Island Time

Pooches on Parade

2012-02-07T09:35:00.002-04:00

The dog parade put on by the Krewe de Croix is an annual event that draws a fair sized crowd to the boardwalk in Christiansted. The Krewe is basically just a bunch of friends who put an island twist on various stateside traditions. Next week is their Mardi Croix parade on the northside, and while it's technically a different group running the St. Patrick's Day Parade, it's mostly the same people.

You can see the story I wrote about Saturday's parade here. This is my favorite pic from last weekend's dog parade. "I'm ready for my closeup!"

AND FYI - The laptop I use for almost everything is now a former computer. For the short term I'm using a much older machine. I can do pretty much all the same stuff, but everything is a lot more difficult and takes longer. So I probably won't be blogging quite as much. Just so you know. jb

Wonder If They Sell Much

2012-02-06T08:49:00.002-04:00

Saw this sign yesterday at the Cost-U-Less. I can certainly see why they'd have to reduce price.

Troubled Times

2012-02-02T09:05:00.003-04:00

I wrote last month about the closure of Hovensa, the St. Croix refinery that was by far (and is for another couple of weeks) the largest private employer in the territory.

I don't want to pretend that a huge oil refinery (one of the biggest in North America) is a great neighbor on a small, tropical island. But for more than 40 years it has been the mainstays – let me say that again with emphasis, THE mainstay – of the local economy.

We'll be visiting this from time to time for a while, because this is a huge event for this island.

Last month the unemployment rate in the U.S. Virgin Islands was 8.5 percent – 7.7 percent on St Thomas/St. John, and 9.6 on St. Croix. That's high. But the loss of all those refinery jobs will push the overall jobless rate in the territory to 12.5 percent and on St. Croix it will climb to 18.7 percent, according to the territory's Department of Labor. And there's no reason to think it'll get better any time soon. There simply are no other jobs on the island and no industries here that might create even a fraction of those jobs, not any time soon.

This came on top of a fiscal crisis for the territory government which is causing pretty heavy layoffs of public employees. And the Senate lacks the political will to do the things it needs to do to resolve the problem. They'd be unpopular, and politicians don't intentionally run around doing unpopular things in an election year. In fact, I covered a Senate session where the whole daylong discussion was Hovensa, and they steadfastly refused to face reality all day.

So the Baurs now have a front row seat at economic chaos. We're okay, at least for now, Everything is going to get more expensive, except rum, and we're losing friends fast. People who work at the refinery have a set of skills that kind find them work anywhere – except here. To work, they've gotta go to where the oil jobs are, and that's someplace else. One family we were getting to know saw the handwriting on the wall early and moved to Panama right after Christmas, before the Hovensa announcement. Another family we know is moving to Texas this summer – although they've said they're taking us with them. Not that we're ever moving to Texas, but their son thinks the Baurs are the funniest people he's ever met, and we've turned him on to Dr. Who. Another family is moving to Oklahoma, and there's also talk of Saudi Arabia and Qatar among our friends and acquaintances. Some friends of Millie's just moved to Florida. They werenit a Hovensa family, but they don't like what they see coming down the road.

And it's all going to get worse before it gets any better. The people who are leaving have skills, education. That just exacerbates the brain drain that has always been a problem on the island.

For us the biggest concern is the school. One of the perks of moving to the territory to work for the company was Hovensa paid private school tuition for the kids. Good Hope will still be there next year, the administration assured everyone, but everyone knows it won't be the same. And Good Hope isn't the only private school facing that problem. All of them – Country Day, Kingshill, A to Z Academy – have some hard decisions to make, and some of them won't survive. I just don't see how they can.

That's going to mean more people without jobs or leaving the island. We're looking at a long stretch of difficult times.

North side beach

2012-02-01T07:34:00.002-04:00

This is the beach at the Carambola, a resort on the north side of the island, looking west towards Hamm's Bluff. The first month we were on island we stayed at a vacation rental a couple of miles east of here. It's very close to The Wall, a scuba paradise where the sea floor drops straight down about 200 feet. The north side is pretty much all like this, but it's not perfect. Cell phone reception is spotty. Darn.

Gross story: They take a LOT of killing

2012-01-29T11:21:00.006-04:00

The centipedes here on the island, I think I've mentioned before, are the most horrible pests I've ever seen. They're big around as your finger, five or six inches long, with stingers at both ends and they look like some creature from hell in a cheesy SyFy horror movie. (I know, cheesy SyFy movie is redundant.)

And they take SO MUCH killing. You don't smack a centipede with a shoe and call it good. Oh no.

You smack it four or five times in the front end, then another two or three in the back, then again in the front. All along one end or the other keeps writhing and aiming its stingers at you.

We tried spraying one with poison. It charged us, so to speak, and kept coming as we backed up spraying furiously. Took about eight feet before the son of a bitch was dead.

So this is what this story is about. Two nights ago I went out to lock the gate before going to bed. As I came back in, I closed the front door and turned to lock it, and peripherally noticed something moving at my feet. Somehow, as I opened and closed the door, a centipede had tried to come inside and I had closed the door on it.

And it was writhing and struggling and trying to pull itself in. So I grabbed a shoe and smacked it in the head three time. It finally quieted down. I decided to wait until morning to deal with it. But Tori had heard the slam-slam-slam, so she knew it was a centipede. Nothing else requires that much killing.

The next morning I grabbed the broom, opened the door and had to stifle a scream. Because the back end of the son of a bitch was still wriggling. In fact, once I cleared it from the door, it started coming forward again. This was 11 hours later! The front half was ruined, it was bent in half at the middle, and it was still trying to get into the house! I took a picture, then dispatched him for good and all.

In the picture below, the top portion is the half that I smacked repeatedly with a shoe. It's relatively flat. The bottom half kept pushing the front end forward, waving those stingers and behaving horribly.

Life in the tropics – It's not all rum and mangoes and beautiful beaches. Sometimes it's monsters from hell. But I can imagine a REALLY cheesy SyFy movie featuring these things.

A Pair of Big Ones

2012-01-27T13:09:00.002-04:00

I don't recall what these are, breadfruit I think but I'm not sure. But they're big. These are growing at the St. George Village Botanical Garden on St. Croix. And they're big ones.

A little flora

2012-01-21T10:01:00.001-04:00

An orchid at the St. George Village Botanical Gardens.

Economic Tsunami

2012-01-18T12:54:00.004-04:00

The island got some bad news this morning. The territory's single biggest private employer, the Hovensa refinery, is shutting down. This is huge. Not just the 2,000 jobs, although that's a giant hole in the economy. Electricity, which is already more expensive than anywhere in the states, is generated by fuel purchased from the refinery at a discount. Rates will soar. Businesses that were just hanging on with the high utility costs will get flung over the edge. Gas prices, which were a little lower than stateside, will jump.

And that's just the start. Everything will get more expensive, from a little more to a lot. This is really big, bad news for St. Croix.

Big ship; Small world

2012-01-17T11:13:00.003-04:00

I don't think I posted this one before. If I did, oh well. I also don't recall how it got so purple. Should be bluer. Still, cool shot. A cruise ship at Frederiksted's pier. I've never seen them come in, because they do it at about six in the morning. Forget that. But I've watched them pull out in the evening, and it still amazes me every time I see one of them move. They're so damn big. How can they move? How can they stay afloat?

The revisions of the book are finished (this time around, it's never ending) and I have to get back into a schedule. Spent the last three days practically chained to the desk, so I feel like I'm coming up for air.

And in the "small world" category, got a comment on the blog post a couple of weeks ago from someone who, inspired by our move to the Caribbean, pulled up stakes in the big city and moved to the rural central California coast. Which is the same place I started my journey more than 30 years ago. So you just never know.

Quick Note

2012-01-11T13:08:00.002-04:00

No blogging this week or probably next. Have a deadline for the revision of my YA novel, Chrissie Warren: Pirate Hunter hard upon me. Have to focus like a – well, like a really focused thing or person, how's that?

We'll be back soon, if that actually matters.

jb

The Big Parade!

2012-01-08T10:02:00.005-04:00

And finally, the main parade.

They don't call it the Grand Parade, or anything cool like that. It's the Adults Parade, to distinguish it from the Children's Parade. But it's pretty grand.

It's a real cultural gathering, with princesses, moko jumbies, steel pan, masqueraders and parade troupes. The troupes are what you think of when you think of a Caribbean carnival. The picture above is a girl from a Dominican Republic dance group.

It's supposed to start at 10 in the morning. It never does, at least not in our experience. We can hear it forming up from about two blocks away from our house, and we can tell shortly after noon when they get moving, Then we just hop in the car and skirt the main road, arriving in Frederiksted a few minutes later, well ahead of the marchers.

And it takes a long, long time. The first entry steps off at about noon. The last one staggers past the reviewing stand as the sun sets around 6:30 p.m. It's a long damn day. Fun, but long. The photo below is an 8-year-old girl who was jumping up and down with excitement because her sister's majorette troupe was about to pass by.

As it happens, I did not cover the parade this. I did go down and shoot video, which we posted here. The coverage by another Source reporter is here.

So festival is almost over. There's power boat races today and closing ceremonies tonight in the festival village. It's fun, but it's time for it to be over, I think. Time to get back to work.

I Love a Parade

2012-01-07T09:33:00.004-04:00

Is there anything cuter than a bunch of pint-sized baton twirlers clomping down the street? The children's parade of the Christmas Festival took the streets yesterday and even with the rain it was a good time. Bands (including the unbeatable Rising Stars steel pan band.) were highlights this year.

Story for the Source is here, and Tori's video of the event is here.

There was also some rain, and though they didn't use this shot, I thought it was a good one.

'It's a sanctioned incident'

2012-01-05T12:12:00.004-04:00

It starts at 5 in the morning. It's crazy loud. It's like nothing I've seen anywhere else.

It's J'Ouvert (pronounced zhou-vay, apparently French in origin.) Or as we like to call it, the St. Croix Annual Public Humping Festival.

This year the police reported no incidents, unless you consider the whole thing an incident. "It's a sanctioned incident," Tori said.

Six flatbed trucks hauled bands on a route about two, two and a half miles. Thousands of people flock around dancing. Well, that's a very mild word, dancing. There's gyrating, there's writhing, there's humping, a lot of humping, most of it, oddly, between girls. Some guys humping girls, but a lot of girls on girls.

I covered it again this year for the Sour

ce – my story is here and you can find the video here and here. I warn you I didn't shoot most of the most outrageous behavior. I wouldn't be able to use it in my story or video so what was the point? You'll have to use your imagination.

And yes, there were kids there. Kids in strollers. Six years. Nine. Many being supervised by parents who were behaving a lot like everyone else. Lot of high schoolers. And on up into at least one woman in her 70s. I saw a bank manager, and a professor, and the kid who bagged my groceries just a few days ago.

St. Croix is a very churched community, by which I mean there are a LOT of churches, with five or six always in some stage of construction as well, and a lot of people go to church. And then there's J'Ouvert. And the difference is so striking, and the so sincere. And I wonder sometimes which is the real St. Croix. Or is it both?

This picture shows the dense throng of revelers. Moments later, just a little farther down on King Street the road kind of funneled between two buildings and it was wild. The temperature actually went up noticeably from all the bodies packed so close together. All I could do was huddle over the camera bag to prevent the equipment from getting wet or covered with powder. It got a little intense.

Anyway, tomorrow is the Kids Parade, and Saturday is the Adult Parade, which i the real highlight of festival. I'll have videos of both up.

Nice Work if You Can Get It

2012-01-02T11:57:00.004-04:00

This is Tori looking out her second floor classroom window at the Good Hope School. Yeah, I don't know how she gets any work done either. (I May have run this picture before. If so, sorry.)

Actually she doesn't get any work done this week. They're off until Jan. 9, next Monday.

Here's the school. Through those arches is – well, look what Tori sees from her window and you'll get it.

Festival Kicks Into High Gear

2011-12-30T10:34:00.004-04:00

Last night the Festival Village opened, and the Crucian Christmas Festival kicked off for real. Carnival rides, food, games of "chance." Fun. There have been events leading up to last night, the youth Calypso contest, a parade in Christiansted, pageants. But the village opening is the real start.

For the next week very little work will get done on St. Croix. There's the Quelbe Tromp, the J'Ouvert (must be experienced) a food fair and two big parades, plus a lot of other things.

Every Caribbean Island has its own celebration, and the Crucian Christmas Festival's is St. Croix's.

Anyway, here's the story I wrote last night on the festival, and here's the video Tori shot.The picture above is 6-year-old John Hazell riding the merry go round.

Problems in Paradise

2011-12-29T13:11:00.005-04:00

It has come to our attention that some people – you know who you are – get sulky, even snarky, when we post photos of beautiful warm beaches. Especially when the places they live are covered with snow and ice and they spend the winter wiping their runny noses and trying to figure out exactly how many sweaters they can put on at one time.

But to show my heart is in the right place (my chest) I hereby present a list of 12 things that are NOT great about living on St. Croix. To make up for all the perfect weather.

A Dozen Things That Are NOT Great About Living on St. Croix

1 - Hurricanes and hurricane season. Even when there is no hurricane heading for you, it's not fun. It's a low-grade worry for six months of the year, occasionally punctuated by the imminent arrival of a major storm. When a hurricane does come, the power always goes out and stays out for a while.

2 - Grocery prices. Milk is over $7 a gallon, a loaf of bread will run about $4. Virtually everything costs more, except for cigarettes and rum, which are dirt cheap, but since we quit smoking earlier this year only one of those has meaning to us any more.

3 - The price of electricity. The electric bill is always shocking, usually close to $400 a month for us, and it's not like we have air conditioning. And the service from WAPA is crappy. The power goes out for no apparent reason, usually during football games. But when the power bill comes, it's a "sit down and have a drink moment." Fortunately, rum is cheap.

4 - If you love football and follow a west coast team (Seahawks!) you almost never get to see your team play on TV. The networks always assume you want to watch some team you don't care about (the Giants, Jets or Falcons) or some team all right-thinking Americans hate (the Cowboys, Pittsburgh, Philly) when what you really want is the Seattle-San Francisco game.

5 - Availability of fresh water. When the tour guides say, "don't drink the water," they mean it. We get our house water on a cistern that collects rain water from the roof. Certainly it is "green," but we have seen some foot-long centipedes crawling into the dank, watery abyss that is our cistern. We purchase all our drinking water at the supermarket. See note about "Everything is expensive."

6 - Cistern showers. When the power goes out for any length of time, the slab of concrete over the cistern is moved. We tie a bucket to a rope, drop it down into the dark and haul up the water. Our first year we lost power for nearly a week after hurricane Omar. We learned very quickly how to shower with one bucket of water, and to flush the toilet only when absolutely necessary, once a day if possible.

7 - Headlights. Most Crucian drivers keep their high beams on at all times, in fact, they seem unaware they have two settings. Blindness, and hilarity ensues!

8 - Dead Iguanas. Seeing one of these ancient dinosaurs flattened on the pavement just seems so wrong. They are the worst roadkill ever. "Roadkill Iguana" would be a great name for a rock band, but it's lousy to see on the road.

9 - Litter. Speaking of lousy to see on the road, St. Croix is a beautiful place, as long as you don't look down. A lot of people litter here. Just throw trash out the car window with no shame. They also just throw their puppies away. There is a severe, (and sad) problem of overpopulation of dogs and cats.

10 - Customer service is a joke here. There's practically nowhere to shop for the day-to-day stuff except one of the island's two Kmarts. Mix St. Croix's poor idea of customer service with the really bad attitude of all Kmart employees and you can just ruin a whole afternoon.

11 - Shipping. Amazon won't ship electronics to the island. Other places charge an arm and a leg because they say it is "not in the United States." Well, it is! St Croix is a US territory and postage is the same here as anywhere else. And the postal service is unreliable in general. Several times packages sent from the states just never arrived to us, lost in Puerto Rico where mail goes to die.

12 - People stateside, especially in northern, snowy states, get all grouchy when you post photos of beautiful sunsets and warm, sunny beaches while they're shivering in their igloos. Sometimes they even leave snarky comments on the blog. Imagine that!

There. Everybody happy now? Good. Then you won't mind if I post this picture. Just another day in paradise.

Happy Caribbean Christmas!

2011-12-25T16:45:00.004-04:00

Merry Christmas from the Baurs and island friends – from left, Alan, Kate, Joey, Max, Tori (the Queen of Christmas!) and John. The Happiest Christmas ever to you all!

And a new year full of really cool stuff!

Happy Christmas!

2011-12-24T09:06:00.005-04:00

I've posted this picture before, back on the first Christmas Eve we spent on the island. I don't think I've ever taken a better one. This was literally ON Christmas Eve 2008.

When we posted it back then, a friend in the Northwest commented that they were expecting a white Christmas, "so there." As if that was somehow a good thing and she was one up. My only response was "My sympathies." I was born in Chicago. I've seen all the snow I'll ever need to see for the rest of my life, and shoveled it. Snow is why we moved to the island, that and frozen rain and black ice and other such temperature deprived precipitation.

Got a few errands to run today, and Tori is involved in some major construction project that I'm supposed to not see. I can't imagine what it is. And then if we have time, we'll run down to the beach. But we'll definitely run to the beach Christmas morning, because we have to take a family picture.

Happy Christmas to all our friends! jb

Velvety Sunset

2011-12-23T11:21:00.003-04:00

This was taken abut a year ago, 13 months, to be specific. It was opening night for the Good Hope School production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" that Tori has directed, and curtain was another half hour away. So I wandered down to the beach behind the school and shot this and a few others.

The show was amazingly good too.

More beachside toes

2011-12-22T07:37:00.002-04:00

I've already shown you my toes in the surf. Tori's are much nicer, and she has better legs. This was after she'd been snorkeling off Dorsch.

Five Pictures From Sunday Afternoon

2011-12-18T16:10:00.010-04:00

'Twas the week before Christmas
And all 'cross the sand
Not a creature was stirring
'Cept Max, getting tan.

Seriously, we just got back from the beach and I wanted to share these. This isn't the beach we normally go to, but a cruise ship was in and Dorsch usually gets a little crowded. This is what we saw when we pulled off the road just north of Rainbow Beach, which is just north of Frederiksted. Virtually empty stretch of white sand.

That palm tree in the distance? This is it, close up.

Max, ready for all sorts of water sports.

And a ballgame on the beach, with the cruise ship in the background. Playing are Tori, Max, Natasha and Alan. Alan is closest to the camera. He's been going to college in Canada, which explains why he's so white.

And that was our Sunday afternoon, and we still got home in time to see some fairly crappy football.

But we have to exclaim to the tropical skies,
"Merry Christmas from us down here in paradise!"

Nice Thing About the West Side

2011-12-15T08:25:00.003-04:00

We get great sunsets over here. Really great. They almost look like a studio photographer's phony prom backdrop, but they're real. This is from Frederiksted's waterfront.

Silly Girls

2011-12-13T10:44:00.003-04:00

This pic is from last Easter, I think. They were making candy in the kitchen, and Millie and Tori got a little silly with the icing.

Millie, by the way, is doing great at school. Just so ya know.

St. Croix Christmas Boat Parade

2011-12-11T09:58:00.007-04:00

It's really the best of everything. Sultry tropical night, full moon, choirs, boats decorated with Christmas lights, fireworks, Santa Claus – who in the islands arrives by boat, not reindeer driven sleigh.

It's St. Croix's annual Christmas Boat Parade. We've gone every year since we've been here. Hard to beat. It's rapidly become my favorite island tradition.

Rather than write about it again, I'll give you these links. This is the story I wrote for the Source last night. This is the video Tori shot .

We had a great time. The only thing is, every year when I go to cover it for the Source, I ask myself, "How come I don't have any rich friends with a boat to invite me to parade with them?" As fun as this is, I'll bet it's a lot more fun from the boat.

Vincent T. Mason Coral Beach Resort

2011-12-10T13:24:00.004-04:00

I don't know who Vincent T. Mason was, but he's got a nice stretch of beach named after him. This is about a mile down the coast from Dorsch, almost to the southwest corner of St. Croix. When I took this I was standing right at the line between this park and Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge, where sea turtles nest. Here's a link to a story I wrote on sea turtle nesting a couple of years ago. It was very cool, an amazing experience, although it has nothing to do with this picture. Also, Sandy Point was were they filmed the last scene from "Shawshank Redemption," where Morgan Freeman walks down the "Mexican" beach to where Tim Robbins is working on his boat. Also cool.

Oh, and perhaps most important, this is the beach where Tori and I filmed "Wooing Wenches," a pirate love story. If you haven't seen it yet, don't miss it!