Trying to get back into the habit of blogging regularly. Took almost a full week off while I had some company. It was fun to have someone here from the states and to be able to show off the island but exhausting also. Every day I had to get up with Rick and take him to work and then go back at 4 o'clock and pick him up. The new job is about 2/3 of the way across the island so it was a good little trip twice each day. The up side to that is that I really did learn my way around the island and am now a whole lot more comfortable driving around and not near as worried that I will get lost.

My "just shoot me" day was last Tuesday (I think), just a few miles after we picked Rick up from work, we had a flat tire, was I ever grateful that this happened after we picked him up and not before. We spent Wednesday at home hanging out at the pool because Rick took the car in to have the tire fixed, well that didn't happen, we had to buy a new tire and have another alignment done, thank you St. Croix potholes. I may need to look into buying tires in bulk down here, the way we are going through them. The upside to that whole situation was that I didn't have to drive Rick to work that morning and go get him and we could just really relax, not sure if my guest was too pleased but sometimes, "life happens".

It's interesting how things change when you have house guests, for one we eat way too much. I suppose we all do that when we are "on vacation". We just throw abandon to the wind and all of our normal good eating habits and want to sample all of the delicious local fare and some of the things that we don't let ourselves eat on a regular basis at home. The trouble is that I'm not on vacation and aside from it not being good for me in general, I feel really miserable when we are eating that much. I am going to have to learn more restraint and just not eat everything and eat all the time, when we have house guests. We've also learned that we have to set a few ground rules when guests come, not that anything terrible happened, but people don't really understand that we are living and working here and that it is a big extra expense having people stay with you, it's not that we don't want to share what we have but sometimes it can cross over into being a burden. Unfortunately, for us with the way things have worked out with our employment situation, we seem to be having guests just when we are getting back to work after a rather long "dry spell" and the finances haven't quite caught up with the expenses. the bottom line is that no matter how much fun you have with your house guests, it's kind of nice to have you home back and fall back into your normal routine.

With Rick's new job we are still trying to develop our routine. He's only been working for two weeks and for one of those we had a guest so there was no routine. I find that I got so used to having him around that I'm a little lonely during the day. Yesterday, the first Monday after our guest left, we started having workmen here to do the tile project on our upstairs galleria (deck), so everything is kind of upside down while that is going on, supposedly only two more days of that nonsense and I can really have my house back. It's always something.

Just realized that today is 1 March, where does the time go, we have now been on St. Croix for 9 months, closing in on that first year. Sometimes it seems like we have been here a whole lot longer than that and sometimes it feels like we just got here. I actually hope I never get used to the beauty of this place, I certainly don't want to take it for granted. Well the first of the month, almost got the house back to myself, getting back on a healthier eating plan with plenty of exercise, taking another writing class this month and trying to develop a "normal routine". Working seriously on those three goals for the next three months, trying to make them "good habits".