LIFE IN WESTERN BELIZE RETIREMENT!

**** Ray Auxillou in his third floor nursery.


SATURDAY NOVEMBER 7TH, 2009

All day Saturday, we had low cloud base, few open spots to the blue sky above, but some really beautiful painting type pictures from my third floor verandah in Hillview. Cloud formations of different colors and densities in different locations. The Yalbac hills tend to get some really colorful formations and the atmosphere was clean, washed out by rains. The green colors and variations of the surrounding hills and valleys, against the different colored cloud formations were stupendous. We have been getting night time showers for four or five days. Planted some bougainnvilla today and some other flowering bush cuttings up at the new ridge house. Doing some landscaping up there.
Got my part time fella to spend the day cleaning out the mud from my third floor nursery. Scraped all the planks of accumulated dirt and scum. Cloroxed the floor and shelves and benches. Looks great now. Cost me $28 Bz. Got to re-do my downstairs nursery as well, one of these weeks. Have a few seedlings coming up in trays. Forget what I planted? Think it was chile peppers, some lettuce, some tomatos. Our motto around here, is never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.
My terraces at the new house are springing up banana plants. Those things are growing about 4 feet in one month? I cut down some old banana plants and I put them in the bottom of the terraces for compost before filling with some truck loads of dirt. Those things shot up right through several feet of dirt and growing like crazy. Didn't even know there were any shoots in the plants when I tossed them in there. Have planted two Elephant Ear plants too, they look lovely for decorative plants and catch quickly. Put in some re-bar by the wall next to the door, to hold sum decorative creaper type ornamental. Don't know what you call it, but it is a vine with big leaves that are yellow and green. Anyway one was growing along the ground and got covered with weeds, so I cleaned it out and sort of gave it some vertical support with re-bar,I had laying around.
According to what I hear, we had tropical storms pass on both sides of Belize. We mostly got fringe belts of rain clouds. No wind to speak of up here in the foothills of the Belize Alps. Since I get a slow internet service here at home in Hillview, I haven't been to the TWIN towns central area, for over a week. Went down couple of times to Santa Elena here, below the hills here, to get hardware stuff and the odd thing from the Chinese supermarket. But most stuff I can get right on the corner, a block away, from Betty's small grocery.
The wife found one of those hub cap type grills, we liked down on the WINNIE ESTELLE when camping out in the Rio Dulce a couple of months back. Robert told me he bought his at Simon Quan's down in the port. We stopped to look there, but they had none. Lo and behold the other day, she found an identical one in THREE FLAGS the new store here in Santa Elena and she has been feeding us grilled marianated chicken breast and grilled vegetables, like egg plant, peppers and stuff from the open market stalls around the highway. Done over a two burner butane stove ( no oven ). We eat bananas every day, usually for breakfast and we have been gorging on papaya from my own trees for the last couple of months. I love diced papaya with condensed milk on it. Man, I have a lot of papaya. Our oranges are ripe too on the tree. Since we opted out of the tourist business, we have loaded coconut trees too. Used to always give guests a drinking coconut FREE, as a courtesy. Been drying some papaya seeds for planting up at the other house on the ridge a block away. Going to stick them in between the bananas soon in the two terraces. This is rainy winter season, so good time to plant. Temperatures some nights have been extremely cold, around high 60's farenheight. Shivering around here! Two shirts and sweater time, some nights, even some mornings.

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