Yesterday I almost lost alllll of our Grenada pictures and it kind of freaked me out a little. My laptop's memory is pretty much completely full. It's a problem, because I shoot tons of photo/video these days, and videos especially take up a ton of memory. So I needed to make more room on my laptop, and quick! I went ahead and moved lots of stuff to my external hard drive and then began deleting lots of my photos and videos from last year that had already been blogged. That wasn't freeing enough space for me, so I went into my downloads folder (which had so many huge files in it) and began deleting away. Some of the biggest files were sample lightroom catalogs that I had downloaded as part of an online course I took last year to learn how to use lightroom. That did the trick, and I shut my computer, happy to have enough space to at least get me through our last two weeks in Grenada.
When I opened it later to upload a new batch of pictures into lightroom, I was mortified to see that instead of 2500 photos in my lightroom library, there were only 80. What happened to the rest?? I poked around a little and realized that I had deleted my personal lightroom catalog when I deleted all the sample ones earlier. And then emptied the trash bin. And they were unrecoverable. Most of the pictures on there had already been edited and exported to my desktop, but lots of the stuff from this term wasn't saved anywhere else. Fortunately I did a time machine backup of my Macbook at the beginning of March and was able to get back all the photos I took from before then. Unfortunately, all my March and April stuff was gone. It's ok because I still have most of the RAW photos I snapped during that time on SD cards that I haven't cleared yet, but it was a good wake up call and got me pumped to hurry and get my recent pics into blog posts. 90% of that will mean nothing to my parents, who I am writing this post for. Sorry about that, parents! Let's do this.
In the evening, Jared and I took them to the tide pools. The sunset was beautiful, but the rocks were really sandy and slick and my mom tripped! The tide pools are not a good place to fall. Everything's jagged and pointy. She got really banged up. Cuts, bruises, black eye, the works. Jared sprinted home to bring back first aid stuff and our car, and by the time he got back we were pretty certain Mom had broken her arm. And this was only day one! Brought back memories of when our car completely broke during the first day of my brothers' trip here and derailed many of our plans for the week. But this was obviously worse. I felt so bad! We took them to the Greek Kitchen for dinner and then took it easy for the rest of the evening.
On Sunday we went to church. I think they enjoyed seeing how church is run in Grenada as compared to in Utah. But for my part, it was fast Sunday and filled to capacity and it gets REALLY hot in there with so many bodies+high temps+humidity+no air conditioning. Add to that an empty stomach and some hot flashes I was having, and I have never been so exciting to finish up the three-hour block. As a detour before going home, we took them up to Grenada's forts, which are usually completely empty on Sunday and have a nice view of the whole south side of the island.
In the evening we showed them Jared's school campus and caught this lovely little sunset. Now that I'm posting these I'm realizing I need to shoot some pictures of SGU campus before we leave. It's really pretty!
^^A test shot from my parents' little digital underwater camera they bought for the trip. Come to think of it, I should've had them leave it with me for our last month here! Oops. I actually have a disposal underwater camera that I've almost filled up though, so that'll do the trick.
Monday was pool day, which Mom was especially a fan of. How could you not be with this setup?? We read and floated and had pina coladas with fresh nutmeg. My favorite "smoothie" on the island. Obviously we took way more pictures than will appear in this post, but I've gotta limit it down somehow! In the evening we drove to the north side of the island to watch a leatherback sea turtle lay her eggs. I don't have pictures of it for this post, but I did get lots of video footage! I'll share the video in my next post.
The experience was very similar to when we did it with my brothers in July (you can read that post here), but it was unfortunately too early for hatchlings this time around. Watching the leatherback sea turtles lay eggs is easily one of my top three most amazing Grenada experiences. The stars are so beautiful, and you can see tiny islands dotting the ocean in the distance by moonlight. And then these enormous, beautiful turtles make their way to shore and are very meticulous as the lay like a hundred eggs. It's just incredible.
^^A sunset walk to our favorite dock! This is the place Jared and I go whenever there's a full moon. We just sit here and talk and enjoy the sky and the breeze. I'm so happy my parents took some good pictures of us together. Most of the pictures I've taken in Grenada are just of Jared or random fruit, haha. Speaking of random fruit . . .
^^Leo, out fruit guy. Again, so happy my dad snapped this picture! This is honestly how I look in everyday island life. Wearing a jumpsuit, hair frizzy and thrown into who-even-know-what, makeupless, buying local fruit from Leo. Leo's the many because he always gives me tips about how to pick the best fruit and how to know when it's ready to eat and how to prepare it. Last time I went, he told me that when I buy pineapple, I need to boil the peels in water, and then strain it and add some sweetener and drink it as a juice. Pineapples are too precious to let any part of them go to waste!
^^ I love this picture of my mom because I feel like I can see a lot of me in her face here. My parents and Jared don't see it and you probably won't either, but I do and it's really special to me.
Tuesday we went to BBC beach and then downtown to walk around the spice market and get some local fruit, and then for 2-for-1 pizza night at Le Phare Bleu in the evening. At least I think that's what we did. My Tuesday memories are hazy. We got the yummiest fruit from a nice guy downtown! Mango, soursop, cocoa bean, bananas, mango, and mammy apple, which I hadn't tried yet! It's really good. Crunchy, kind of like an apple, but with a flavor more like mango. We actually went and saw Leo later in the week. From him we got passion fruit, wax apple, water lemon, and fresh coconut. We had some on point smoothies the next morning. One more post to come!