I don't even know where to start with the blog updating. I buggered off for just over three weeks of fun and adventure and now I want to tell you about a fantastic week-long kayak trip on Lake Superior, which could take several pages all on its own. But I came back from Superior right before I left for Panama (the two trips were so close together that Kevin, who I'd carpooled with for Superior, dropped me off at the airport on his way home). And then there's this whole Panama adventure, where I want to babble on about the finca in Bocas del Toro and the day we went to Bird Island and swam into some cool beaches in Isla Colon and the two days we spent hiking above Miramar trying to find a Cuban and the many fruits and starches I tried cooking and eating and the snorkeling and the night snorkeling and the glowing plankton and how the jungle makes me feel like I move slower than a sloth oh and the sloth! and the ocelot! and the spider monkeys tied in a tree in the Kuna village and the caves and the slot canyon and Panama City and the dolphins and...
See? I hardly know where to start.
Hey!
You know what? I'm lying on my belly under a mosquito net in the Panamanian back woods (on an island, in tropical rainforest) in a grass-roofed cabana built on stilts over the water. It's dark now, but if I looked down on my left side, I would see a live coral reef.
Rick has solar panels and, if necessary, a generator. He has a rain collection system up on the hill that provides a gravity-fed "cold" (ie 20 deg C) shower. He has kayaks, and cayucos, and he makes sugarcane maragritas. He also makes me trot through the jungle after him, which today made me lose my rubber boots in the muck. And the rubber boots were filled with sweat already. But then we came back, and we jumped off the dock and swam, and I got the snorkel, and then we cleaned up and visited another farm and played with an ocelot kitten.
How could you not be jealous?
Yesterday, driving home, I heard a CBC show that talked about language, and words that you have in one language but not another. The ones that I remember were a Persian word for "beautiful after illness" and an Italian one for "the ring left behind when you move a glass".
It's this latter one I need today, as I look at the puddle made by the sweat on my cold beverage. I also need a more polite word than "mountain dew" for the rivers of sweat that run wherever there is cleavage. And one for that greasy feeling your face gets when the "feels like" is over 40 degrees and you don't have air conditioning. And, while I'm at it, one for the weird fingerprints you leave when you have a cut on a finger and you thought it closed up and you remove the band-aid (because the glue makes you itch) and then it oozes a bit again without you noticing right away. Not that that has anything to do with the weather.
But it's summer! And summer is short! And I usually try to suck every last minute out of it. But summer when I'm not paddling, summer in my apartment, not fun. Good thing the weekend is close.
Already the days are getting shorter, and there are few things I like more than the long evening light in the summer. But I am ready for this heat to break. And it's impossible to pack for a Lake Superior kayak trip when the only things you can imagine needing are a swimsuit and shorts and a tank top. Long underwear? I don't even want to think about it, much less touch it!
Blog updating is slow. I don't think you care, though... you probably have no enthusiasm for the computer either. You're out having fun. The computer generates heat. Who needs more heat?