The Good, The Bad, and The Beautiful

 We made it back to Jamaica with only a few hiccups. 

We had booked our flights on American Airlines and then they discontinued service to Ithaca! Bill Turner kindly offered to drive us to Syracuse and we stayed overnight in a motel near the airport and flew out on schedule at 6:00AM on the 8th of November. We were met in Montego Bay at 3:00PM by our driver Vibes, and after spending a frightening amount on groceries at the Mega-Mart arrived at Valley View a little after dark.

Our caretaker Garnett had done a fantastic job on the place, and it looked better than we have ever seen it. Garnett has assembled a small team of helpers and it really showed. We had lost a lot of our ocean view due to the absurd rate at which things grow in the tropics, so we had left orders with our gardener-extraordinaire Tai Jean to severely cut back many of our palms and other plants. He did a fine job and we will now be starting replacements farther down the slope. With luck they won't interfere with our ocean view for quite a few years!

Our house was in generally great shape if you ignore the water pumps. Both our main pump and the hot water pump (our 15 year old solar  hot water heat was unpressurized and required a separate pump) were not working. Tom managed to get the main pump working - bad capacitor - but the hot water pump was dead. Since the solar heater leaked fairly badly we decided to bite the bullet and replace it with a new pressurized system. This has two main advantages - first it eliminates the pump and its control system, and second it  means that we will have hot water even during power failures when we are relying on gravity feed from the tower. Given the dubious reliability of JPSCo, we'll probably be very happy about that!

The new system was ordered and finally arrived Monday, November 21 and after two days of hard work by Tom and Binghi we had hot water showers the next day. A hot shower never felt better!

On the inside of the house the wainscot in the living room was still unfinished and so we decided to make it the first priority of the Tom and Binghi tiling crew. Since Tom was busy dealing with the water issues Binghi started on the wainscot. He's doing a great job and moving along at a pretty good pace. The design he has come up with is quite different than our usual elaborate artwork, but is well suited to the areas which are largely obscured by furniture.

Here are a few more shots, and of course the requisite sunset!