Waking up in Paradise: Making Do in Belize

Another lovely day begins in Belize as I look out from the veranda beyond the south beach toward the mangroves that bracket the mouth of Black Creek.  

This is one of my favorite views, so you may have seen this before. :-)

We  eat our breakfast on the veranda every morning and ease into the day as the sun rises into the sky.  I saw this little spider, maybe a jumping spider, on the veranda   screen and decided to take its photo. 

A hairy little thing, isn't it?

A moth up higher above the screen caught my eye, so I thought I would photograph it too.  It was way over my head, so I had to improvise something to stand on to get close enough to it.

A chair, an ice chest, and 2 kitty litter buckets were my
improvised platform.  Ugh - look at all those ugly patches on 
the screen.  We need to replace it the next time we are 
there.  Dennis just reminded me that all holes got there 
from little birds clinging to the screen to catch insects.
I guess it is worth it to have birds around!

I crept up on the moth as much as possible considering I had to step onto the chair then to the 2 plastic buckets and quickly distribute my weight between the buckets  so they didn't collapse.   You can see the moth up at the top of the  screen.  Dennis handed my camera to me once I got in place.  

It was about 2 inches long.

And had a slightly furry thorax. 

Here is another example of making do in Belize - electric cord spaghetti.  We use a diesel generator to charge a battery bank that stores electricity for us.  But the inverter that converts electricity from the batteries to indirect current creates "dirty" power that can be hard on sensitive electronic things, like computers, mobile phones, chargers for camera batteries.  We need to charge all of our electronics during the 2-3 hours in the mornings and evenings when the generator is running to avoid the dirty power that can damage them.  The electrical outlet is inside and we run the power cords out through the window to the veranda so we can use our computers, etc while on the veranda.

You can see the top of Dennis' head out the window on the left.  He has a power cord going to his mobile phone and another to his computer.  Through the window on the right is the cord is to my mobile phone.  The cord to bottom is for the little fridge to the right.

Got to keep those camera batteries charged so I don't miss any good photo ops like the one below!

This tree trunk has 2 kinds of orchid growing on it; the one with the small 

white flowers on the left (Brassavola sp.) and another one to 
the right that is too young to bloom but has nice green leaves on yellow-green rhizomes.  Two years ago the leaves of the young one were only about
1/4 inch long!  Wonder what its flowers will look like?

Not a bad place to have to make do.