots this year thinking of a photo journal. Enjoy.
