All In The Interest of Safety

Everybody knows that life is dangerous, some more than others. We're stepping up to the plate to do our part.

Although there are things to be said for some tightening up of the ol' gene pool (ala the Darwin Awards), we decided a proactive approach will at least leave our conciounce resting easier at the end of the day.

What some idiot does in spite of our effort to advise them of the potential danger is out of our control. At least we've done our part.

A while back, when Jim and Melanie had sold their house, Jim had the great idea to take his Mayan mural on his dining room wall with him - well, not directly.

What he did was take a photograph of it and headed downtown to Creative Graphics Impressions, on 7th Avenue, and have them print his photo on all-weather vinyl - life sized too. What a great idea! They could take the mural with them wherever they moved.

A couple weeks after they moved, I realized that I'd like a copy of the mural as well. I asked Jim if it was alright and if he'd send me the image, which he did.

I made it down to Creative Graphics and asked them to make a vinyl copy for me, but significantly smaller than life size. I only wanted it about 2' x 1'4", so we could maybe hang it in our pool house. I'll post a picture of it after it's mounted and hung.

I had been playing with the idea of making a crocodile sign for some time, looking for them on the Intertubes, but not finding anything that seemed to strike my fancy.

Finally, I managed to put together a sign that seemed to fill the bill for me. I took the image of the sign I designed down to Creative Graphics and had them make a few aluminum-backed vinyl signs for me.

Both projects took about a week and both turned out to be outstanding. I'll be making a road trip with Doug one of these days to visit a framing shop in Belize City where I'll get the mural mounted onto a painting stretcher board.

I mounted one of the aluminum signs on the fence beside our back canal gate.

Danger!

It looks pretty dang official and should give the unwary pause before they go dangling legs over the edge of the dock - unless they're really into improving the gene pool.

Whatcha Lookin' For And How Did You End Up Here?

I thought it might be kind of interesting to share with you what folks are looking for through Google and some other search engines to end up here at Winjama Belize - Adventures in Paradise. Once in a while, it's a mystery.

Here's the top 25 searches that brought people to the blog:

1. Belize Adventure in Paradise - This is good that it's in first place
2. winjama belize - Likewise, this also is a good choice
3. winjama.blogspot.com - As is this one, the URL for it
4. winjama - And this one too, which started out to be a personalized license plate
5. Wood Bathtubs - Two photos of Kim Longsworth's art work and here we are
6. label - Hmmm, this one's a mystery
7. achiote paste tienda olympia - From a recipe, a store, and where we're from... hmmm
8. cabinet crown molding - Ok. We've spent some time showing cabinetry in both houses
9. belize mennonite houses - We have one. Makes sense.
10. water heater - Must be interested in on-demand heaters
11. crown moulding top of kitchen cabinets - I remember mentioning this, so did someone else.
12. crown molding - And again, but someone with less detail
13. belize blogspot - Oooh, that's getting kinda vague, but found us anyway
14. pictures of large sheets of glass - Thankfully, that was the Corozal Glass Shop posting
15. cabinet piano hinge pictures - Somebody really zeroed in on this detail
16. almond tree guest house corozal belize - Almost got the name right and still wound up here.
17. blogspot.com: belize - Another vague one, but got it here in spite of that
18. belize house plans - Hmph, how did they end up here with that search criteria?
19. Temporary Power Pole Diagram - I have to say, same question as the last one. It's a mystery.
20. canada circuit breaker house - Now this one is strange, yet they got here anyway.
21. install corner door piano hinges kitchen - Another detail-minded person
22. http://winjama.blogspot.com - perfect. The URL is exactly right - and, it worked!
23. house plans in belize - Yet they ended up here instead of a developer's Website...
24. bambamcorozal@yahoo.com - No idea on this one at all, but they found us.
25. www.winjama.blogspot.com - Aahh, our alternate URL. You don't need to use 'www'. Trust me.

top search items:

1. dart team copperbank - yo-kay, we do go darting at Donna's Place At the Copperbank Inn. We drink beer there too, but that didn't show up in the searches.
2. gun law - This is interesting. "I write so much about guns on this blog," he said facetiously.
3. jill - Alright. This is one way to get on a search; give me a t-shirt.
4. pictures - Which one? It's not like I don't put very many up on the blog. How did that get someone to this blog?
5. thunderbolt - I have written about it and maybe even posted a picture of one of the two boats, but why here and not someplace that has rates and schedules and other pertinent stuff? Besides, I've never ridden it.

Time for another Grab Bag

I wasn't the only one doing 'Christmas' cleaning and such. Christmas is when everyone in Belize cleans, paints and rehabs their digs, I'm guessing, to impress good ol' St Nick, so they get lots of goodies. Probably the real reason is that it's cool at that time of year - good for painting, at least. But, it certainly brought us out of summer torpor.

I was busy, but Dianna kept herself and Edna, our cleaning lady, really busy. Oh sure, I had to move the satellite cable from one side of the room to another, but that was about the extent of my involvement. Our living room is completely different now, thanks to their efforts.

Our New Living Room Arrangement

I've even been reorganizing my workshop drawers. Making use of some narrow strip of plywood I had laying around for some project or other, I had Guillermo Magaña true up the edges and rip the plywood. Then, I cut it to size and notched it to make small bins in the drawers. It's still a work in progress.

A Well-Organized Drawer

While I was at Guillermo's cabinet shop, I saw one of his workers busy sanding a beautiful stair railing.

Just Some More Gorgeous Woodwork

I had mentioned that I didn't catch a shot of the green-leafed tree marking the cave-in in the road. Well, Vivien did catch it and was nice enough to send it to me. So, here it is in all its danger-warning glory.

Traffic Safety Tree

Let's see, what else? Well, there was a couple of shots I took at Jennie and Nigel's on the occasion of Gary's B-day.

Jenni With Gary's B-Day Cake

Gary's New Baby, Lizzy

Well, I think that's about it for now. Some things I either forgot to include in a posting, didn't have the photo at the time, or some other good reason. Anyway, enjoy. It's time to feed the doggies. They're outside, prancing around on the porch, trying discreetly to get my attention.

Cheers,
Dave

Road and Garden Improvements

Normally, you expect to read 'house and garden' or something like that. Not here. No sir.

There's never a dull moment around this place. We had another cave-in on the road in front of our place about a week or so ago. I missed the opportunity to take a photo of it with a tree limb with green leaves that someone stuck in the hole as a warning. Denis across the road adorned it with a plastic soda bottle, thinking that would probably reflect headlights better.

I phoned it in to Department of Works. Long-time readers may remember the last time this happened, I called them and they responded in an hour and repaired the cave-in. Well, not this time. We waited and we waited. Finally, Mr. Quinto (the retired Belize Ambassador to Taiwan) sent one of his guys and a back hoe down to fill it. He also provided the rocks to fill the hole.

Fixing the Cave-In

 BTW, the hole ended up about 3 or 4 feet across and almost 5 feet deep. Even though the actual hole in the road was only about a foot across.

Long View of the Project

Fortunately, no one fell in the hole or drove into it. Although it might have been interesting if some of the nightlife drove into the hole. Probably would have made more dramatic photos.

So, now we come to the garden improvement bit.

Months ago, I had my Godson, Isaiel, make up several metal hose hangers for me. I promptly installed one, then a few months later installed another, and this morning, I installed a third.

A New Hose Hanger

There's still two to go. You can't rush these things, y'know. I guess the rule till now has been to wait till the plastic hose hanger decays in the sunlight and the hose falls down. Hoses for the most part, seem to be holding up well in the bright sunlight. Just the hangers seem to be susceptible.

Cody and I also went through my stack of lumber and PVC pipe parts. I gave him probably half the lumber as I'll probably never have a use for all of it.

Neat and Tidy Wood Rack

It's nice having that area organized finally. It's just been an area that collected stuff as the place was being built, so it kind of grew up messy. Not now. It's pristine, sort of. But, I digress. This blog stuff is interfering with pool-time. See ya.

Cheers

I Pulled The Plug

Hi Dave,

You have deactivated your Facebook account. You can reactivate your account at any time by logging into Facebook using your old login email and password. [I can't imagine why I would want to do that.] You will be able to use the site like you used to. [I never used it much. I was always trying to figure out what the attraction was and why I should be interested in it]
Thanks,
The Facebook Team
   
Sign in to Facebook and start connecting
Sign In
[You have got to be s**tting me]
To reactivate, follow the link below:
http://www.giveupyourprivacy.now
This message was intended for [me after I had 'deactivated' my account]. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click here to unsubscribe. [Even after killing - sorry, 'deactivating' my account, I still have to unsubscribe]
Facebook, Inc. P.O. Box 10005, Palo Alto, CA 94303 [It's a nice, homey touch that they include their snail mail address - like I'd want to waste the postage]

You may enjoy the Facebook experience. Me? I've had a belly full of every time they change something, personal data is shared with the world by default. They could at least ask me if I want to share my data. It's the old 'opt out/opt in' thing. Since when is it proper to assume everyone wants to share everything with everyone and anyone by default?

I just don't want any more 'personalized advertising, or news, or whatever - especially if I didn't specifically ask for it.

Cheers

Welcome 2011 - Edited

We (Denis, Vivien, Dianna & Me) headed out to Copper Bank to help those folks bring in the New Year. We got to the Copper Bank Inn and Donna's Place Restaurant about 3:00 PM. Of course, a pot luck was in full swing. None of the four of us remembered seeing anything about a pot-luck in the emails.

Enjoying the Pot-Luck Chow

(thanks Vivien & Denis for the photos)

Like most pot-luck affairs, there was plenty of food for everyone - even those who didn't bring food, like us. And it was good too. A great salad, a really tasty lobster dish (I don't know what it would be called - it was molded to look like a lobster), and a whole lot of other eats. No one went hungry for sure.

I went and left my 'Pocket Instamatic' (remember those?) at home, as I was going to rely on my phone camera. Hah! With no flash, it was less than useful for that purpose. Thankfully, Vivien brought her camera along and these are her and Denis' photos. Thanks guys. It's unfortunate, but they didn't send me any photos of themselves (That has since been corrected, hence the edit in the title - Ed.).

After shoveling all that chow down, and helping it down were a few bottles of Belikin, it was time for darts. Again, we were a little reluctant to play, but there were no excuses excepted this time. Everyone in the place played. There were four teams set up and two boards, so there was plenty of room for everyone to play.

Just Some Whupass Dart Playin'

I played on Tall Paul's team and we almost won our first match. There were about five or six folks on each team, so there was plenty of time to stroll around, eat more food, get another cold one, visit the other board or the head (whichever you needed to do).

Dianna Doin' the Tushy Wiggle

Denis called my attention to this. My team was playing by this time at the other board. Denis' team was playing Dianna's. He said I had to watch Dianna shoot. She had developed a rather unique style of getting ready to deliver the dart. We were lucky enough that Denis captured this shot in mid stride. You can almost see it happening.

Vivien Celebrating A Good Shot

Denis, Coolly Taking A Shot

What a great, fun and relaxing way to bring in the new year. Well, almost. We left Donna's place about 8:00 PM and made it back to our places by about 8:30. When we arrived at the ferry, they were ready and waiting for us. I didn't even have to stop - we just drove right on, parked in the middle and enjoyed the ride across as the only vehicle on it.

Dianna and I were in bed and asleep by about 9:00 or so. Thankfully, there were enough fireworks lit off at midnight so we could roll over and wish each other a happy new year. Then it was back to sleep.

New Year's day was totally a relaxing, do-nothing day for us. Other than napping and watching a couple of movies on the tube, we just vegged the whole day.

I hope you and yours had as enjoyable a New Years celebration as we did. Here's wishing everyone a great, happy, prosperous and safe new year.

Cheers