February 4, 2025

Tuesday

Hooray, the GTA guys are here in our new place getting our internet set up. We are in the condo, a three bedroom/two bath place with white stucco walls, white tile flooring, and light-blue tiled bathrooms with the narrowest bathtubs you’ve ever seen. (Seriously, smaller than hotel bathtubs!)

Our kitchen is small but not tiny, definitely functional, plus full-size washer and dryer in a little kitchen nook. The windows are covered in blinds, easy to keep the sun out in the hot afternoons, but I’ll be limited for decorating with curtains. I’ve never been very good about curtains, anyway, so perhaps it’s all for the best. Instead I’ll hang art on the walls and lay colorful rugs on the floors.

Our household stuff is still out on the Pacific somewhere.

We bought these two mugs and a coffee pot.

Yesterday, we found the local bookstore. It’s one of three on the island. There are two stores in the Bestseller bookstore chain (plus one religious bookstore that I most likely won’t bother to check out), and they had the recent NYTimes best-sellers plus a lot of the most popular books/authors on the shelves. The store is small enough that they divide the shelves up by the following: Bestsellers. Non-fiction. Adult Fiction including general and mystery. Romance. Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Young Adult Fiction. Manga. Children’s. A Guam section. I was a little surprised to see the mystery and general fiction mixed in together, but not disappointed.

So, because I don’t have a library card yet and my internet wasn’t set up for downloading to Kindle, I bought the biggest book I could find in the store: 945 pages of the latest Robert Galbraith Cormoran Strike mystery, The Running Grave. I have the first three of the series in Maine, and it seems I’ve missed three in between. This book is a trade paperback size and still…945 pages.

It’s not a brick . . . it’s TWO bricks!

I also picked up a Gillian Flynn novel. Craig got a political nonfiction. He’s still reading The Overstory by Richard Powers, the novel I can’t stop recommending.

I’ve also been practicing my art, though I’m not very good and I’ve been using my new markers exclusively. I like how the bananas came out, but that’s about it. And then I ruined the whole thing by coloring in the tiles with gray. Sigh.

Now that I’m going to be connected again, there are no excuses for not writing. I will begin putting in (close to) full-time hours and see what I can do in the next couple of years. I don’t know if I can do eight hours every day, but who knows?

The guys from GTA were just telling me about where to watch surfing, local bars to go to, that a coconut crab can pinch your fingers off, and that we must go to the open air market at Chamorro Village on Wednesdays.

Oh, the coconut crabs. C and I went out for a walk after dark one evening “while it was cool.” He kicked something with his foot, and it looked to me like a small rodent or bunny hopping toward the fence. I said, “Something just hopped away out here.” So he turned on his phone flashlight and WHOA! He picks up this big, black creature with many legs, about the size of his hand spread out wide.

I swear it looked like a tarantula! It stared at us. We stared at it. Then we moved. And ran into another one underneath the outside grill pavilions (three of them with turquoise blue tin roofs). I squealed and we ran back to the building. Later, we thought it might be crabs. Sure enough, they are coconut crabs. They are large, land-dwelling crustaceans! Giant hermit crabs, actually! They can be up to a meter in size!

Photo screenshot from the internet.

Um . . . not going out there at night again. That’s what we saw. In the dark. Staring at us.