Homesickness and Randomness

Yes, I know, Fellow Adventurers, AWOL again. I’ve been pretty grouchy lately and it’s hard for me to write a funny blog post when the only humor I have is the biting, sarcastic kind. Nothing is really wrong, I’m just generally kind of out of sorts. Kevin is gone. I haven’t heard her since we got back from India. I miss her wakeup call. I miss America and stuff like cheese and Target and restaurants that open for dinner before 7:30 pm. I don’t need that stuff to be happy, I just kind of feel a bit nostalgic for all of that lately. I love living overseas and I will be sad when our time here ends, but I think it’s part of the human condition to miss one’s homeland. I'm pretty sure people have been doing it since the first cavemen walked over ice floes to other continents. That’s why people call their home countries the Motherland and wax poetic about it throughout human history. I totally understand why people kiss the ground when they return to the land of their birth. It doesn’t matter how rotten things were in your motherland, it’s somehow part of your soul. I think the Irish are the biggest offenders. (See Angela's Ashes or pretty much anything written by an Irish expat.) Lucky for me, I’m about 98% German. Luckier for me, part of that other 2% is Irish and is enough to give me a really cool maiden name and the ability to wax poetic with the best of them. The jury is still out on which side gave me my mad alcohol consumption skills. (See, that was pretty funny…now we’re getting somewhere.)

Anyway, the bottom line is that I haven’t been very inspired by the idea of blogging lately. I did start writing a piece about the henchmen working on our plumbing. They’re still at it, so I’ll save it until all the hijinks are over, hopefully sooner rather than later. It’s been going on for almost three weeks now, though, so it could be a while. In the mean time, how about some random weird snippets of our life that really don’t fit anywhere else?

-When we first moved here and were staying at the residence hotel, I was very worried that our kids’ large inflatable pool rings would seem like “too much” in the hotel pool. One afternoon, we saw a family give something to the pool boy to inflate. The poor kid spent the next thirty minutes blowing up an inflatable raft with his mouth. When I say inflatable raft, I don’t mean the kind you float around on, napping. I mean an actual boat. After the pool boy finished and went inside (I’m assuming to find an oxygen tank), the family climbed in and proceeded to use oars to paddle around the pool. Tiny inflatable inner tubes? Yeah, we’re good.

-Remember that time Amelia Earhart threw up just before we arrived at the Taj Mahal? I neglected to mention that she rallied and ate four plates of Chinese noodles for lunch.

-Did you know there are thousands of varieties of bananas? In the U.S., almost all the bananas we eat are Cavendish variety, and the small percentage of the rest are primarily made up of what we call plantains. In Sri Lanka, Cavendish bananas are much harder to find. While there are many different kinds of bananas eaten on the island, including red ones, most of the bananas here are the Kolikuttu. They are much smaller than Cavendish bananas, about four inches long, and about a half inch to an inch thicker than what we’re used to. They taste different, too. They’re not bad, but after growing up on Cavendish, I’m sick of the short, fat little buggars.

-Pretty much everyone in this country wears flip flops all day, every day. Case in point: Almost every road construction worker I’ve seen is wearing a hard hat and flip flops. Safety first!

-Everywhere I go in Sri Lanka, I see mothers out with their babies. The babies are usually wearing shorts or sundresses and a knitted stocking cap. Now, this is a tropical island. It’s hot here, Fellow Adventurers. The average temperature is 80 degrees, and these poor tiny things are wearing toasty warm knitted woolen caps with little pompoms on the top. I always want to pull up next to them and snatch the hats off the babies and drive away, eventually collecting a car full of little knitted stocking caps that I would send to babies in Siberia, kind of like Robin Hood for sweaty babies. Babies wearing hats on 90 degree days is such a normal thing that the other day, when we were out driving and I spotted a baby without a hat on, I screeched at The International Man of Intrigue, “LOOK! That baby’s head is uncovered!!! It’s going to catch pneumonia! Someone call Lankan Social Services or whatever they have here!” The International Man of Intrigue sighed. He’s used to me by now. For what it’s worth, he thinks the hat business is weird, too. His theory is that if babies wear hats when they’re small, they get used to being super hot, so once they grow out of the hats, the blasting tropical island heat doesn’t seem so stifling.

- The Little Explorers might be too well traveled. They enjoy playing “airport.” They’re actually quite detailed. They check bags, go through the metal detector, get a wand and do pat downs and check passports and stamp boarding passes. They are more thorough and a whole lot nicer than TSA.

I think that's all I've got for today. My driver just came to the front door, delivering beer that The International Man of Intrigue sent home. I think it's time for a cold one! Have a great weekend, Fellow Adventurers!

Worst Case Scenario

Remember our not-so-little roof leak? And then the huge waterfall that dumped into our dining room during a dinner party? Well, that’s nothing after last night.

It’s monsoon season in Sri Lanka, which doesn’t mean at all what I thought it would. I thought monsoons would be more, well, monsoon-y. I expected a constant deluge for days on end, the kind of things you see in movies with people sitting and staring out of their thatched roof tropical hut. In reality, it is a total torrential downpour, but it comes and goes, and things return to tropical island sunny in between. Many times, the worst of it seems to come at night, as was the case last night.

All day yesterday, the wind kept picking up. When I was out running errands, I could see the choppy waves and the storm over the ocean. The International Man of Intrigue was scheduled to return from a business trip in the Maldives last night, and I was starting to get a sinking feeling the weather may not hold out for his flight. Luckily, his flight took off only 15 minutes behind schedule, but as the evening wore on, the wind worsened. Our plexiglass skylight, which was the source of our leaks, started banging up and down whenever the wind gusted. I started getting really nervous about it. After all, the two overlapping pieces of plexiglass had never seemed that secure in the first place. And our dining room waterfall? After four visits from the landlady’s henchmen, we’d given up. They kept insisting it was just the gutters needing to be cleaned, even though the embassy’s maintenance man kept telling them there were more problems. In the end, The International Man of Intrigue and I had resigned ourselves to some leaking whenever it rained, as long as it could be caught by a single bucket. By the time I put The Little Explorers to bed, the banging was worsening, and the water was gushing in. I sighed and pulled the dining room table and chairs out of the way and battened down the hatches as best I could.

The International Man of Intrigue finally arrived home from the airport and was also sufficiently impressed and concerned with the banging plexiglass to make me feel like I wasn’t a complete crazy person. He even took a short video to show to facilities maintenance so they could get an idea of the problem. Then, we retired to the family room to relax and catch up on the excitement of the week. He told me about taking water taxis and meeting interesting people. I filled him in on which Little Explorers had snot noses and fevers, leaky bathtubs, and what kind of pizza we ordered for dinner. Oh, yes, it was obvious who’d had the more exciting few days! What happened next was inevitable, I suppose. A particularly loud series of bangs caught our attention. We grabbed a flashlight to check it out, even though we were pretty sure that a large chunk of plexiglass had just ripped off and disappeared into the night. Sure enough. We now had an open air skylight. After a quick call to the embassy maintenance staff to let them know the situation, we turned in for the night. It wasn’t like anyone could show up and replace a giant piece of plexiglass in a windstorm, anyway.

You know how, when you are lying in bed, worst case scenarios and monsters start popping up in your imagination? (Please, Fellow Adventurers, tell me it’s not just me!)Well, as I let my imagination do the thinking, my biggest concern, aside from water damage, flooding, squirrels, mosquitoes, birds, structural damage, or the roof actually collapsing, was the huge breach in security from the hole in the roof. There are monkeys on this island, people. What if monkeys came into the roof? Or ninjas? Ninjas could repel into the hole in the skylight! Or ninja monkeys? Aaaaaaaaagh!

And then I fell asleep. Apparently skylights ripping off and rain coming in sound nothing like children crying, so I had an excellent night’s sleep.

Bright and early this morning, the sun was shining down through the hole in the skylight and everything looked fine. There was surprisingly little water on the floor. A lot of leaves, but surprisingly little water. The best part? No ninja monkeys! The embassy maintenance staff arrived first thing and the henchmen shortly after. The head henchman walked in to assess the damage. He looked up at the skylight and, for the first time ever, was speechless. No blaming it on leaf filled gutters or trying to find a way to pin a leaky roof on the inhabitants (because, yes, I climb up and poke holes in the roof when you’re not around). He simply blinked a few times, muttered two words in Sinhala and walked out. I have been smiling about that every since. The Intrigues: 1, Henchmen: 0! (Okay, really, the current tally is probably The Intrigues: 3, Henchmen: 47, but we won this round, and I think we get extra points for Head Henchman Dude being rendered speechless.)

It’s mid afternoon as I write this, and the skylight is currently being replaced. It looks like I can go to bed free of worry of invading ninjas. I’m not holding out much hope on this keeping the water out, though. I’ll keep you posted, Fellow Adventurers.

Our House is a Zoo

I don’t think it’s come up in conversation with you, but I am not what you'd call an “outdoorsy type.” I would rather hike through the pages of a good book than along a trail. I grew up in the country, practically the middle of nowhere, so you’d think I’d have an appreciation for the great outdoors. Nope. When my mom would force me outside, I would often take a book and sit and read on the front step, when I wasn’t convincing my little brother that it would be epic if he’d take his Big Wheel and do a Dukes of Hazard style jump off of our 6 foot tall front porch railing. Since that story has lasted well over 25 years, I’d say it was epic, indeed!

All of this hasn’t changed much as I’ve gotten older. I do have an appreciation for nature, but hiking and bird watching aren’t my thing. That being said, we have gotten to live in some amazing places when it comes to nature. Our last home was in Monterey Bay, California. We saw whales, otters, sea stars, and more in the wild. Sri Lanka is really determined to one up that. We have seen monkeys and monitor lizards in the wild. My kids have held newly hatched sea turtles. Gertrude Bell even got to take one fresh from the sand to the tank. The International Man of Intrigue and I saw a giant saltwater crocodile swimming down a river once when we were driving. It still makes my stomach turn, as I’m not entirely sure it wasn’t this guy, although I do think the one we saw was bigger.

So now we’ve established that Sri Lanka is an amazingly biodiverse ecosystem. The really interesting part is that our house is as well. Just before I sat down to type this, I was rocking Arthur Dent to sleep before his nap and I could see a parrot out in the tree. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the really interesting biodiverse ecosystem lives inside of our house. There are all kinds of bugs, including mosquitos, ants, and, most disgustingly, roaches. Once, I ran downstairs to let our gardener in to sweep the balcony. When I ran back up the stairs to our family room about forty seconds later, Arthur Dent had a tropical roach clutched in his little hand. I screamed and grabbed him, but I couldn’t bring myself to pry his fingers open and touch the roach. I shook his arm at the elbow and shrieked . The gardener looked at me like he wasn’t sure whether to offer assistance or go sweep. He finally raised one eyebrow and headed out to the patio. I’m sure he was thinking, “There’s a whole lot of crazy in this house.” Eventually, after a grueling 10 seconds or so, Arthur Dent dropped the roach and I took him to the bathroom to scrub his little hand until it was pink and germ free.

We also have little geckos that live all over the house. Arthur Dent delights in them and points and babbles every time he spots one. The rest of us enjoy them as well. I say, as long as they promise to enjoy the all-you-can-eat mosquito buffet our house offers, they are more than welcome to stay.

As I type this, the landlady’s henchmen are on the roof and the wraparound balcony trying to seal up the holes that are allowing tropical squirrels (which look a little like chipmunks) to nest in our attic and family room. Yes, adorable little tropical squirrels have taken up residence in our house. One day one was running industriously back and forth from a little hole high up the wall in our family room, along the rafters, through our bedroom and into our bathroom and presumably up to the attic. Gertrude Bell exclaimed, “Get me a ladder and I will climb up and catch it!” I sighed and hoped the thing wasn’t about to have babies in the wall. Last night after The International Man of Intrigue and I went to bed, we could hear the squirrel chirping in the attic. My big fear today is that the landlady’s henchmen have sealed up the openings to the outside without driving out our little friend. The last thing I need is a dead squirrel in the attic. I much prefer my attic squirrels alive, thank you.

The final animal I want to tell you about doesn’t live in the house. She’s my favorite, though. She’s some sort of tropical bird whose loud call is pretty distinctive. She must be semi-nocturnal, as I sometimes hear her during the night when I’m awake with Arthur Dent, and she used to wake me up every morning at the crack of dawn, rooster style. Since she has such a distinctive call, and try as I might, I’ve never seen her, I named her Kevin. The International Man of Intrigue finds my naming of Kevin alternately amusing and crazy. (Luckily, he also finds my particular brand of amusing and crazy to be irresistible.) I’m thinking of trying to catch a glimpse of Kevin by baiting her with chocolate. I’ll keep you posted.