Pinterest

Pinterest is this site where you can "pin" things from around the Internet. It becomes a way to organize the ideas that you find online. When you "friend" other people, you are able to see what they have pinned and therefore have access to all of the great things that other people have found online too. People use it for different things but I mainly focus my boards on food, exercise, crafts, and party ideas.

Many people who "Pin" joke about the fact that you will have all these great ideas but none of them get implemented. The recipes that Stephanie and I did when she was here in August all came from Pinterest (Cooking). I've also been working on implementing some of the ideas that I've pinned to my holiday boards.

During the month of November, we did the Thank You tree minus the trunk part. Each day we wrote something we were thankful for on a leaf and then put it on the wall.

Last weekend we got together with Tucker and made felt ornaments to put on Arianna's felt Christmas tree. She was interested in decorating a few of her ornaments but the rest of them remained plain. We used my cookie cutters as the shapes so that's why there's some "Easter" shapes on the tree. :) Arianna has hidden some of her decorated ornaments. She likes to "hold them" so she puts them into one of her purses to keep them safe.

I also made an advent calendar I saw online. My hope is to take a picture of us doing each one and do a 24 day countdown to Christmas. No guarantees that I will get the blogs up on the same day that we do the things but I should be able to get up 24 blogs at some point before the New Year.

Christmas Tree Lighting

Over the past five years Camana Bay has slowly but surely become the place in the Cayman Islands for most major events.  A few still happen in downtown George Town but generally the centre of events has moved to Ken Dart's mall/work complex/living community.  Last night was the tree lighting as we begin the Christmas season. The last couple of years this has happened on a school night which kept us from attending.  This year it was on a Friday so we had a chance to go. We started the evening going to a new bar b que restaurant on Seven Mile called Duke's and then headed over to Camana for the festivities.  The tree was down on the crescent by the north sound canal entrance to Camana. The National Choir sang Christmas Carols and then Santa made an appearance to turn on the tree and all the lights of Camana.

 

 

 

 It was a great evening and a perfect start to the Christmas season!

Pirates Week Finale

Every year in November the Cayman Islands holds "Pirates Week".  It is a way to kick off the tourist season and celebrate Heritage Week in each of the Districts. Last Friday, Katie, Stephanie and Arianna went to the opening festivities and Arianna had a great time watching the fireworks go "boom".  Yesterday was the closing evening and so we headed into the heart of George Town on the water front to watch the last days events.

 

It started with a card board boat race out of Hog Sty Bay.

 

 

After watching the race we walked around town and had dinner at the food stands.  Arianna wanted to play at the fountains and we ended up at Heroes Square where she could play by one.

 

 

Then she heard music and wanted to go dance.  We headed over to a Reggae stage and she danced until dark.

 

 

Finally as night fell we met up with some pirates from Seattle who gave Arianna some stickers that she happily played with while we waited for the evening events to kick in.

 

The week traditionally ends with the capture of the pirates that had stormed George Town the week before and the sentencing of the pirate leaders which leads into the fireworks show to end the night. We were right by the plank and got a great view of the "punishment" as three pirates walked the plank into the Harbour bay.  Then fireworks closed out the festivities.

 

 

This was a first for all of us as we had never before done the Pirates Week events like this and it was great to have a chance to do it before we leave.

Atlanta Seminar

One of the perks of my job at ICCI that I will miss the most are the quarterly seminars that ICCI does in the United States.  They alternate between Miami and Atlanta and so three to four times a year I have gotten to head up to the U.S. for a 5 or 6 day period.  The highlight of every seminar are the field trips.  This fall was my final seminar and it concluded last evening.  We had flown up on Wednesday and wanting to go out with a bang, I had set up two days of field trips in Atlanta for our Seminar on Technology and Society.  We visited the Center for Disease Control, the Martin Luther King National Historic Site, The CNN Center and the Georgia Aquarium.  At CDC we got a presentation from one of the scientists and at CNN Center we got presentations from several executives including the General Manager of HLN and the President of CNN BEST which is their Broadcasting Engineering Studio Technology Division.  We topped it off with a behind the scenes tour of the Georgia Aquarium that included a special treat getting to watch them feed the whale sharks in a huge tank from right next to the top of the tank where they entered and where the general public isn't allowed. We didn't get pictures at the aquarium because they didn't want us photographing around open tanks where things could fall in but here are group photos from the other three tours.  All in all it was a great way to end my seminars with ICCI.

 

 

2012 Cayman Islands Sprint Triathlon

Yesterday we both completed our first full sprint triathlon.  It was an early morning wake up at 4:45 a.m. as we had a breakfast of hard boiled eggs, toast and bananas.  At 5:30, Darren, the husband of Andrea - a friend of Katie's, gave us a ride to the transition area since he had a bike rack on his vehicle.  We racked our bikes and got our transition area ready with towels, water bottles and our bike/run clothing laid out. 

 

The swim portion came first and with 124 competitors (51 in the olympic, 52 in the sprint and 21 in the team competition) it was a mass start.  The sprint distance only did one lap of the 750 meter swim course and I finished in 14:40 which actually had me in 12th place overall after that portion.  Katie came in at 17:45 and both of us were in good shape.  Our first transitions went poorly with both of us at over four minutes to get to the bike portion. 

There were crosswinds and swirling headwinds that really affected us both and it pushed both our times over the 50 minute mark for the 20 kilometer ride.  I came in at 53:09 for that portion and Katie at 55:29.  We both plummeted down the standings as we headed to the run.  Our second transitions were better but still below what we had hoped.  By the run I was pretty dead while Katie was getting to her strongest leg.  She caught me by the middle of the second lap and instead of blowing past me as she easily could have, she slowed down and paced me the rest of the way.  I was on the verge of quitting a couple of times, but each time she urged on and at points practically pulled me to the finish line.  Our medals look like dog tags but we wore them proudly.  Our run times came in at 38:19 for her and 43:27 for me.  Overall we finished 49th and 50th at 1 hour 57 minutes 12 seconds for Katie and 1 hour 57 minutes 13 seconds for me.

When we first started training our goal had been 2 hours and 30 minutes.  We moved that up through the training and had set the two hour mark as our goal and 1 hour 50 minutes as the shoot for number.  The transitions and bike portion prevented the shoot for goal but Katie pushing us got us to our overall goal of below 2 hours.  We finished exhausted, but triumphant! 

 

We have both checked another item off our bucket lists.  But as we both noted yesterday evening, we have a double challenge to do a sprint triathlon and the half marathon which comes up in a month so we are only half way to our goal and we are still in training mode for another four weeks to get through that.

 

Cayman Islands Triathlon

I'm pretty tired and Scott has crashed on the couch so I thought I would just do a quick update to let you guys know that we finished the triathlon this morning in 1 hour 57 minutes - 3 minutes under our goal!

I'll let Scott tell you more about how things went but here is a picture of us at the end.

 

Stephanie Arrives

Katie's sister Stephanie is on island to help us with Arianna these next two weeks as between the triathlon and my trip up to Atlanta things were going to be rough.  On her first day she got to take Arianna "trick or treating" for halloween with Arianna's friend Tucker who lived in a complex that had a bunch of kids and thus actual trick or treating.