Monday, May 28, 2012

Watching paint dry


We finally have the keys to our bakery, all ready for fit-out which should take a couple of weeks.  It is tiny, as you can see above, but it's ours! It sits in the middle of a boatyard and we share the new building with lockers, offices and the local chiropractor. It's directly opposite the entrance to the largest yacht charter harbour, The Moorings and it is in the 'up & coming'  little area of Wickhams Cay II which is slowly converting from workshops and yards, to trendy shops and offices.

Double blue doors, to left of Tylers white Nissan
Starting with the big oven this week, all the baking equipment is arriving on-island over the next few weeks. I'm currently driving around with a 200 kilogram  Hobart mixer in the back of my car and our garage is now crammed full with stuff for fitting it out.  I've designed the shop fittings and counter and we're whittling down thousands of recipes for the baked goods and homemade goodies.  We have a small fridge for cakes, a good coffee machine and a large blackboard for daily specials. The main thing is the bread however, which will be baked on the premises - sourdoughs, pain de campagne, gluten-free, wholewheat, rye and ciabattas to name a few. We hope to have a 'soft' opening in Mid-June, provided that everything has arrived and some staff are in place, but that still feels like next millennium and not next month.
Big Baby in New York, pre shipping

A colleague (based in Kiev no less) and I were swapping rude emoticons on our internal instant messenger a few years ago, and he was bemoaning our fate chained to the corporate grindstone and I suddenly announced that I was going to run away and open a bakery on a Caribbean island.  I think he even sent me an emoticon to the effect of "dream on" and "hahahahaha good one" (this was before the days of ROFL).

Several years on and here we are, about to give birth to our little bakery. As we enter our final trimester, there is a now a sense of urgency to get all the other stuff finished up before the arrival takes over our lives. Today is a bank holiday and Tyler is busy painting the guest room for our Summer guests and I'm sorting out toys in amongst reading cookery books, pinning a few pics, looking at packaging to order and drafting some ideas for a potential biweekly column I may be writing soon (oohh yes!).

Another big push for a month or so will have us happily ensconced in both our completed home and the bakery. The kids will be on their long Summer holidays and another year would have passed, making it 2 years on August 28th since we arrived on this rather scruffy third world volcano and its eccentric island life. 

For now, we're not even feeling the Braxton-Hicks's yet (not to be confused with our neighbour India Hicks) but I think life is just about to change fairly dramatically for les Famille Dawson.

Since I think everyone is now officially bored to tears with the prolonged gestation of our bakery, I'll write about something else next week until the happy announcement. 'What to Expect in the First Year' probably.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

The week past

William

OK, it's official: Impatient mothers have less intelligent kids: Apparently mothers who speak in 'nurturing' tones as opposed to the ones that 'heavily scold' actually lead to a larger hypothalamus in kids. The study didn't seem to cover mothers who rant, swear and curse at their children - but I suppose that's left up to Child Welfare.

As you can see I've been spending way too much time on the Internet again, but luckily T managed to hook up our new, just-back from St Thomas TV yesterday, so now we're back on the BBC & ITV iPlayers, so will be able to watch copious amounts of the Olympics, when it starts.


Grade 5 Croque en Bouche with Guest Chef

In amongst lots of pinning and scolding last week, James & Georgie managed to pass their Royal School of Music exams (James with merit) William played 3 soccer matches, Georgie fell head first over his bike (and survived) and we carried on unpacking boxes.  Last week was also the Cedar School Gala Auction. Tyler made a Croque en Bouche with the Grade 5's and it was auctioned off for $600. This was not an entirely un-stressful thing to do in 100% humidity. He didn't quite superglue the concoction together, but close.  Anyhow it ended up looking a bit like the island (as you can see right) as the base just got wider and wider, but he still managed a smile for the camera.

Georgie & I also planted our first vegetables here (heirloom tomatoes, okra, artichokes, herbs, spinach, lemon trees) and disturbed our resident VI Tree Boa who leapt higher into the air with surprise (about 1 metre away from me) than I did. Georgie said very sweetly that we should actually consider ourselves lucky to have one in our garden as they are endangered. So are middle-aged 'heavily scolding' mothers, I thought to myself, not feeling very nurturing at that particular moment and swearing. A lot.

The island continues to delight, and sometimes not. You would have noticed that news of the bakery  has gone rather quiet. After being promised the building on the 1 April and then the 1 May, we are clearly starting to reach the end of May with no building in sight and our phone-calls are being studiously ignored by the contractor. As we've now ordered all the equipment and have our first employee starting with us in a weeks time, this makes for interesting times. Luckily we think we may have a temporary kitchen, so we'll just have to make it happen, despite an actual lack of bakery, which we may see anytime between next week and next Christmas.

I've also gone completely native and signed up to run in a half-marathon in Puerto Rico called The Divas. It's legendary and one is met by hunky half-clad chaps bearing champagne and roses at the finish line plus an "ageless category for those keeping the secret". Ha, I love it!  Since everyone here seems to be fairly fanatical about sport (tennis, sailing, mountain-biking, squash, surfing, spinning, diving, running, stand-up paddling, triathlons - the list goes on) and I hadn't quite found my metier yet, I thought this was as good a place to start as anywhere. This also means we can fit in a bit of Christmas shopping in PR as well so what's not to like? The fact that I can only run about 1.5 miles at the moment without keeling over is a minor issue and it's still preferable to the bee pollen diet from last year.  

We're settling into Carrot Bay and it's bliss. The house is beautiful, serene and airy. We're slowly getting into the island lifestyle especially now that T is around again. Yesterday we even had the Perfect Saturday: Soccer matches in the morning, a good lunch with homemade pesto, a busy DIY afternoon and a scrumptious braai in the evening with a hilarious Graham Norton on the iPlayer after the kids had gone to bed. Our first like that, I think, in 18 months.






Thursday, May 17, 2012

12 Steps needed

I know exactly why I was so grumpy on Monday. I couldn't feed my Pinterest habit. I try and restrict myself to about 15 minutes a day but this always ends up being like 3 hours. You'd think I would have enough to do: Three kids, a job, a new start-up business, a house to furnish, a gazillion unfinished projects, a family to manage and a body to maintain.

No - I'm afraid Pinterest was designed and launched just for ME. You are speaking of the girl who still has her fashion scrapbooks and sketchbooks from junior school. I've schlepped boxes of magazine tear-outs from South Africa to England and then back again, and then Transatlantic to here. They're like old friends and I like doing nothing better than going through them all. It's sad, I know.

So Pinterest is the digital version of this. I now have the entire  Internet to pin into my virtual scrapbook. Lovely picture of the sea. Click. Gorgeous white jeans on Parisian waif. Click. Aqua sofa against grey walls. Click. On and on and on.

Someone needs to design a Twelve Step Programme for Pinterest Addicts.

Click.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Monday

I was going to do a little perky Monday post, mainly because I didn't have to report that the children had gone sailing , yet again, over the weekend, but it's not going to happen. I now wish to relocate to Switzerland, and if they wont let me in - Antarctica.

It's the middle of May, but it's already hot. And buggy. And everything seems to fall apart when it's hot and buggy, or maybe that's just me.

Having dispatched the children to bed, I was looking forward to spending a leisurely hour or so writing up this blog. I was going to post some chirpy Jamaican music (Movado Delilah) which we are all listening too on our little car radios as we grind up and down the volcano with potholes (otherwise known as Tortola) and a couple of photos of our lovely weekend (which for once, as we know, didn't include sailing). I was also going to write some upbeat dingetjies about motherhood.

To treat myself, I thought I would switch on the brand new air conditioner in our new home and pour myself a little glass of cold, dry white. This would mean that it would be beautifully cool, there would be no mozzies and I could receive my husband, who is working tonight, in serene surroundings when he got home from a cheffing gig. I was looking forward to YouTubing (there you go Joburg Book Club, another verb!) some new music that I like, since the radio stations here never seem to announce the songs, and I never know who the hell I'm listening to.

Well.

None of this happened.

For starters - I couldn't find how to switch on the friggin music on the computer, which Tyler has now expertly wired up through the new sound system. Audio On. Audio Off. On Off On Off. Fiddle fiddle. I thought of phoning him, but that's never a good idea in mid-service (but has been known to happen before). I switched to the new laptop (which I'm forbidden to use) but it had the same bloody set-up. No amount of things on/off or in/out seemed to work.

Now irritated, I had to pour myself another glass of dry white, remembering that this was meant to be accompanied by the icy-cold air conditioner which is brand, brand new. This should have been a warning (ie a bit like the brand new dishwasher, which had also been "installed" ie pushed into its space in the kitchen). After a lot of on/off and in/outs with the AC, all that happened was the knob-thingy came away in my hand. Just like that. Broken. As in "she is not wacking".

Since I was now being eaten alive, I frantically tried to hunt down the can of "Off" which had completely vanished. Gone. Nowhere to be found. The last known mortals to use it were the children. That was the nice piece on motherhood gone. Sometimes I really don't like my children, especially when been chomped by man-eating mosquito's.

By which stage I was furious. Being a complete sucker for punishment, I decided that I definitely needed some music to cheer me up. And another glass of icy, dry white since it was the only thing that was cold.

So I decided to use James' little laptop, hoping like hell that this hadn't also been inveigled into our new wireless entertainment system I wasn't aware we had and certainly dont know how to work. (as in all I want to do is Switch The Music On).  This was my biggest mistake. I Googled 'New Music 2012' or something stupid like that and clicked on MTV's Top 40 Hits.

Please, don't do this at home. It's very bad for both your soul and sanity. Oh my goodness me. To see Snoop Dog (at least 50 years old and father of twenty-somethings) singing with Kanye West "We're Young and Wild and Free", oh puuuhleasse. No you're not: You're old and rich and probably a grandfather. Not one but two songs by the ghastly Katy Perry who sounds just like Jesse J, who looks just like Lady Gaga who sounds and looks just like Nicki Minaj. And actually also Madonna (who all the afore-mentioned look like anyway) who we definitely know is over 50 but at least wasn't signing "I'm Young & Wild & Free" but some silly duo with Nicki Minaj and someone else, probably Drake.  Last week on Isle 95's Hot Caribbean Charts, the number one hit was Rihanna ft Drake and number two was a song by Drake ft Rihanna. S'trues Bob. I don't feel old or anything watching all this rubbish, just superior.

Anyway needless to say I couldn't find the cable to download the pics from the weekend (the old computer dosn't have a chip/memory disk thingy) and it's now almost 12:30pm and I need to be up again at 4:45am to have my daily bout of internet-wrangling. In trying to load an arbitrary image to go with the blog, everything hung, nothing uploaded and I almost lost the entire thing. I swear I would have given up blogging on the spot, had this been the case.

I suppose the outcome of this rather depressing Monday evening is (a) I'm now pleased that we do live on a remote island (b) I'm even more pleased that I'm not a 50 year old + popstar and (c) I should always write my blog on a Sunday.

Monday is a disaster.



Sunday, May 6, 2012

Keep Awake and Sail On

We've had a whole weekend of sailing with James (Blue Fleet) and Georgie (Green Fleet) racing in the BVI Dinghy Championships, also known as The Main Reason Why We Could Never Afford to Retire.

On Saturday Night we had a Cinco de Mayo party at the Yacht Club, which was just a good excuse to eat lots of Mexican food (cooked by Tyler) and great fun. In fact the whole weekend was very enjoyable despite the weather, which required parents having to spend quite a bit of time watching becalmed dinghies in the pouring rain. However, everyone pitched in and the kids had a blast with their little sailor friends from all around the Caribbean.