I'm going to do a whenever-I-think-of-it photo-a-day for a little while featuring...Water. I think that's appropriate given that the rainy season has well and truly begun, don't you? The rest of you (or most of you) have snow; I have rain.

This first one is for pjthompson . PJ, this isn't the panorama I mentioned a while back, but I made it because I've been ( Read more... )

Last Saturday we had a huge storm that created havoc with our telephone lines. We haven't had Internet service because of that.  When nothing had been done by Wednesday, I called the phone company using the neighbor's phone, who, curiously, had a working telephone but no net. They said that there was no prob with our line ( Read more... )

In many ways, January was a looooong month. On the other hand, I can't believe that it's already February ( Read more... )

Loads of laundry done today: 3
Estimated remaining loads: 8

The office is reorganized at last. Now we have to get the terrace straightened out, and the house will be back to normal. Tropical storm Fame is on its way out, but Gula is building up north of Reunion Island. Hopefully Madagascar will screen us from the worst of it like it usually does.

Last ( Read more... )

A story, true no less, featuring a giant squeegee and in which references to excrement are made a little too frequently for polite company.

Picture this: Mayotte, Wednesday, 5pm, thunder and lightning announce the imminent arrival of rain. Rain arrives posthaste and  falls steadily until midnight, when it finally lets up enough to let the sick and ( Read more... )

Yesterday, we arrived back in Mayotte, greeted by the baking heat as we stepped from the airplane staircase to the shuttle that would drive us 70 meters to the baggage hanger where heat of another sort awaited us, that of a poorly ventilated, dark barn stuffed with people who do not share my Western views on masking natural body odors.

The good news ( Read more... )

What kind of glimpse would I be giving of Mayotte if I didn't include at least one photo of the rains? Not a very accurate one, that is for sure. So, in the spirit of the season, here is Fabie, on the safety and relative dryness of her porch, watching the rain, enjoying a moment of coolness and quiet.


( Read more... )

Yesterday, it rained. And rained and rained. Luckily, most of the time it was a steady downpour that only once became torrential, allowing most of the water to run off. 100L of water emptied. Before

( Read more... )

The other day, during a big rain, I remarked (yes, I'm totally using the French sense of the word) that there was a pouch of accumulated water on the fiberglass sheets of our terrace roof. I took a long pole and gently--gently--lifted the pouch. The pole stabbed right through the fiberglass, and I got a shower of dirty rainwater in my face. And the ( Read more... )

The dry season has come and is in the process of going. I had forgotten what rotten headaches the atmospheric pressure gives me just before the rainshowers here ( Read more... )