And she was henceforth known as Messy Jessie

I have precious few childhood pictures of myself. Something about being the youngest of four, and being born long before the invention of digital cameras. And before the internet. And when tubs were green. Oh gosh, my own kids are going to think I'm a dinosaur.

Jon, ftw!

Pearl fell asleep in the backpack on our walk down to the beach the other day.

Lianna and I thought it was HILARIOUS, until she woke up and screamed for an hour. No more trips to the beach when Pearl hasn't had her afternoon nap. Now we know :)

(mean aunt)

Jon won the photo contest!! I take a thousand pictures a day and didn't even place, and he gets first with one of the five pictures he's ever taken here.

We had to go down to the phone company for him to get his prize and have his picture taken. And as it turned out, there WERE actual prizes!! He's now the proud new owner of a Blackberry Curve (anyone in the market for a Blackberry Curve?)

the ones that got away

Ruins by the beach

Scary mastiff at our neighbor's house.

Darcy's birthday

That goat on the road is the biggest goat ever! It's srsly the size of a pony.

Typical Statian stairs-goat

Egrets roosting

Crazy bird! We saw one of these for the first time down at Crook's Castle when we didn't have a camera on us, then a few days later there was one in our YARD. Pretty sure this is a huge discovery.

I think this is a moth, because it's resting with its wings open. Butterflies rest with them closed. I didn't make that up, did I?

Cheesiest, most forced grin ever.

Spouse club! Finally there is a group of us - a far cry from my nine months of isolation.

SLUG. In my HOUSE. SLUG in my house. SLUG. IN. MY HOUSE.

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BLAH! Blogger is driving me crazy. Sorry for the terrible formatting.

cry it out

I never used to be a movie crier. I’ve become more emotional the past few years, maybe because I got married and have a deeper perspective on love and whatnot, or something. Up until then, though, the only movies I can remember crying in were Project X (the one with the chimps that flew airplanes! If the idea alone doesn’t make you upset, you’re not alive) and Black Beauty.

But ohhhhhhhh dear….Black Beauty. Kills me. KILLS ME every time.

And I don’t just mean I cry a little until the credits roll. I’m talking about an irrational - borderline volatile, even - reaction that makes me want to curl up with a pan of brownies and sob for weeks. Which is crazy! Black Beauty has a happy ending! (spoiler alert?) But, wow. It’s unbelievable what that movie does to me.

So one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made was watching Black Beauty with Jon when we were dating. I warned him ahead of time that I was prone to overly emotional reactions to it, but, really, there was no preparing him for what was to come. He was truly shocked. The credits were rolling and tears were still coming. The credits ended and I was sobbing. SOBBING. Finally Jon pinned me to the floor just observe. So at that point I was unable to move and laughing AND crying – an appalling display of the most extreme laugh-cry on earth. Fresh tears flowing down the sides of my face and pooling in my ears. And his face was four inches from mine, eyes wide, mouth open, head shaking slowly in astonishment.

Then, just when I got myself under control, he started with the reminders :

“Remember his poor broken knees?”

“Remember when Ginger couldn’t breathe?”

"Remember when the barn burned down?"

Aaand his personal favorite, which he still brings up at random six years later – always in the same melancholy tone:


“Remember when Black Beauty was pulling the cart up the muddy hill?”

:(

Halloween 2010

Hope yours was at least half as fun as mine.

Mysterious and spooky

Here's the obligatory Halloween-inspired post. I don't handle the supernatural well. Some people tend to have more paranormal experiences than others and thank goodness I'm not one of them. If anything truly, truly creepy ever happened to me personally, I'd just lose my mind. Like I'd spend the rest of my life in the fetal position with my fingers in my ears if I ever saw an apparition. I'm not saying I believe in ghosts...okay yes I am saying that. And I once quit a high school job at a diner because the building was haunted.

The worst I ever personally experienced were lights inexplicably turning on and off and a hair-raising sensation of being watched those on awful nights when I had to stay late to close up. Others swore they regularly heard the bins of dishes being shaken in the back room when there was no one else in the building. One day a customer even asked how we were dealing with "the ghost" - she had been a waitress there many years before, back when it was "Heidi's" instead of "B'Sghettis" (worst name ever!! No wonder that ghost hated us!) But the final straw for me was when Lianna and our boss were sitting at the take-out counter when suddenly the swinging kitchen door directly next to them flew open as though it had been kicked in from the other side. It hit the wall, rebounded, then eventually swung to a stop. No big deal, just someone playing a trick on them right? WRONG. They had been closing out the cash register - a task completed only once the building had been cleared out and locked. CHILLS! I quit the next day.

And a more recent scary story. This just happened. Jon and I were watching TV at night when we spotted a HUGE black spider up on our ceiling, out of reach. Nothing that a squirt of Bop to the face couldn't have handled, but no. Jon wanted to slingshot it to death with frozen marshmallows. I would have nothing to do with large falling spiders so I retreated to the bedroom. But by the time Jon had returned from the freezer with his ammunition, the SPIDER WAS GONE. And he never located it. I haven't slept since.

Happy Halloween!

out and about

Busy Saturday! We had planned to go snorkeling off Crook’s Castle but woke up to choppy water and cloudy skies, so we walked to the Botanical Garden instead.

On our way back, we decided to investigate an unmarked intersecting road. Turns out it led to the old English Quarter Plantation ruins (which I’d heard about, but never seen).

(For any history nerds out there)

A total dump, to be honest. The archway is cool but the rest has all been reduced to a couple of crumbled stone walls surrounded by vines and pigs.

That baby chick got eaten, guaranteed.

We took a video of the actual feeding of the fruit leather, but I wimped out at the last moment and just ended up tossing it into the food trough. Therefore the movie is pretty boring and only proves that pigs A) don’t have great eyesight, B) don’t understand the human gesture of pointing, and C) WILL indeed eat plastic wrappers when given the chance.

As we left, the pig reared up on the fence again for a moment and I thought the visual of a huge pig head with the ocean backdrop was hilarious, so I convinced Jon to go back and coax it back up with another fruit leather so I could get a good shot of it. An ill-conceived plan. I did get the photo…

...but then two things happened in quick succession. First, Jon accidentally dropped the fruit leather, which adhered to the poor thing’s back. Second , a disturbed loose pig came squealing after us and we got the eff out of there. It still makes me a little sad to think of that poor hungry pig with food stuck to its back (especially because pigs are supposedly smarter than dogs), but then I remember how close I was to being eaten alive by its baby and I feel a little better about the whole thing.

For Kellie :)

Jon's favorite car on the island.

He pronounces it "Damn-ass" (of course).

Then that evening we went to a school function at the park. (The walk there plus our walk earlier put us over SEVEN MILES for the day. Yay for legs!)

Pearl, Lianna, lizard.

Photo of the week.

kthxbai