Baby Stepping Toward an Apartment

Another day, another step closer to our new temporary apartment. Kathy spoke to her company today and they will be contacting us tomorrow and let us know where our new apartment will be. It looks like she will be starting work Wednesday and with any luck we will move into our new temporary home Monday. Until then it is a flurry of visiting friends and family while we stay at our comfortable but smallish hotel suite. Meagan and Kaitlyn are staying with us and I am constantly amazed at how much stuff women (especially 4 of them) need just to survive the day. I am adrift in a sea of purses, clothes and makeup and under constant attack by incoming text messages. Calgon take me away!

Meanwhile on the studying front, nothing happening- with all the holiday goings on and such. Hopefully things will calm down and we will settle into a routine after we move in. Rileigh has turned into a party animal night owl staying up late from all the stimulation with visiting people. She looks forward to a normal schedule and quieter surroundings.

Our cargo arrived (actually last week but I have been to busy to go get it) I picked it up today and it was all there, safe and mostly sound ( minor casualty to a sleeve of blank DVDs) All in all, not a bad way to get a couple of large boxes back to the states.

Thanks to Gerri DiCarlo for this picture she posted on her Facebook page.

It was taken a couple days before we left St. Maarten, while having dinner at Carlo's Bella Napoli restaurant at the Atlantis Casino.

Nomads , the Road to Doctor, and the Condemned

Since we've been back we have been living out of our car. Thank goodness it is an SUV or I suppose we would have to rent yet another storage unit. We are currently staying in an extended-stay corporate type furnished suite. The place is quite nice but we hope to be moving soon after Christmas. Kathy is in the final stages of securing a nursing job through a travel agency with one of the local hospitals. As part of the compensation package they will include an apartment. It will be great to have a semi-permanent base of operations and to finally unpack all of our suitcases.

I haven't been able to do as much studying as I would like but did get in a couple days of review. I have finally received my authorization to test so I can now call the testing center and make my appointment. I'm shooting for the end of January. I am about halfway through (the medical school portion at least) my journey towards doctordom and I can't believe how fast it is going. With any luck clinicals will breeze by just as fast and in 2 short years I will be .......Doctor Vince. Yikes! Of course, by then I am sure we will have a socialized medicine plan in place and I will make about as much money as the Dick Cheney School for Marksmanship and Business Ethics. (smiles at John Gilbert)

Here are a few pictures:

Rileigh and her big brother, John:


Last night Kathy and I went to our friend, Bill's wedding:



Brian and I welcoming Bill into married life, or as we like to call it, the Condemned Men's Club (just kidding dear)

Who Turned the Heat Off ?

After a relatively painless ordeal loading all of luggage and cats etc into 2 cars (thank you Jon Cook!) we checked in at Princess Juliana Airport and even had time for one last glass of wine before we took off. The flight went well and we touched down in the good old USA around 5pm local time.



BRRRR!

It was a balmy 31 degrees when I walked out of the airport and since I was sporting my "Island Casual" attire (shorts) it might as well have been 31 degrees below zero!

Here is Rileigh all bundled up just before we walked outside. I'm sure she was thoroughly confused having spent the day before lathered in sunscreen and dipping her toes in the warm ocean.



It is great being back home.

Our Last Island Day

On Friday we decided to enjoy our last full day on the island with a trip to Pinel island. I really regret not going there earlier during our time in St. Maarten. It is a really cool little excursion and I recommend it if you ever have the chance. Pinel is only a 5 minute ferry ride away from the Cul-de-sac area on the French side near Anse Marcel. The little island is quiet, has hiking trails, a couple of beach bars/restaurants, and calm and pretty beaches.

The ferry ride:



Pinel island:




Pretty beach:



Rileigh enjoying the day on a beach chair:



Rileigh's first dip in the Caribbean:

48 Hours...

In less than 48 hours we will be back home having bid farewell to the friendly island of St. Maarten. Packing is pretty much complete, I delivered 2 boxes to the cargo company this morning and all 112 lbs of our crap should be arriving in Philadelphia sometime next week. In addition to shipping 2 large boxes of stuff back, we will be paying even more money to US Air because we will be checking 2 additional suitcases. If you are keeping track we will be bringing the following on to the plane:

6 suitcases
2 cat carriers (filled with 2 happy cats)
1 baby stroller
1 baby car seat
1 diaper bag

We decided to hit the beach tomorrow, so today we went to Phillipsburg to walk along St. Maarten's version of a boardwalk. Several cruise ships were in town:



This is perhaps the best named bar in the world:
(you'll have to forgive them for using your instead of you're)



Rileigh enjoying the sun:



We stopped at a restaurant named The Green House for lunch, I got a burger, Kathy got a wrap and Rileigh had the fish-it looked good but was a bit tough: (click on the pictures to better see her meal)





Perhaps the weirdest experience was sitting at the restaurant, enjoying a warm Caribbean afternoon, taking in this view and listening to Christmas carols playing on the restaurant's speakers. Very surreal!



Someone loves the camera:

The Mad Dash

Today is a blur. Our apartment looks like a category 5 hurricane just come through. Suitcases, boxes, bags, oh my! After a concerted effort to sell a large portion of our things we still had way too much stuff. I donated 2 boxes of books to our school's library after selling only about half to other students. We also donated about 5 bags of clothes, some baby toys, and, alas, the Cadillac of Baby Swings as blogged about here. The good news is that the donated items are going to a local orphanage so its a win-win. We don't have to charter an ocean liner to bring everything back and someone will put our stuff to good use.

Tonight the packing continues and we will box up some things that wont fit in our luggage and ship it back via our friendly neighborhood cargo company. At the rates they are charging us it may have been cheaper to buy an additional seat on the plane and belt our junk in.

Hopefully we will get everything here pretty much squared away tonight and tomorrow we can try to squeeze in a beach day and let Rileigh have her first dip in the Caribbean (before she most likely sees her first snow in 3 days).

It Makes My Liver Quiver

Christies auction house in New York auctioned off an 81 year old bottle of scotch that was originally distilled in 1926 during prohibition. The bottle of MACALLAN sold for a whopping $54,000.00. Click here for the story.

In case you were wondering, (You know I was)

750ml bottle = just about 17 shots (1.5oz/shot)
$54,000.00 divided by 17 shots = $3176.47 per shot

Now, as most of you know, I enjoy an occasional scotch myself and have been lucky enough to sample quite a few really good ones. I have even spent as much as $30.00 for a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, which by the way, I didn't think was the best I have ever tasted. As much as I enjoy scotch I can hardly imagine the spirit worth 3 thousand dollars a shot.

Although I would be interested in trying a sip of an 81 year old single malt. (in case the anonymous buyer is looking for volunteers that would appreciate a good drink)

Return of the Blog

Once again it seems I have fallen into a period of non-blogging. My apologies to those who have been stopping by and been disappointed by a lack of anything new. I promise to try to not let that happen again. OK on to what's new:

Well, our time here on the island will come to an end next week. As an added surprise I just realized that our flight home is SATURDAY not Monday the 17th as previously thought (and told to every living soul I know) So we will be home* Saturday the 15th of December.

This past Thursday we had what was our last exam at school. A full length simulated Step-1 board exam. All of my days locked away studying seemed to have paid off- I did pretty well. According to a conversion table they had it translates into a fairly respectable score on the real thing. So I am a little less worried about the real test which I will be taking somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd week of January. I did come away form the exam with a list of things I need to study a bit more like the structures of viruses against which I apparently have a mental block.

I can't believe how fast my time down here has gone. It seems like only yesterday I was carrying suitcases into our apartment at the Summit and wondering what the hell we were doing on this island. It has been a great experience though and other than missing the kids, I wouldn't change a thing. Many of my fellow classmates have left the island already and hopefully I will run into some of them during clinicals. I have been lucky and met some really great people down here and hope to stay in touch with many of them. To those classmates I will not get a chance to see again before we leave, good luck.

On the home front things have been a little hectic around here. We are desperately trying to consolidate all of our island-ly possessions and sell most things so we don't have to cart them all back with us. Tomorrow I have to run over to the cargo shipping place and inquire about shipping some things home rather than trying to squeeze it all into our luggage. Hopefully it will not be too expensive.

Rileigh is doing great (I know most of you only visit this blog to hear how she is doing) she is showing the beginning signs of crawling- she gets up on her hands and knees and rocks back and forth and then does the baby impression of a moonwalk. She slides herself backwards. She is super pleasant all the time and smiles and giggles most of the day away. I'm sure she is anxious to get back home to see her brother and sisters and her grandparents, conveniently just in time for Christmas. Here are a few recent pictures of our little drool-machine:







*By "home" of course I mean in the greater Philadelphia area looking for a 2 bedroom Kenmore refrigerator box.