The Dampness

It’s sunny today (well, this morning anyway) after a few very wet days. Previously most of the big rain showers have happened at night, but the past three days we’ve seen solid rain and wind. The humidity is bad enough here in normal times, but when it rains like that you really feel it. The bed sheets feel damp. The clothes hanging outside on the clothes line under the eaves never dry. The shoes I rinsed after kayaking four days ago are still soggy. Your beverage glass just drips with condensation. You can’t work the touchpad on your laptop because your finger is too moist. You try to draw and find the paper is so damp that your pencil barely leaves a mark. Your clothes smell musty. Your towels smell musty. The suitcases we stored under the bed smell musty. Everything inside the suitcases smells musty, even our passports and American money, which were showing signs of mildew. One of Deborah’s hats was growing mold on it. Even the walls feel sticky.

We do take steps to try and dry things and air them out when the sun is shining like it is today. We pulled the suitcases out from under the bed and opened them up out on the deck. Of course, not more than ten minutes had passed before Semoko’s dog had discovered these cozy new places to curl up and take a nap, as you can see in the photos below.

Deborah thinks the dampness is also contributing to her spate of illnesses, particularly those related to the ear, nose, and throat. It’s as if she has mold growing inside her head. The humidity isn’t helping her hair any either, which has a regrettable inclination to turn into a big frizz ball. She says she hasn’t had a good hair day since we arrived in Fiji. Occasionally she will blow it dry and comb it out to look like her normal glamorous self, but this only lasts an hour or two before it starts to frizz up and she has to once again pull it back and tie it off like some inconvenient hair scarf that’s stuck to her head. For me, the climate seems to actually improve my hair, giving much needed volume and fullness. But somehow I think that small benefit is unlikely to ever persuade Deborah to live full time in a tropical climate.

Does the puppy prefer Deborah's suitcase...

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...or Blakes?

(photo by Deborah)