Stuck in Majuro

Things I've learned in the last week:

1. Horses are the best (courtesy of Tara).

2. Whales are alive (courtesy of Ruben).

3. Engine parts dealers are the devil. Which means that even with Clem calling and yelling at them every day since we got here a week and a half ago, we still have no parts. Cross your fingers for Saturday.
   

4. Sewing is a dangerous sport. Not that I didn't already know this after days of batten sewing in Chuuk that ended in my thumb swollen to twice its normal size. But having a large needle jammed into my thumb by an industrial sewing machine yesterday has convinced me once and for all.

5. Having no work to do does not in fact mean you spend your time doing all sorts of exciting things. Instead you lie around and watch movies all day (“I was just checking to make sure the projector was still working... I swear!”).

6. Powerpoint is the devil. We arrived here just in time for a big deal conference on climate change with all of the nations in the Pacific. Steph and I spent a couple days there, which mostly involved sleeping and writing emails while various low level officials droned on about funding. However, I did meet some really useful people and it looks like we may be able to take the environmental thing to the next level (what is the next level, you may ask? Good question... Multiple extremely circular, yet quite enjoyable, discussions on board have yet to yield the answer. But I'll keep you all updated as the vision solidifies).

7. It is not possible to make INFINITY into a reasonable acronym involving some permutation of Pacific and the environment. Believe me, we tried. For three hours.

8. Boats look much better without grass growing on their waterline.

9. The flour that was and still is pretty much full of gross bugs sadly had to be used for the bread which now is growing to a monstrously huge size and is taking over the world as Annie says but actually its taking over the reasonably big cooking pot.

10. Bread often turns into Rubens mini pizzas which are normally about the size of his hand or less. They actually turn out tasting like real pizzas, however today he is making a strange but tasty looking round roll of bread with lots of cheese inside he calls it his cheese roll.

11. Annie is mushing up some sort of gross looking white beans which she says will taste a lot better when she adds garlic to it, according to her garlic makes everything better apart from sweet foods. We would like some pepper with the mushed beans but our surprisingly Brazilian crew member hates all spice apart from wasabi- isn't that weird ?!

--Annie and Tara

(Happy Birthday Phil, our proud new boat owner!)