Bathroom facilities and amusement necessities

The second half of January was mainly about renovating the bathroom. Anthony was helping a lot with tile hacking, painting, plastering and tiling. But in between, we still did some tiny things.

We tried to fill time with doing jobs and otherwise fun stuff.
We dragged uphill the stones for the pizza oven, we did tile hacking and painting in the bathroom, we digged in a water pipe on the flat bit, we digged out ground for a lily pond on the flat bit (it really felt like digging out some treasure, I feel we were really close anyway). And when I tell 'we' I mostly mean Anthony and his dad, for it was such heavy work.
In the evening we 'watched laptop'. Way too much 'Boer Zoekt Vrouw' and (never too much)movies: Mr. Poppers Penguin's, Fright Night, Super, Angels and Demons, Spiderman 1 and Cast Away. (Lately I've been wondering why I am actually always telling which movies we'd been watching. Maybe it's nice when some of you do not have ideas for 'which movie to watch now?').
As for the cooking, we had a really good two weeks. Of course pizza, the nicest brownies ever (I finally finally know the secret), we dined falafel failure one evening (I will never know the secret) but this was the exceptional failure for these weeks, Ant made the nicest bread sticks(Baguette alike), we did a classic chocolate cake, a challenge to make from three recipes one Lemon Meringue, for the savoury needs I made some cheese biscuits and last but not least we made Roti ourselves (Except for the Roti skins, but I won't tell this because then it might be less impressive).

I found myself amusingly surprised by flora and fauna again. The Fauna-enjoyment mainly made by Baxter and Kitten J.
I saw them fighting Kung-Fu downhill, and it all started with Kitten J. using both his paws slapping both Baxter's cheeks while standing on two legs only. Some days later I saw Baxter climbing up into a tree, as if he were a cat. He was chasing a Manacou. When we are dish washing lizards come standing on the window seal begging for some water and drinking it the very moment you throw it to them.
The friend from Roger who lives downhill found a fury puppy. It was very playful which made you feel he had some sharp teeth too. What he also had were ear mites, ticks and a nasty wound which looked as if some acid had burned right trough his skin. When the people came up to show him, their Kitten J. followed them uphill, watching everything from a safe distance with a very jealous look on his face. When they left, he left some minutes later, only he left behind a trace of some dead lizards. Maybe to get rid of some of his anger.
The tiny plants we planted as seeds some weeks ago, have surprised me too. The Morning Glory's go so well. Every morning their heads are pointed into another direction, as if they are crawling to find a thing to climb upon (they even use each other). Some seeds which at first weren't likely to germinated, did germinate at all. Apple seeds, a lemon seeds and sweet pepper seeds.

The last part of January we had a little more time to get further away from the house.
We walked quite a lot. We walked towards the Villa Beach, where there were a lot of tourists again. And they were all very charmed by Baxter, calling him, where as normally locals chase him away.
We walked to the supermarket and then Baxter followed us again. But we had to cross the street and then it got too dangerous. So I lifted him up waiting for a possibility to cross over the streets again to bring him back home again. When I was standing along the road, with Baxter in my arms, I probably looked very concerned. A businessman in a fancy car took the whole effort to stop his car on the other side of the road and waited for me to ask whether the dog and I were okay. Then he told me I needed a leash and I told him thanks for his concern and he drove on again. We tied Baxter up at the house and proceeded our walk. We saw the big house in Arnos Vale from a great distance, bumped into a lot of local people, had to cross over a bridge with very low railings and a very deep height(which isn't very nice when you are afraid of heights and on the road where you walk, cars are racing) and we saw very crappy houses. These houses look really abandoned: plants growing all over the place into broken windows, holes in the roof, broken fences and a messy garden. But people just live in there, they're all fine with it.
We walked both north and east along the beach from home. At the north is a hotel which is called 'Grand view' where you have a Grand view. We saw the airport, the stadium which is placed right next to the airport(here they practice running for example), our own house, the supermarket, pelicans catching fish, a very nice guy called 'Anthony Casson' and at the background we saw high hills and dark clouds. East were a lot of boats and a village we hadn't seen before. When you walk somewhere, you are kind of lucky if there's a pavement, otherwise you just walk along the road where minibuses drive like crazy.

We went over to a friend of Roger. He showed us nice collections of river stones, stones in weird shapes, coral and comics. He also had a barrel from the pirates movie standing on his veranda, just like the one we saw in fort Charlotte. His wife told us one of their dogs is very sensitive and filled with empathy. When you have a sad voice, look sad or talking about something sad he gets tears in his eyes. Their son had this racket which electrifies mosquitoes. We have them in the Netherlands too, and we mainly use it for flies. But where we always have to chase the flies to finally kill one after 15 minutes, the boy only had to sit on his chair and flapping his racket up and down hearing a buzz 20 times a minute. We could have come on a boat trip towards another island with this friend. But the very prince of England and his newly wedded wife are having their honeymoon there now, so visitors aren't allowed on the island, and even the inhabitants, who are very rich millionaire alike people, aren't even allowed to get out of their own houses and go to the beach.

And of course, for the necessary sports, we went downhill to the flat bit to practice some. First we played some civilized badminton, and then we found cricket in the container. Anthony explained it to me and we played. Baxter was with us too and he was lying exactly behind our legs so running for points was extra hard. As weird as it was, we didn't trip over Baxter, but Anthony tripped over one of the million invisible tree stumps in the field. We found a rubber boat in the container too, and when we were all set to inflate it and sail on the sea, we found out a part was missing. So inflating was impossible, and so was sailing on the sea. Instead of sailing, we went swimming. We took a ball with us, played with it, tried hitting it and then I hit it too far into sea. So the orange ball, telling everybody 'Holland', floated away in a rapid speed, up till a certain point where we couldn't see it no more, and further. Wilson.