It’s still hot here. Too hot. Too humid. Hard to breathe.

I woke up at around 7 with a very sore throat. Oh, oh. Is this from snoring or am I getting a cold? Sue said she hadn’t slept a wink since 1:00am so she rolled over and slept for another hour or so.

We had scrambled eggs for breakfast. I read for a while. Sue worked on her iPad, adding up our expenses, one of her favourite things to do. I was kind of stuck — couldn’t update my journal from yesterday or check on my email or read the latest Trumpy news because last night we maxed out our 500MB internet access — so I would need to go buy another $10 voucher before I could be connected again. At some point I turned on our 2-channel TV and saw that the snowy, distorted picture was actually the local TV station broadcasting CNN live. Hey, we can watch a bit of news. Well, it didn’t take long for us to get caught up with all the latest. Just in time, Sue discovered another New York Times crossword puzzle stuck in her notebook — so that gave us something fun to do for an hour. 

We headed into town just after noon. Hot, hot, hot. We walked all the way to the centre of Rarotonga where the ‘BlueSky’ internet company store was. I bought another voucher, punched the codes into my phone, deleted about 12 spam emails, looked at a couple of photos of Max enjoying the Spring weather on the street outside his house, and just like that, we were all caught up with the happenings in the world.

We stopped at a restaurant on the way back and had lunch. I decided that from now until we leave, the ONLY thing I should order here is fish or seafood, since that’s what they do well here. We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and topped up some of our supplies. 

Back at our villa it was time to have a snooze out on the deck. I think Sue read her book during this time, but I can’t vouch for certain. 

Too hot, too sweaty, too unmotivated to go back into town for supper. Shoot, why not have an ‘enhanced’ happy hour (that means more cheese, more sausage, more olives, more crackers, at least one more G&T) and call it supper? We’re convinced that the heat and humidity here diminishes ones appetite, though you wouldn’t believe that if you saw the (massive) South Pacificers who live and eat here! 

We sat outside on the deck, waiting for it to cool off a bit. Sue threw our t-shirts and shorts into the ‘energy-efficient’ washer and a few hours later took out the clean clothes and hung them up on bar stools under the whirring ceiling fan in the spare bedroom. Once it was dark we entertained ourselves by watching the 8 or 10 geckos that were zipping around upside-down on the ceiling of our deck, catching flies and little bugs. At one point the sky opened up and dumped buckets of rain on our little part of the world. Just as quickly, it stopped. We went inside and watched a bit of local news on TV and had a couple of “Tim Tams” for dessert. We finished a couple more crossword puzzles. And that was the end of Monday in Rarotonga. Shut ‘er down and gone to bed before 10:30. See you tomorrow!