This week was a lot of fun! We went without water for the beginning part of the week, as the days went on we slowly sat further and further apart from each other as to not offend anyone with our smelliness from lack of showering ;) Apparently a water mane burst and they turned the water off as a precaution to avoid flooding. Tenants in our building were threatening to go into the pool with a bar of soap to bathe if our water wasn't turned on soon. It's a bummer when you forget your water's off when you go work out and then realize there's no way to take a shower--thank goodness for pools! We've made sure to store a bunch of water in the cupboards as emergency drinking water, as well as putting a giant tub on the porch to collect rain water to use to fill the toilets so that we can still go to the bathroom. You know you're adjusting to a new way of life when being able to flush a toilet seems like a highlight to the day.
After the water got turned on I spent the rest of my week anxious about the talk I was asked to give in church on Sunday. Public speaking both does and doesn't freak me out. I enjoy being able to talk and introduce myself to those who don't know me, like my church here, but I also get really nervous and red in the face and I talk too fast, and I forget things I was going to say, or say things out of order, etc. My dad is an AMAZING public speaker, every time I watch him do his training for work, or talk in church, or in other meetings, I always get really jealous. But the talk went well! I wasn't too nervous this time, I was praying for my nerves to ease so I could just get out what I wanted to say. This week I also was asked to be an instructor in the Primary at church which means that I'll be teaching/helping all of the 2-12 year olds at church. I was in Primary for the first time this last Sunday, and I was quite intimidated. The kids are really cute, and really innocent and sweet, but man do they get hyper. I'm excited about this calling, though. I think it'll be fun to be around the little kids, growing up with so many siblings, being around little kids is second nature.
Other highlights of the week included boogie boarding at Mullet Beach (we renamed the beach "Jared Allen Beach" since we all know how much I love Jared, and Jared had a mullet) which is a five minute walk from the apartment. The sand is so soft and the water is crystal clear, it was amazing. Andi and Tanner are slowly getting more acquainted with the ocean, and they're more confident in swimming and playing in it, whereas before it was a "I'm going to wear my clothes to the beach, and just get my feet wet" type of thing.
Carina had her first round of tests this morning, they're called "blocks." They're almost like mid terms, or unit tests, but they account for 12% of your grade, so they're pretty stinking important. This entire weekend she had her face in her laptop, or in a textbook, so we tried to steer clear of her. The med school campus plays a movie in one of the lecture halls on a projector for free every Friday and Saturday night. So Saturday night Andi and I went and saw "The Help." We both love that movie, we've seen it before, and we own it. But we love free activities so we decided to go anyways. The lecture hall was FREEZING. It's such a weird sensation here to be cold even after only three weeks of being gone from Minnesota. It's so hot all the time that to feel cold kind of seems alien. We walked in and saw people cuddled up with blankets and sweatshirts and Andi and I looked at them dumb like, "uhh...we're in the Caribbean, have fun sweating your face off back here in your blanket." Half an hour into the movie I swear mine and Andi's teeth were chattering.
There's a shuttle service at Carina's school that will take you from campus to your apt, or to the grocery store, or the airport, it's awesome. It's not safe here to walk after dark, and it gets dark at 630 or so, so we rely on the shuttle quite a bit. The drivers name is Michael, and he's awesome. Every time he drives us we get a history lesson about the island, or the newest gossip about upcoming stores to open, or scandals with rental managers of different rental units, he's pretty much our eyes and ears to the island, we love him. He also repeats everything a couple of times, which I've found is fairly common for islanders to do. Shuttle drivers can't take tips, but Michael took us to the grocery store last week, so we bought him a thing of Rolo's and asked if he liked Rolo's and he says, "Yes I do, Yes I do, Yes I do." Then later on in the car ride he was talking about a mall here called "Blue Mall," which always seems under construction and it's never going to finish and we commented that was very weird and he says, "Very weird, very weird, very weird." Love it.
I don't know if I've mentioned before that the gym in our apt building costs about 50 dollars a month per person, so we've scrapped that idea and we just use the gym for free at Carina's school, and it's really nice and heavily air conditioned which is awesome because the air conditioning in the gym in our apt is only on three or four hours a day, and even when it's on it's super hot in there, and it smells a bit funky. There's this guy named Marcus who works out in the same gym and he's such a fine specimen of man, so I always work out extra hard or extra long when he's there, just to soak up our time together ;) This is going to be awkward once Marcus and I actually start talking more consistently, and then get married and he reads this blog! Ha! Today when I was walking back to the apt from the gym I took this shortcut that was slightly more shady than the regular way home, and this creepy guy started walking behind me and gradually kept getting closer and closer to me so I decided to just run home. I probably looked ridiculous going from a walk to a full on sprint to escape a guy who hasn't done anything to me, but you hear horror stories, and I decided you can't ever be too careful.
After Carina's blocks were done today we decided to celebrate by going out to dinner and ice cream and a movie and I took SO many pictures. I'm literally going to post a separate blog about the ice cream place we went to, because it was so pretty in there, I couldn't believe it. The movies here are American which is awesome so I can keep up on 'em. I'd have flown back to the US just to see "Hunger Games" if they hadn't have had that here, so dodged a bullet on that one. The theater is a lot more strict here than back home. Employees walked into the theater tonight while we were watching "We bought a Zoo" which was my second time seeing it, and they asked us to put our feet down off the chair, and told us Piper had to be sitting in a chair, it was funny. It was definitely a fun night. The woman who owned the restaurant we went to offered Andi and I a job serving there on Wednesday nights for their all you can eat ribs when they're super swamped, so that's something we'll look into as a fun thing for her and I to do together. We're meeting a lot of cool people who live right by us, and the island network of friends is getting better, it's starting to feel like a home. Tomorrow Piper and I have a play group so we can get her some baby friends, so that'll be nice.
Life is good here, I'm loving all of the family time, and all the laughs. Kids are so easily amused. Piper has this baby doll that makes possessed sounding noises every so often randomly when people accidentally step on it or something, and the doll drives us all nuts! I decided it'd be fun to launch the baby doll off of our porch and into the pool, I told Piper that "baby was going to go swimming." At first she seemed thrilled with the idea, Piper loves swimming, and so will her "baby kate." My first attempt at throwing it into the pool, the doll hit a retaining wall and bounced back about twenty feet. When I went down to get it its eye had fallen out, it was so funny. The second attempt we got baby kate into the pool, and Piper started screaming, she didn't like this idea anymore. All's well that ends well, though. Thanks to "Baby Kate's" swim, her sound box is broken, and her creepy laugh doesn't work anymore. So we're keeping ourselves heavily amused at home. Here's some miscellaneous pictures of the restaurant/us at dinner...
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