I've been bad about taking my camera with to as many places, and I'm not taking nearly as many pictures which is stupid of me. Luckily a lot of my friends here (Trisha) document everything, it's so nice to have that person in the group who's always taking pictures of everything, makes me happy later to have memories of all those things.
Lately I've been what feels like extremely busy, but in a good way. I'm expanding some things I'm doing at night. My philosophy is, I'll never have the free time in life that I have here so I might as well take advantage of all the things I could be doing. I'm busy with Piper during the day of course, but at nights and weekends without having a job to go to all weekend, or a lot of obligations or things to show up at, I've had a lot of time to just kick it and take part in things I've always wanted to do, but have never done.
French Lessons. Thursday nights I take French lessons, and that is quite an experience. It definitely makes me so happy that I took so much Spanish in high school, and grateful for my fluent Spanish speaking father who always used it at home, I underestimated my fluency that's for sure. I had a five or so minute conversation with a local here who also spoke Spanish and he was impressed by how well I could speak and understand...making Dad proud. Anyways, knowing Spanish has helped immensely with French. Verb conjugations make that much more sense, and past and present tenses of words, not to mention a lot of the verbs are so similar. The one beef I have with French though is the pronunciation. Every Thursday night I feel like my voice is hoarse from coughing and gargling words all night. I write down the French words and then underneath the word I write how it actually sounds, just for practice sake, and half of the words have (phlegm, cough, gargle, hock a loogie) written next to them. Plus I swear, and to those who have learned French, or who speak French, what's up with words that look one way and are pronounced ENTIRELY differently. Sometimes I just have to look to my left and laugh at my friends next to me about these words and how little it makes sense that they're spelled one way and pronounced entirely differently. It can be extreme. It's like writing the word "couch" and telling someone its pronounced "Tibet" how does this happen!? Regardless, it's an absolutely beautiful sounding language, and I'm thrilled to be learning it. It's nice to have my brother in law, Casey here since he can also speak French. I'll definitely need to recruit his help in order to finish my assignments every week. Fun fact about me: My middle name is "Je t'aime" which means "I love you" in French. Nobody believes me when I tell them, and I've had to whip out my license in order to prove it at least dozens of times. Thanks for the bizarre middle name, Mom & Dad ;)
Here's our French class:
Piano Lessons. When I was 12 I took piano lessons for four months and then quit, I didn't like it, I was a bratty little pre teen who thought she was too cool for school and DEFINITELY too cool to have piano lessons in the afternoon instead of hanging out at the skate park behind our elementary school with the rest of her friends...man I was sweet...NOT. Plus when I was 12 we didn't even have a Piano, so I had to go to our church to practice and it always creeped me out to be in there without anyone else. A couple of years later we got a grand piano in the basement and my mom would play it every morning while I was sleeping. Some mornings it was a nice wake up call, pretty piano music to rise to for the day, and other days I had stayed up way too late and wasn't in the mood for her 6:45 piano playing and I wanted to walk out there with a sledge hammer and bang the keys until they were ground up into tiny little pieces and then take the tiny pieces of keys and sprinkle them over my moms head while I said, "No more piano, sleep time." I think that was a literal dream I had one morning while I laid in bed in frustration that my mom was fine tuning her talents and I was just a selfish snot who wanted to sleep in past 7 am. When I turned 14 I started to get REALLY into music. My best friend all through high school and I would constantly look for new bands, I'd listen to him practice guitar all the time, and then once we got our licenses and could drive we were constantly going to concerts. Minneapolis is my favorite place in the world. All of the music and energy there doesn't compare with anywhere else that I'd ever been. I started bringing my iPod with me EVERYWHERE. People would constantly get mad I was always listening to it and not listening to them. I'd take it with me to work and listen to it while I set up shop before our doors opened to customers, I'd take it to the gym, take it to school, everywhere.
I've matured into kind of a music snob. I'm really picky about my music sometimes, and I over analyze it a lot of people tell me, but I guess everyone has their "nitch." Since being in St. Maarten I've been missing my Pandora and Groove Shark stations, and our internet connection is so slow that YouTube videos take forever to load. I'm officially acquainted with EVERY single song on my iPod. 16GB of music and I can put it on shuffle and guess every single song. My iPod is my baby. I love it. A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a guitar intro from "23" by Jimmy Eat World which is my all time favorite song, and I said, "Alright, that's it! I HAVE to learn to play the guitar." It was seriously bothering me, it didn't make sense to me anymore that I love music so incredibly much, yet I can't play a single instrument. I sing, but I want to play the piano, and I NEED to play the guitar.
Cue my friend Trisha. She's a spouse on the island who specializes in music, and teaching vocal and piano lessons. I have my first lesson in an hour and I'm excited to finally start learning piano again so I can get this show on the road. My impatience is wearing thin on my intolerance with myself about lack of musical ability. Enough is enough. Its honestly just been bothering me for so long. Time to take up some new hobbies, and learn some new skills.
The island is a perfect place to cultivate talents, because you have the time and the resources. My church gave me a keyboard to practice on, so i'm going to be the next Beethoven probably...I mean I'm only guessing... ;) (I'm putting winky faces at the end of all my sarcastic comments so that you people know I'm kidding about being super cocky and seemingly obsessed with myself. It's not like i'm obsessed with emoticons.) For those of you reading my blog that don't know me too well in real life, i'm incredibly sarcastic. You get used to it. I hope? Ha.
I've also been living and breathing hair again lately. After Aveda wrapped up last year I promised myself I'd never even brush someones hair for them again. 1550 hours of straight HAIR just burns you out like I can't even explain. I'm not sure if it was especially bad for me because I don't have the same passion as other hairdressers...I mean, half of my class went on to working in a salon IMMEDIATELY after school finished. I could never do that. All of the drama, and the gossip, and living up to the appearance and way people needed you to be, I just felt like my head was going to implode. But alas, after a couple months of not doing hair I found myself reading hair blogs, studying our upcoming hair trends, and I thought "Crap! I actually love hair." I couldn't lie about that anymore. So I've been doing so many haircuts and colors lately, it's been fun to get back into it again. The one thing I'm missing is my salon chair/sink, I've had to get a little bit ghetto...
My friend Trisha just had her birthday last week, and badly wanted her hair done for the big day. The only hard part is washing the foils out, I had Cari just bend over and put her head into the sink when I did hers, and not only is it extremely uncomfortable but also, "Hi, I'm a bleach foil, Michelle is about to rinse me out and I'm going to whip myself into your eye, thereby blinding you." Not so much a good idea. I have awful luck and didn't want to chance it. People leaning their heads down and the bleach foils being so close to their faces just freaked me out. It brought me back to Chemistry class in High School when we were doing a Stoichiometry lab with eye droppers and I distinctly recall our teacher, Mr. Nelson (who was my absolute favorite) say, "Students, do NOT touch the eye droppers, there's sulfuric acid in them and it could flick you in the eye" so OF COURSE I walk on over to the apparatus, touch the eye dropper, and sure enough acid meets eyeball. I had to use the embarrassing eyewash, mascara was everywhere, I wanted to just die. Mr. Nelson always poked fun at me because we were good buddies so it helped a lot when he told me I was his only student to ever have to use the eyewash...someone get this chick a ribbon for her achievements. KILL ME.
So I told Trisha I had an idea, I honestly think it was divine inspiration ha, to just have her lay on the counter top and put her head back into the sink with some towels under her neck as a nice pillow, and it worked like a charm. Her hair turned out beautifully, I got to use my curling wand which I hadn't used in months. The humidity down here is KILLER. Twenty minutes after curling my hair, it looks like a sweaty afro. So I tend to leave the curling wand under my sink for most of the time, which bums me out slightly, I used to curl my hair constantly, curls are the best. But I decided to curl her hair for the big day, and her hair curled marvelously, but of course, by 7 that night for her birthday gathering, it was mostly flat... oh well!
Moby Dick, our Isuzu Trooper is back now! It had been having some SERIOUS issues with chugging and black smoke coming out of the tail pipe, it had apparently been from the flooding here when I drove it through a very wet golf course (oops) apparently the mechanic took our exhaust sensor (what the freak is that?) off and a ton of water dumped out and immediately after it was working tons better, plus we got new brakes so that when I have to slam the brakes for a person who decided they were ballsy enough to jet across the road, I don't almost hit and kill them, always a plus. Getting the car fixed was quite a fiasco, but I'm just glad she's up and running again so we can errand and get out more.
Piper is doing well, getting so big, talking SO much. She's so fun. She likes to collect rocks now, on our walks she'll pick up fistfuls of rocks at a time, give them to me to carry until we return home, and then she gives a couple of rocks each to all of our security guards who are now her friends. She's growing like a weed, though. I've been taking naps with her a lot more lately. I'm basically nocturnal now, I have been staying up way too late for how early I get up with Pipes. I go down to the ocean almost every night still and it's like a time warp down there. I was down there for two hours last night just writing in a journal my friend Jess gave me before I left to use as my "Island Adventure Book" and by the time I came upstairs it was two hours later, I had no idea. But I got to see a bunch of land crabs, and some tree frogs, and it was awesome. Not to mention the ocean is amazing and the sound of the waves combined with how well you can see every star is the best thing ever.
Come swim with us!
The before and after pics of our pool my friend Kristin put together. We had three pools when we got here, all three were drained about a month later because of a psycho court case battle between our complex owner and the home owners association, its been a long time com in', and now one pool is filled again thank goodness, but the other two sit and rot. I swear to you one of these days I'm going to be walking back from the gym in the dark and i'm going to fall into the unfilled pool and bust my legs/arms/ribs/head/body.
Shell, give us a heads-up when you post new entries. Mom and I read them same-day. We laugh, we remember, we feel grateful for you. Applaud interest in French (oui?), and piano. As for the rest of your life...it'll come to you. Love, Dad
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