Happy New Year in St. John!

We are hoping we 2010 brings us some better luck than 2009. We have recently added the generator to our growing list of out-of-commission equipment. The belt is shredding which means we can only run it with small loads, like the battery charger, instead of larger loads, like the air conditioning, microwave, hot water heater, or washer/dryer. I washed a load of clothes by hand last week which really made me appreciate the modern conveniences of a washer and dryer! We've ordered a new belt and hopefully Kevin can figure out why the genset keeps shredding them. In the meantime I just keep telling myself "It's like camping...camping is fun, right?".

On Monday we took the bus from Coral Bay to Cruz Bay, which took us across the entire island. It cost a dollar. Cruz Bay is the main town on the island, and we had gone there hoping to pick up two packages that were sent general delivery to the post office. We waited in line forever. When we finally got up to the front of the line, the guy at the desk was very curt and said "Sorry we don't have it". He wouldn't look any harder for it and basically shrugged and said he couldn't help us. So we had no idea if it never arrived, or if it had arrived and had been sent back, or what. It wouldn't have been so upsetting to us if the mail package hadn't contained several of our last paychecks...a lot of money to lose track of! We walked over to a cafe and ate lunch while Kevin called our mail service who gave him the delivery confirmation number and said it had only just been scanned in on 12/21 (about a week earlier). So we knew it had to be there. We went back to the post office, stood in line for another forty minutes, and asked again. This time the clerk was a lady, and although she couldn't find any trace of the package she suggested we go to the annex building next door and look for it. The lady at the annex was the most unfriendly, unhelpful person ever. I politely said good morning and told her why we'd been sent over. She actually started yelling at me, saying that there was no way for her to find any package in the annex and that we should never have been sent to her. When we persisted, she said "what do you want me to do, look through every package in here? I don't have time for that! Unless it's in this pile waiting to be sent back, then it is probably not here!" We looked at the pile where she was pointing and I am not kidding you, our package was there, right on top, with the name "SALT" in big black lettering. We grabbed it, tentatively asked if she might know where our second package (containing a $200 part) was, and endured some more verbal abuse before beating a hasty retreat. At least we had the important package with our mail. At no point during any of our dealings with the Post Office did anyone actually look up the delivery confirmation number (which we knew) on a computer. And the USPS website clearly says that general delivery packages should be held 30 days so we're still confused as to why they were preparing to send it back so soon. We won't be sending anything else to St. John, that's for sure.

We've had a quiet week since then for the most part. For New Year's, we met up with our friends Linda and Steve on "Seaman's Elixir" and their daughter Katie and her husband Ryan, who were visiting from Colorado. We all went out to dinner in Coral Bay and then went to a bar with live music where we greeted the new year with champagne (yes, we made it to midnight!).