St. John Talk Blog

Here’s Photo No. 2 of our weekly Pond Bay update:

Taking advantage of an easily accessible view of the Pond Bay development, we’re going to try to post a picture every Friday of the goings-on at Pond Bay for those who are interested in the progress being made.  Here’s installment No. 1:

Yesterday afternoon, Casey & I had an unexpected visitor.  Here he is:

I

The last picture is the iguana hanging out by the door to my office.  I think he’s pretty old; he was pretty slow to move around.  I call him Fred.

Haven’t seen him again today, but I’m keeping an eye out for him…

To quote a line from an old Talking Heads song.  But it’s true…maybe.  Here’s what the “experts” are saying….

At lower levels…a tropical wave will pass mostly to the south of
Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands Tuesday preceded by a
band of convergence and some shower activity Monday afternoon.
Moisture will linger through Thursday but a drying trend begins
Thursday and strengthens Friday ahead of a much stronger tropical
wave. This tropical wave…now near 40 west…shows signs of
cyclogenesis. Preliminary tracks for this potential system place
it close to the local area on Saturday.

And this is what they’re talking about…

Not a lot of people, unless they live in the Caribbean or Latin America, can say this but we’ve got an iguana problem in our garden.  These little (well, not so little) horned creatures love to eat our new landscaping as a leafy green vegetable snack to quench their thirst after sitting out in the hot sun of our back yard all day long.  The longer you look, the more iguanas you can find (kind of like a Where’s Waldo puzzle) throughout the yard and in the branches of nearly every tree around our house.   One even wandered into one of our bathrooms one day when the front door was open while painting.  We are currently thinking about applying for a property tax reduction by claiming our property as a wildlife refuge.

We get our propane tanks filled from a guy named Elvis.  I’m sure the business has a proper name and license, but we just know the guy as Elvis and we know that to get to him we drive down towards town past the Marketplace, make sure there are no cars ahead coming towards us, and then quickly zip down the one way street the WRONG way and make a right turn into his yard.  Voila, the next day the tanks are full of propane. 

Elvis also has a chicken and rib joint, I think it’s called Candi’s, adjacent to his office and propane tank cages.  What better place to have a stick to your ribs (pun intended) lunch of ribs and two starchy side dishes for only $9.95?  Can you tell from the photo collage how good they are?  They are melt in your mouth good.

Our favorite tree, just along the road near our house, is in bloom and it’s beautiful.  It is most commonly called the Flamboyant tree locally but is also known as Royal Poinciana.  It is in bright orange bloom from spring through summer here in the Virgin Islands.

Last night we had dinner at the Fish Trap for the first time since its re-opening last month by new owner and former (as well as current) Fish Trap chef, Aaron Willis (in red shirt above) and his wife Lisa (orange shirt).  Flanking either side of Lisa are our friends and former owners of the restaurant, Lonnie and Albert Willis.

The food quality remains excellent and I was so pleased to see crab legs remain a menu highlight as I’ve been craving them for the past couple of months while we were away.  Not much call for king crab legs in Switzerland, you see.

I’m looking forward to shopping once again at the Fish Trap fish market as well.  Great variety for such a tiny island.

So here are a few more pictures from the St. John Carnival Parade.  Enjoy!

Flickr

Here is a link to my photos from the St. John Carnival yesterday, July 4.  It was a four + hour long procession of costumes, dance and music.  An incredibly fun day.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hthphoto/sets/72157606000705795/

We attended the 2008 St. John Carnival Parade yesterday.  We took some photos and shot some video. Below is the video (it’s about 20 minutes long so give it some time to load).

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

We’ll hopefully have a link to some photos in the coming days.  In the meantime, enjoy the video.

A couple of notes:  1)  the video quality of the original video is excellent.  It is in HD.  However, I think the compression used to upload this to the web reduced the quality significantly.  (It reduced it from 30fps to 12 fps – that’s got to affect the quality.)  Sorry. [I tried to upload it to YouTube as well; however, apparently YouTube has a limit of 10 minutes or less.   2)  I went a little crazy with some of the transitions.  It was my first time editing a movie on a Mac (I used iMovie rather than Final Cut).  So, I was having fun with them.  Give it some time and the novelty will wear off.  ;-)