Coming in threes

We had a series of unfortunate events this morning…while I was busy with school, Emma-Jane phoned from the radio station – she is the main organiser of the carnival – to ask whether I had a work permit to sell jewellery. I confirmed that I did not, but since I had already confirmed this with her, and checked whether I would need one, I didn’t think there would be a problem, since the stall holders don’t need trade licences, being covered by the carnival’s general licence. Now there has been some query though, so Emma is going to investigate a little further – but I might not be permitted to sell them after all. Then, I had just got off the phone, when the boys started calling to say, ‘what’s going on here’ – the washing machine was flooding the passage. Nick and I went rushing downstairs, switched off the machine, mopped up a lot of water, and wondered what to do next. While we were busy wondering, the machine was continuing to fill up, so it seems that the programming which tells the machine to stop drawing in water, has gone awry. Managed to get it all out by running a spin cycle, and stopped the flow of water, but at the moment we will have to manually stop the inflow during the cycles – rather on the awkward side. Teddy has given us the name of someone to phone. While that was going on though, Tammy phoned to say that not all the long-awaited recording equipment arrived with this ship, as it was supposed to. There is one part, the major piece, the desk, which was missing from the order, despite being ticked off on the invoice. Poor Tammy said she felt sick with the disappointment. They were hoping to start the recording of her new album as early as this weekend, I think. We were wondering what terrible thing was going to befall us next, but thankfully, nothing did!

After lunch I went out to the museum to take a photo, for a layout, of a model carrack they have on display – a ship which Jaoa da Nova Castella would have used when he first discovered the island in 1502. Then I went to the seaside to collect some sand, which I will be incorporating into the page. At 2.45 we all went to visit Tammy, just to see what was there already, and had a cup of tea. She had cheered up considerably, and can see that God’s hand is in the timing. Fortunately she managed to sort out the whereabouts of the missing piece, which actually was never sent – the shop was out of stock at the time, so because they didn’t alert anyone to the fact that it wasn’t with the order, they will kindly post it all the way to St Helena at their expense. We are all just so relieved that the sound desk didn’t go missing or get pinched along the way – valued at nearly ₤700, you can’t easily replace it! We were there for about an hour – the boys played outside with a go-cart, and also watched the cat chase a mouse around the garden. The mouse wasn’t really intending to catch the mouse, or certainly not kill it – it just wanted to play. It was really funny and interesting to watch.