Daily Tasks

For breakfast this morning:  Homemade sweet potato gnocchi sauteed in butter and cinnamon with slices of banana.  Highly recommended.  Make the gnocchi from scratch.  Expect a mess.

Lesson learned this morning: Remove banana peel BEFORE freezing banana.  This I should have known and admit that I put the unpeeled half a banana in the freezer to find out if you could unpeel a frozen banana.  You can’t.

Tasks for the day:

Be utterly and absolutely lazy until I have to leave to teach my 11:00 AM Bikram yoga class.

I half wish that I had simply told people that there were no classes this weekend because there is quite a good chance that no one is going to show up.  After all, today is the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter and Monday is also a holiday.  People go out of town or get into the groove of relaxing.  I don’t really blame them since, honestly, yesterday was a perfect blend of sleeping in, reading and subsequently finishing Michael Chriton’s Pirate Latitudes, practicing yoga, prowling facebook and watching the new episode of Bones on Megavideo.  The evening followed suit with an easy dinner of garlic sauteed vegetables and gnocchi on a bed of spinach (along with a slice of cornbread that Chris made as part of his first attempt to make something resembling corndogs without a deep frier) and a movie (Bruno…not nearly as clever as Borat).  Back to why I offered class today: I felt that I should at least give people the option of practicing since Friday and Monday classes were canceled.  Besides, the worst that will happen is no one shows up in which case I am already half way to City Market and Starbucks where I needed to go today anyway.

That brings me to the second task for the day: Teach yoga.

I have already covered this one but I will take a few moments to cross my fingers that all my dedicated students decide to rally and vindicate my decision to offer class today.
So on to the third task:  errands.

I have everything I need for Easter brunch except broccoli, strawberries, bananas and possibly grapes (pending price).  The broccoli is for the quiche and the fruit for a fruit salad.  I am perhaps the most excited for the fruit salad, having little occasion to justify the purchase of all that fruit (especially the strawberries, hoping they are still on sale!).  So far the mix is bananas, oranges, kiwi, strawberries and grapes with maybe some pineapple thrown in there.  You might not think that is very glamorous but I am one excited fruit lover.  Before heading to City Market I have to swing by Starbucks for coffee because we killed the last of ours just this morning.  I have not decided yet if my willpower is strong enough to resist ordering an iced coffee or cafe misto.  I would love to sit for an hour or two upstairs on their lanai and write.  I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Now my next task is to bake an apple pie.  I decided to bake the apple pie tonight leaving all day tomorrow for the hot cross buns and quiche.  The question is can I keep Chris out of the pie until tomorrow?  Only time will tell.

Here is what I love about today:  Everything on my list of things to do is quite common place, but I get to carry them out on a gorgeous day in the tropics.  The wind is low, the sun is out and a good portion of my drive winds along the coastline where the water is sure to be a crystal sea of vibrant blues from turquoise to deep sapphire.  I will carry along my camera so that I can share with you the background of my everyday life.

Coming up: Island living photo essay.

Task one?  Check!

The Dangers of Tropical Living I – Ambushing Fruits

Being a diver, I frequently get into conversations with non-divers about the threat of sharks and how it is so insignificant as not to warrant much energy on my part.  I might not want to be paddling about on the surface in tiger shark infested waters, but the truth is that unless you are chumming the waters, the density of shark needed to qualify as ‘infested’ just isn’t common.  Besides, I feel that I am much safer under the water than I am slogging about up to my knees near Florida sandbars.  Either way though, I rarely devote much thought to the matter.  One of my favorite ways to derail the “sharks are scary” train is to bring up a statistic I heard on the Colbert Report.  I know it must be valid coming from such a dependable source; while Colbert employees sarcasm and parody to make a farce of right wing fundamentalist ideals, he is generally fairly adept at checking his statistics.  I digress.  Sharks and vending machines, that is where I was headed.  In the context of Discovery’s Shark Week, Colbert points out the somewhat bizarre and obscure fact that more people are killed annually by VENDING MACHINES than by sharks.  Yes, vending machines.  And if you are anything like me at this point you are raising one eyebrow (or in my case trying to and failing as always) whilst pondering how on earth one gets killed by a vending machine?  Perhaps while trying to cheat the system, one may get an arm stuck and subsequently starve to death before rescue arrives.  Or maybe that vending machine had been kicked one too many times that day and finally decided to take its revenge via strangling by power cord?  Rather, I suppose, vending machines are rather large and heavy and sometimes fall over.  A somewhat more common statistic quoted in defense of sharky reputations is that more people are killed each year by coconuts falling from trees.

Tropical fruit probably seems fairly innocent to you but today I was almost beaned by that rogue coconut.  I enjoy running at a place called Goodman’s Bay Beach Park and today I took advantage of being in the area to do just that.  I warm up by walking a lap – I am a big believer in warm ups and their injury prevention and endurance promoting qualities.  Bordering the jogging path on either side are (duh duh dun!) coconut trees.  And so the stage was set with my presence, my unprotected noggin and more than a few of those ambushing palm fruits.  Sure enough as I strolled along one of those shelled bombs released and plummeted towards me.  At precisely that moment I looked down at my untied shoelace and stooped down to tighten it.  THUMP.  My eyes rose to a patch of ground only six inches in front of me where settled a freshly fallen coconut.  Okay, truth be told it was a small coconut and the tree was only about 8 feet high.  I don’t THINK that it would have done any fatal damage but I can tell you it would have given me quite a headache and a large lump.  I may also have had trouble recalling what had happened in the time surrounding the incident.

Once again, however, I barely escaped the tropical fruit ambush with my life.  That is correct, this is not my first battle.  My first day back in the Bahamas after teacher training, back in December, I was hunting papaya with Chris and one nearly got the better of me.  And when I say nearly, I mean I was the winner solely because I later ate that papaya and so won the war.  The first battle, however, went to the fruit.

While I was away at training, Chris discovered papaya in the backyard of our apartment complex.  He had talked several times about “hunting papaya”, which seemed at first a less girly sounding way to say “I’m outside picking fruit”.  December came around and I jokingly donned my camouflage hat and brandished the ‘spear’ (a broom handle with a steak knife taped to the end).  Off we went into the ‘jungle’ to hunt the dreaded papaya.  I spotted my quarry:  a barely yellow, plump specimen.

I went in for the kill.

But this papaya was not giving up without a fight.  All of a sudden.  WHACK!

And much to the delight of Chris, I jumped, screamed AND got hit by a melon.

Thus ends the story of the Great Papaya Ambush.  Never again will I make fun of papaya hunting.  That shit takes skills.  Oh yes, and subsequently, if you ask me about my fear of sharks, the answer is that I’m far more afraid of tropical fruits.  Especially heavy ones that grown on trees.