The Rainy Season is Here

Tinkerbell is now re-outfitted with her cap. We don’t need it to protect the generator since we now have our cinderblock generator shed, so Tom has put the cap back on the truck so we can pick up feed and hay and stuff without having to worry about it getting wet or tarping it. It wasn’t as simple as it seems like it should have been because since we took it off last year, we’ve had steel angle iron welded onto the truck rail, so the old clamps no longer fit. So, Tom had to drill holes in the part of the cap that attaches to the truck rail and bolt the cap to the rail. We’re not sure if that will work on these roads, however, because we’re afraid that with all the bouncing and flexing some of the welds in the aluminum will crack, and the cap will just fall apart. I guess we’ll see.

The other effort of the past couple of weeks has been to get the back pasture ready to be seeded. Tom and Selwyn chopped down all the brush, Ronald and Wilton helped Tom get all the chopped brush in piles, Tom burned all the piles, and Selwyn sprayed weed killer on everything that looked like it may have lived through the initial chopping and burning.


Selwyn fixed the fence and put up a gate so the horses can’t get in there anymore, and now we just have to wait for some rain and plant the grass seed, which Tom already picked up in Spanish Lookout. While this is great weather for planting, we’ve decided that when people ask us when to come or not come to Belize, from now on we’re going to say that the last week or so of May and the first couple of weeks of June are NOT a good time to visit here. Between the outbreak of the rainy season with lots of thunderstorms, and the fact that the rain brings the flying termites out (this happens only once per year), things have been a bit of a mess and I feel like all I do is clean up mud and wings. But, after a couple of weeks of that with thundershowers almost every afternoon, the past two or three days have been gorgeous so we think we’re through the worst of it.

The other thing Tom just finished is the wiring in the shop. We’ve had extension cords running all over the place and Tom was sick of the mess, so he wired the shop so that he can run power from the generator to the shop through wire in conduit buried in the ground, and then plug everything in to real outlets on the walls. Unfortunately we need a longer trench and more wire to run the power to the house, but it’s getting there.