NEWS FLASH…NEWS FLASH…NEWS FLASH..
We have just had an earthquake! It was recorded as 7.4 magnitude and was felt all over the island, the boat rocked and shook for about 2 minutes. Jeff was at the house where he watched our life savings shake around but fortunately there was no damage. There is some superficial damage to the dock where concrete has cracked and the Catholic Church steeple in Castries wobbled so much that bits fell off but apart from that all is well. It caused great excitement throughout the bay.


We had a great surprise this week!
We went up to Rodney Bay to pick up Tim, who was unfortunately five hours delayed. We met up with him in the foyer of the hotel amongst the milling throng of the crew. He announced that he was carrying all our shopping but did have one extra piece of baggage that he thought we might like - Fiona! She appeared out of the crowd, big grin and said “surprise”. We were speechless, thrilled, confused, shocked but most of all happy to see her. They had planned this last month and only a few people knew, in case it didn’t come off, as she was on a jump seat/stand by deal. So they stayed for forty-eight hours and then we took them back to the hotel on Sunday to get crew transport ready for the flight back. We crammed a lot of stuff into those hours, as the pictures will show.

We apologise for all of you who got a Christmas card in mid November. The local postmistress told me that the mail takes 2 to 4 weeks and even then it may go astray so to be ahead of the game I sent them on 14th Nov anticipating a delivery date of mid December. Instead they appear to have taken six days to arrive! We have had a few e-mails saying ours was the first card to arrive, something I have always tried to avoid. Another thing we want to clear up is that the first floor walls are not a horrible green colour, that is just the raw colour of the dry wall board, thanks for pointing that out Fi!

It is very pleasing that a few more windows are trickling through and that we have a lock on the front door (courtesy of Tim bringing it from UK). The muddy hole for the pool continues to be dug and a small retaining wall has been built to keep that part of the slope where it should be although there have been some serious attempts of land slide whilst it was being constructed, fortunately no one was injured or had to be dug out. There is a proper floor in the spare bedroom and the guest bathroom is almost tiled. One of the labourers left the team last week. His work output slowed to a snails pace, spending a lot of time on his phone and generally shirking any task that looked like physical labour. His replacement lasted only half a day as his attitude was the same as Glens and he was so weak he needed to rest between carrying each cement block and there was a whole lorry load to be moved. Replacement number two has started and he seems to be auditioning for “The Worlds Strongest and Fasted Man”, so he can stay!

We are house sitting for Maggie this weekend as she and Helen both need to renew their length of stay in St Lucia so they are off to Barbados, back on Monday. We shall enjoy the house, dogs and pool for a few days and I shall cook a Sunday roast!

The staircase is almost complete, the guest bathroom is almost tiled and the pool has had its foundations dug.

I got a bit distracted when I was doing Jeff's hair. It was unintensional and he wasn't aware of how bad a job I had done until he asked for this photo to be taken. He has since regretted it but now knows why the boys were having a good laugh behind his back-of course!