What are you people still doing up?

[shereads]

Hi Cantdog.

 

[cantdog]

You saw me over here, did you, sweet thing? What are you doing, drinking coffee at this hour?

 

[shereads]

You saw me over here, did you, sweet thing? What are you doing, drinking coffee at this hour?

Ha. I don't need caffeine to be sleepless. Not until the alarm clock goes off at 7:30 for my 9 a.m. meeting. Then I'll be mainlining coffee. How was Belize?

 

[cantdog]

I refer you to the thread where you asked that before. What the fuck thread was that? One of yours. I think. Hang on.

 

[cantdog]

Hah! it was the Couric one. I said

My voyage to Belize has yet to begin. We depart Saturday, the 12th of the coming month.

The vitamins and meds are gathered and counted, and the list is in the hands of the customs people in Belize. Half or more of them are already packed to go.

This sort of wide open frankness with the customs agents didn't pay off in Santo Domingo, but I suppose MMI has done it before elsewhere. In the RD, groups found their meds held hostage toward baksheesh of one kind or another, and sometimes they were simply confiscated. Our group learned to bury them.

We would wrap them in clothing, and stuff the bundled clothes in opaque duffels. Also in the mix were kids' schoolbooks, pencils and pens, all that sort of thing. Shoes, stuffed with meds. Tools. The xrays showed a hodgepodge, but the receiving customs people didn't use them.

You open duffels from one end, and the "top" layer was always chocolate and other candy, above an insulating layer of clothes. Sometimes the chocolate was gone, but once they saw it was a group of twenty-five or more, each person with two check-on pieces of luggage weighing nearly seventy pounds, duffel upon duffel, they generally started to think it was just going to be a whale of a lot of work to go through them all. They ended by waving us on, out to the street, en masse.

We shall see what happens in Belize. If there is a problem, we can explain to Ms. Mayo and Mr. Taveras how we finessed them in the RD, if we have to.

We've had a few shots and filled some prescriptions for Chloroquine and Cipro. I'm pretty confident it'll be a good trip. Just the three of us, Mr. and Mrs. Cantdog and the child, are fairly formidable, and Taveras sounds like an old hand.

cantdog

and then I hit the 'submit reply' button.

I thought at the time I was communicating, but perhaps I was wrong.

 

[cantdog]

No coffee. Me neither, and I'm refusing to drink in order to sleep. Brilliant idea. It's three in the morning now. This is really swell. It's a good thing most of my life is so inconsequential.

 

[shereads]

Sorry, I abandoned the other thread in favor of a bubble bath before. Not sure why I thought you'd already been to Belize and returned. Insomnia is eating my brain cells. If you have any difficulty going through customs, show them the cans of Minute Maid Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice that you always carry in your "sample case." They'll think you're one of the owners. You'll zip right through.

Or not. I've never been there. Do be careful of the monkeys. Monkeys can't be trusted. And the jaguars. They're beautiful, yes, but I've heard that you practically need a mechanic on retainer to get full enjoyment from one.

 

[cantdog]

Maybe I need a hobby, or a working girl to come visit.

No, I have six hobbies, I just don't do any of them very much. And I'm so married it hurts, so a hired girl is out.

A power outage might work. Then I wouldn't be doing this, at least.

 

[shereads]

Maybe I need a hobby, or a working girl to come visit.

No, I have six hobbies, I just don't do any of them very much. And I'm so married it hurts, so a hired girl is out.

A power outage might work. Then I wouldn't be doing this, at least.

You probably have the most consequential life of anyone here. (I was going to say the least inconsequential, but I can't handle a double-negative at this hour.)

Say goodnight, Gracie.

 

[cantdog]

Sorry, I abandoned the other thread in favor of a bubble bath before. Not sure why I thought you'd already been to Belize and returned. Insomnia is eating my brain cells. If you have any difficulty going through customs, show them the cans of Minute Maid Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice that you always carry in your "sample case." They'll think you're one of the owners. You'll zip right through.

Or not. I've never been there. Do be careful of the monkeys. Monkeys can't be trusted. And the jaguars. They're beautiful, yes, but I've heard that you practically need a mechanic on retainer to get full enjoyment from one.

I've always coveted one, though, in a mild way. I built model kits of the XKEs as a young ape.

I have good luck spotting animals in the woods. It's a scanning technique. I see them when others don't. I was always the one spotting the colibris in the RD, and the scorpions and whatnot.

 

[cantdog]

I hear monkeys can be worse than pack rats. Or the keas in New Zealand. They don't seem to have any, in the places I've been so far. They call the howlers 'baboons' in Belize, and they have a fancy eagle and tapirs and jaguars and all kinds of stuff. We'll likely be traveling in a rackety bus, though, making more noise than three tennagers and audible for half a mile. I haven't a lot of hope. This stuff is not like ecotourism. Much.