VI Transfer Day

Each year, the 31 March is recognized as Transfer Day. It marks the day in 1917 when the Danish West Indies were formally ceded to the United States and officially became the US Virgin Islands. They were bought for US$25 million and were purchased as a strategic base in the Caribbean for the US Navy. Today the event is celebrated with a programme of cultural events and celebrations. According to RonUSVI on the VINow travel forum: Business will be as usual for the day. There will be ceremonies in the Legislature gardens that won't affect any business activities. Schools and the local government will be closed.

The VI Government offices are actually closed today thru Monday. Nice huh?
Wednesday - Transfer Day
Thursday - Holy Thursday
Friday - Good Friday
Monday - Easter Monday
But before you say anything, UVI doesn't get all those days. We get Good Friday off, but that's it. Since we get the two week break at Christmas (that the VI gov doesn't get) we gave up some of the smaller holidays, which doesn't bother me because I love that two week break.


On Good Friday, bars, restaurants and establishments that sell alcohol cannot do so between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. because it's against the law. Those that violate this territorial law face a fine of up to $200 and up to a year in jail or both. So if  you're arriving on STT on Friday mid-day, no welcome rum drink for you, sorry. But happy hour on Friday is still open, so that's good for us locals. :-) I was just doing some research on the "no alcohol on Good Friday" law and apparently the law was repealed in 2005 but for some reason it's still being enforced. Figures. Here's where I found the info.

Also, Easter weekend is a large family camping weekend. So you may see a lot of tents being set up on the public beaches.

Article in St. Thomas Source


http://www.worldeventsguide.com/event/1705/Virgin-Islands-U-S-/Transfer-Day.html

Fruit Bowl

I finally made it over to the Fruit Bowl today. It's located in the Wheatley Center which is across from the small KMart at Lockhart Gardens. They had a nice selection of fruits and veggies. But limited selection of other grocery items. It was clean and smelled nice which some of the other grocery stores on island can't claim. I'll definitely visit again :-)
thefruitbowlvi.com/default.aspx

As far as prices, it's somewhere between Pueblo and Gormet Gallery. I spent about $60 for the items shown above. It's not as low as Cost-u-less, they still have the lowest prices. But Fruit Bowl has a great selection so  guess it's worth the little extra.

The Worst Service on St Thomas

The Worst Service on St Thomas, originally uploaded by captainjay.

We try and try to like this place. It just can't be done. Jack's Wings
in TuTu they just can't help but f up the service. The music is good
but an hour and a half for a sandwich is just doesn't make sense.

Friday Beach Picture

This one is fo Cooper Island Beach Club in the BVI's. This is one of Margo's pictures from her sailing trip last year.

Jay

Jenny Craig at One Month

Thought I would give an update on how the Jenny Craig is coming along. It's been 4 weeks....I lost 10 lbs and 6 3/4 inches. Not too bad. My friends that have done the program lost more in their first month, but that's ok. As long as I keep losing, and can keep it off, it doesn't really matter. My consultant calls once a week to see how I'm doing and I place my food order every other week. I've been able to stay on the program the whole time and not cheat at all. Usually once I put my mind on something, I give it 100% and I've really been able to do that this time. It's sooo convenient and I really like the food, so that makes it helpful. I feel bad in the evenings when Jay has to fix his own dinner and I just have to throw mine in the microwave for 5 minutes, but he's been doing pretty good with that. We've also saved money this past month. I don't have an exact number, but between not eating out (dinner or lunch) and not sitting at Hook Line every day for happy hour, the amount is pretty substantial!

One of the things I have to get better at is eating more vegetables. You're supposed to fix a side veggie with dinner and you can have unlimited veggies during the day to snack on it you get hungry. Once in awhile, Jay will cook up some squash, zucchini, peppers and onions for my side dish or we'll open a can of green beans, but that's pretty much it. So if  you have any easy veggie recipes you can throw my way, it will be much appreciated.

I'm doing pretty good with the fruit. You're supposed to have a cup of skim milk and a fruit with every breakfast and a fruit snack in the afternoon. On the days that I'm having cereal, it's no problem. But the other days, I don't like having to drink skim milk, so I make a fruit smoothie. I take the cup of milk, half a banana, and a handful of frozen strawberries, ice, splenda and splash of vanilla in the blender. It's pretty good. For the fruit snack, I just found a great way to dress up an apple. You take the apple and cut it in chunks, sprinkle with cinnamon and splenda and put in the microwave for about 50 seconds. Yum.

A few people have mentioned to me to stop using splenda and get the new sweetener stevia. I keep trying to remember to look for it at the store to see if they carry it here. I like splenda and we have a bunch of it, so I'm not sure if I would stop using it, but I'll try the stevia if I can find it to see what the difference is.

My first real test is going to be in a couple weeks. I've done well with the one day tests (on the boat or at the beach). But, I'm going to San Francisco for a work conference and I'll be gone a whole week. That's going to be tough. I'm going to take Jenny Craig snacks and some food items that don't need to be kept frozen, mostly breakfast stuff. We'll be eating most lunches and dinners out plus two 14 hour travel days, so I ordered the Dining out Guide to see what is suggested for those occasions. Hopefully I can stick with it.

Hull Bay

Jay and I went down to Hull Bay on Sunday after he got off work. It was a beautiful day and wanted to go do something. It was too late in the day to take the boat out, so we thought Hull Bay. We know that they usually have bands on Sunday this time of year. So we checked out their web site. Well it hadn't been updated since 2009 so that was no help. We checked out Face Book and they have a page, but it's a friend page and not a fan page. The difference is you have to actually add them as a friend and they have to accept it, instead of just becoming a fan. I don't like it when businesses set up their FB this way because then any employee who has access to log into the page can see my  personal page since their my "friend" and I don't like people who I don't know having access to my information. So, that's not going to work. But they do have a social calendar that you can see without becoming their friend. If you mouse over the music note on the calendar a pop up will tell you who's playing. But if you click on it to get more information, then FB wants you to allow access to Hallmark Social Calendar app. Again, I don't allow access to any apps on FB, they are just information farms that dole out your email and other info at will (since you gave them permission by allowing access). So Hull Bay Hideaway was not making it very easy to find out who they had playing that night. If you're going to have a web site with a calendar of events, you need to have it up to date and accessible by all people. You would also think that Hull Bay would do a better job of promoting who was playing at their establishment. Just a thought.

Sooooo anyway. I digressed. We ended up going to Hull Bay and had a great time. Deb Callahan Band was playing and put on a good show. Jay had thier Presidente Burger, which he really liked and I had a salad. (being on a diet really sucks!)  but it was a fun evening.

Maho

Took a little trip over to St. John yesterday to meet up with some friends. What a beautiful day.

Friday beach pic

TGIF! Going to be a quiet weekend. Jay works both Sat and Sun so I guess I'll have to find something to get into. I need to get more comfortable with the boat so I can take it out myself like he did earlier in the week without me :-)

Have a great weekend!

BioBlitz in St. Thomas

Happy St Patty's

Happy St Patty's, originally uploaded by captainjay.

Tickle's is packed. The Fiddler is rocking the house with a little
help from Jason.
Jay

Happy St Patty's Day

Happy St Patrick's Day everyone. We will likely go over to Tickle's Tonight after work to see the Fiddler and try to find a green beer. Dick and his merry band are always a good show and this has turned into an annual event.

Jay

St John By Boat

I am off today. I did a little work on the boat, then I iced the cooler and one of my friends joined me. It is flat calm out so we ran over to Cruz Bay for lunch at the High Tide Grill.

Lunch special - Bacon Blue Cheese Burger

 

 

Flooding in WV

I know this is a blog about the Virgin Islands, but we do still have our house in WV and right now they are experiencing some major flooding along the Kanawha River, which is where our house is. We have a floating dock that is attached to two 40 foot poles. Normally there is about 20 foot of pole exposed above the dock. But as you can see in this pic, there is only about 5 foot at the moment. There is a gangplank on a hinge that goes from a deck on the edge of the river bank and rests on a landing on the dock, but at the moment, the gangplank is nowhere in sight which means it has fallen into the water and is under the dock. When the river level starts coming back down, this is going to be a problem. We may have to call in some favors and have someone go keep an eye on it and pull it back up when the time comes. The joy of owning a house long distance.

BTW - that is not our boat on the dock. It belongs to a friend who's dock is attached to ours and they use our gangplank to get to their boat. John, maybe you could go by and check on things? :-)

Daylight Savings Time

Daylight Savings Time, originally uploaded by captainjay.

Today is daylight savings time for everyone in the the U.S. except us. The US Virgin Islands does not participate in it so no setting our clocks ahead an hour for us. The joke is that it's too stressful changing all the clocks and since it's supposed to be stress free living down here (ya right), why bother. The truth is we are close enough to the equator that our daylight doesn't change much through out the year so there is no need to "save" that hour of day light. I'm happy because that means the 8:00pm shows are back on at 8:00 instead of 9:00pm. :-)

What's funny is, the clock we have in the bedroom apparently is a "smart" clock and automatically changed our time an hour ahead for daylight savings and we didn't know it. So this morning when the alarm went off at 6:00 am and Jay got up to get ready for work he didn't realize the time change. I slept in an hour and got up at what I thought was 7:00 so I could take him to work and saw on the cable box that it was only 6:00. so poor Jay has been up since 5:00 am! Lol

Silvia and Beth bday BBQ

Silvia and Beth are having a birthday BBQ on the beach at Smith Bay today. They picked a perfect day to have it cuz it's absolutely beautiful. It's been awhile since I've been to a STT beach, sad, I know. We live here and get busy in our lives and tend to forget about the beautiful beaches until someone visits or someone has an event. So we definitely need to start making time for "beach time" :-)

Friday Beach Picture

Never get tired of the view on White Bay on Jost. This shot was from a few weeks ago at T's Birthday Party on Born to Rumb. I do have to say though that I likely won't return to White Bay on a Sunday anytime soon. Unfortunately it has become a victim of it's own popularity. Last trip over you couldn't get near the beach with a boat by 2:30 in the afternoon.

Jay

Better Weather

Wednesday 

Tuesday

Finally the weather is back to normal. Blue skies, light wind, nice temp, .... Makes for a much better walk after work. I've been walking around the field at UVI, each lap is 1/2 mile and I'm doing 6 laps in one hour. Not too bad. Plus it keeps me out of Hook, Line & Sinker while I'm waiting on Jay :-)

At Least It's Not Raining

So we haven't seen the sun in two days. It has finally stopped raining this morning so there is hop. The wind is blowing in the 20 mph range out of the north so it still feels cold by our standards. I am off today so hopefully it will get better by this afternoon when I have to run some errands and maybe work on the boat a little.

Jay

Friday Beach Pic

It's Friday!!!!! Thank god.....it's been a crazy week. And, I have absolutely nothing planned for this weekend, another yea!! We had something going on every weekend in February, which was a lot of fun, but it's time to chill out for a while and recuperate. Jay has to work most of the weekend, so no boating unless he gets off at a decent hour on Sunday and then maybe we'll run over to Water Island for a little while.

Jenny Craig update - coming to the end of my second week and it's been going really well. I've lost 4 lbs so far, so that's good. I've been walking every day after work with some coworkers, 3 miles in an hour, which is also good. I just placed my second order for weeks three and four which will be here Monday so I'm anxious to see what meals I get with this round. The food has been really good, just small. You're supposed to supplement with veggies, which I'm not very good at so I need to come up with some good ways to incorporate more veggies into the meals. But other than that, it's going great.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!!! :-)

Another Blog to Follow

Here is a newly started blog being done by the owners of the newest boat in the fleet at CYOA Charters. The Boat is named Mowzer, I will let you read the blog to find out why. The owners are out now for a two week shake down cruise through the US and British Virgins.  http://svmowzer.blogspot.com/

Enjoy

Jay

New Front Brakes

So after 9300 miles here is what island brakes look like. The ones on the right are the original. The new ones on the left are there for refrence. The mountains here just burn the breaks up real fast. Fortunately there wasn't any damage to the rotors so it was a relatively painless swap out. $110 for Napa's premium pads, as you can see the surface area on the new pads is larger and the vent is modified as well so maybe they will last a little longer. Guess how I am spending my day off today. New front brakes, oil change, air filter and a wash. As you can see it's not always painkillers and beaches here in the islands.

Jay