by Chrissann Nickel
For the last 5 years, I’ve been living in a hotel. My boyfriend, David, manages the resort, which is why we’ve lived on-property in one of the rooms all these years. It’s a very small island resort with only 8 guest rooms, a restaurant/bar, and a marina downstairs. And while it’s a lovely spot and the two-bedroom villa we reside in is quite cozy, it’s not as flashy as it sounds.
Most people become visibly envious when they hear I live at a resort. I can see in their widening eyes exactly what they’re picturing – a never-ending, luxurious tropical vacation which is somehow fortuitously my everyday life. This assumption is not entirely untrue (I can get room service whenever I don’t want to cook, which is often), but there are plenty of undesirable quirks to deal with as well that people don’t really realize when they’ve never called a hotel “home”.
My main grievance is the lack of privacy. When we step outside our door, we are in a public space (even worse for David – he is at his work). I’m not a very social person, so this has been particularly challenging for me. Sometimes I just really need some peace and quiet, but when you’re surrounded by drunken vacationers and unsupervised, shrieking children, peace is rare to come by. We try to regard our villa as our small patch of privacy, but the tourists have other ideas.
Much like their stubborn, water-rejecting equine counterparts, you can post a sign for a tourist but you can’t make them obey it. The “Hotel Guests Only” plaques in front of our rooms seem to be interpreted as more of a suggestion rather than a rule. Tourists visiting our restaurant/bar frequently wander into our hotel rooms, usually whenever a door is open while the housekeeper is cleaning. I used to enjoy having my own door open to allow in some breeze while I worked, but after too many instances of intruding tourists on their own self-led tour, I’ve had to forgo the breeze.
This seems to be just another case of the Paradise Induced Mental Relapse I have referenced in earlier posts. Nowhere else in the world have I experienced random people strolling into my hotel room. But here, I’ll be sitting at my desk and in come three couples, cocktails in-hand, flinging open my door and marching into my living room, saying all sing-songy, “Don’t mind us, we just want to see what the rooms look like.” Actually you fools, I DO mind. Even if this was just my hotel room and not my private residence, I still don’t give a shit if you want to see what the rooms look like. Ask to see a VACANT room. This one is occupied.
After the most recent obnoxious invasion of my privacy just yesterday, I figured I’d share a couple of examples of the less-than-charming side of island hotel room living:
EXHIBIT A
I am working on the computer when I hear loud Spanish chattering and the banging of keys trying to be forced into my door’s keyhole. I get up to open the door and am faced with two 30-something Puerto Rican women who do not say, “Oops, excuse us” but rather, immediately become red with anger and shout, “What are you doing in OUR room?!”
I swallow my own rising aggravation and inform them as politely as I can muster that it is 100% impossible that this is their room. I ask which room they were assigned at Registration but instead of replying, the larger of the two ladies attempts to move past me, body-checking me with her over-sized bedazzled beach bag. Now they are storming into my home, telling me it is, in fact, their room (how could I be so stupid?). I have now officially moved past asking and demand to see their room key. Sure enough (I’m not that stupid!), it is for the room named “Bequia” and not my room, which is named “St. Barths”. I coerce them back out the door, point out the name discrepancy between the room placard and their engraved room key, speculate that perhaps this was why their key wasn’t fitting into my door’s lock, and point them in the direction of their (yes, THEIR) guest room. They mutter something in Spanish I am certain is not an apology.
EXHIBIT B
Our bedroom wall is shared with the guest room beside us. There is a group of 6 adults who have weaseled their way into sharing a room whose max occupancy is 4. It is 2 am and they have returned from the bar, sloppy drunk, and are playing loud country music and arguing with each other in slurred Southern drawls. While I am typically a deep sleeper, I am unable to ignore the ruckus and lay fuming in bed, making futile attempts to calm myself with breathing exercises.
Suddenly, the screaming and crying is on our patio and the sliding glass door to our bedroom is flung open. A naked woman is now entering our room, apparently thinking it is her room. This is where I lose it.
I am yelling (because it is the only way to reason with drunk people and it is 2 am), “This is not your room, GET OUT!” The buck-naked woman and her half-naked friend remain on our patio arguing. While this drunk ass woman somehow managed to crawl across the roof from her patio to ours, like a cat up a tree, she cannot get herself back where she belongs. We are forced to walk the nude women through our bedroom, across our living room and kitchen, out our front door, and lead them back to their room.
For some reason, David is not as upset about this as I am.
EXHIBIT C
Just yesterday, I am taking a midday nap on the couch and am awakened by crinkling sounds. I look up to find a woman in my room, rifling through my purse on the kitchen table. Still foggy from sleep, all I can muster is a stunned, “What the HELL are you doing?!”
She is old, leathery, and British. She looks at me, continues to fumble through my belongings, and says, “I’m just looking at the rooms.” I am forced to get up, physically remove her hands from my bag, and lead her out of my home. This bat-shit crazy woman had not only opened my closed door to enter my room, but had closed it behind her, presumably, for privacy. I explain to her that: a) my purse is not a part of “the room”; b) she better not have stolen anything and I’m calling the manager now; and c) if she ever wants to tour the rooms at ANY hotel in the future, she needs to do so with a hotel employee.
~
I have got to start locking my door. Or, you know, move.
by Dillinger
I’m not a big fan of spa treatments. It’s all a bit too touchy-feely for me. A decent pedicure is pretty much my limit. Typically, I will only get a spa treatment if I am on holiday or overwhelmed by guilt. The main reason being that unnecessary expenses can always be justified with the tag ‘I’m on holiday’ and also because most touristy places have spas on every corner, advertising their life changing treatments and you get sucked in by it all after awhile. Living in a country which is effectively one big tourist resort messes with my head a bit. As for the guilt, I will get to that shortly.
I visit a spa here for one reason and one reason only: the essential bikini wax. It’s the downside of living by the sea – you need to be bikini ready everyday. Imagine being a porn star and needing to be sex ready all the time, the mind boggles. Finding someone who would wax properly over here was a struggle and a situation that I have had to compromise on. There were trial and error attempts with those who wouldn’t take enough off and those who had no sense of symmetry. Admit it – there is nothing worse or more infuriating than a wonky wax. I finally settled on a woman who, quite valiantly, simply takes the lot off. Like I said, a compromise situation.
But this is where the guilt comes in. Being a beautician is pretty low on my list of jobs I could tolerate doing, but if that is what you enjoy, I commend you. However, I always think that waxing must be the job that every beautician hates the most. I presume they enjoy the rest of it, but they must surely release a deep sigh when they look down their list of appointments and see a wax job in there. Whenever you go for a wax, beauticians always try to up-sell. They constantly tell you about all the other pointless crap they do which is going to change your life and make you feel rejuvenated and born again. So there comes a point when I feel so overwhelmed by guilt that this poor women, month in and month out, waxes my VJ, that I say ‘yes’ and agree to have one of her ‘treatments’. I’m not even Catholic. I shouldn’t give in to guilt, but damn it, every time I fall for it…….and every time I regret it, almost instantaneously.
Last week, in a moment of weakness, I agreed to a massage. It is my opinion that the only person who should massage me is a lover. I really don’t want anyone else to touch me anymore than is absolutely necessary. But, like I said, the guilt makes me commit to stupid things. On this occasion, I convinced myself that at the very least, the oil would smell nice and my back did need some moisturiser, so I really had nothing to lose.
From the first minute, I started to wonder how long it would last – when would it end? I soon realised that I was in for the long haul. She did each leg, she did each arm, she did my back, she did my feet, she did my hands. She kept making happy comments and asking me to confirm how great it was. I was counting seconds, I was counting sheep, I was making lists, anything to take my mind of this horrible experience. I hate being touched. How had I walked into this situation with open eyes? Am I really that thick? Why did I agree to this? She’s a beautician, waxing is her job, you don’t need to punish yourself, she chose her career, maybe she even likes waxing? To make matters worse, the oil did not smell good. It was a familiar smell, but one I couldn’t place. She then poured it in my hair, with the belated question, “Oil in your hair? It’s ok?”. I’m English, so out of my mouth spilled forth the words, “Sure, it’s ok, it’s great!” while inside, I was screaming for the experience to end and fighting the urge to bolt. With the oil now running down my forehead, I could finally place the smell. It smelled like barbecued beef, ergo, I now smelled like barbecued beef. Would this never end?
Finally she stopped and I was free to go. She was all smiles and totally delighted with herself. I was struggling to maintain my fake smile.
“I use special Ayurvedic Indian massage oil, you like?”
“I loved it, it was great!” I replied, while inwardly contemplating the fact that as cows are sacred in Hindu culture, whether this was the reason to have a massage oil that was eau de vache?
“Leave it on for 1 hour and then have a cool shower and you will feel great.”
I never discovered if I would feel great. Coated in beef drippings, I drove home as fast as possible and dove into a steaming hot shower and scrubbed and soaped up until the entire experience was a distant memory, to all but my bank balance.
6 months of guilt-free waxing now lie ahead before my next sensational spa treatment. Hot stones or exfoliating scrub?
by Chrissann Nickel
Caveat: For those of you who read the title above and found yourself hoping to attain some sort of Mr. Miyagi-esque sagacity from this post, I feel compelled to provide full disclosure – the aforementioned wax is not the karate skill-inspiring car polishing variety, but rather, this post is about bikini wax.
~
Many of the basic services people take for granted out there in the real world are the little things I often long for. From dry cleaning, to a good tailor, to a cobbler (both the kind made of peaches and the man who fixes your shoes), to food delivery options (seriously – nothing fancy – I would dance in the streets if I could get a pizza delivered) are all on the list. But no matter how much I yearn for a proper bakery and the like, I would stop whining about it all if only I could have a good bikini waxer.
Once upon a time in my past life in The Land of Convenience, I used to get fantastic bikini waxes on a regular basis. And while I realize “fantastic” may seem like a bizarre word choice to describe the procedure of having scalding hot liquid poured on your lady parts and ripped off whilst attached to your hairs by the root, I now know just how fantastic my experience truly was. Each month, I would visit my favorite chamomile-scented day spa and see an efficient French woman named Françoise. Not only was she quick, she skillfully minimized the pain in what can be a torturous enterprise and I left there with skin so smooth and hair-free, if I wasn’t 5’3″ (and, you know, womanly) you’d think I’d just been born.
Having lived in the islands now for close to 8 years, I am disappointed to report that I still do not have a waxologist who I can trust. It is a cruel injustice to live in a place where you wear bikinis year-round and not be able to get a good bikini wax. In my fruitless search for The One, I have been burned, ripped, and pulled in ways that still make me shudder. Commiserating with my fellow women on rocks, the tales of disappointment in waxdom abound – one friend even had the top layer of her skin inadvertently pulled off. Down there. It bled for days. I wish I was exaggerating this in some way, but I am not.
And it’s not just that these so-called estheticians lack an aptitude for depilatory treatments, but I have yet to even find one that actually uses the appropriate type of wax. Why is it me telling them, the “professionals”, that they’re using the wrong wax? They look at me with the same feigned patience I would give some random patron telling me they could do my job better, but really – I could do their job better. It’s my sensitive lady skin that is being punished here and I feel like this is not one of those situations where you can just grin and bear it. Let me just tell you – there is NOTHING like a bad bikini wax.
Life on a rock often motivates you to start taking matters into your own hands. I have become much more resourceful living down here; when something I desperately want is unavailable, I have been known to try to fill the void on my own. I have learned how to make all sorts of shit I would never have attempted if it were readily available – I make my own whole-grain bread, veggie burgers, sorbet…hell, I even made my own hair serum. I’m not quite sure why it has taken me so long to decide to start doing my own bikini waxes, but in a fit of frustration after my most recent waxing debacle, I finally made the decision to go at it on my own.
I decided that if I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. I researched and shipped in the right kind of wax and even got myself a salon-quality wax heater. I figured it was best to not complicate things by adding the microwave into the equation.
On the day of my waxing appointment with myself, I was already smug before I had heated the wax. I imagined that I would emerge from my first self-bikini wax with the same victory I experienced when I realized I could make my own almond butter. It’s so easy! And cheap! I can’t believe I’ve been paying $27 a jar for it all these years! Spoiler alert: doing your own bikini wax is nothing like making almond butter.
Conducting a self-bikini wax is quite literally a sticky situation. Gravity is working against you and despite your best intentions, you end up dripping a considerable amount of wax on inopportune places – in between your toes, for example. And sadly, the “Wax Removing Lotion” you lavishly purchased along with your Easy Bake Waxer does not, in fact, remove wax. It is also safe to say that I am now in need of a new set of bath towels, as the ones I sagely used to protect the floor are crusted in what looks like a honey explosion.
I will not go into the specific details of my bikini wax endeavor, not because I am shy, mind you, but more due to the fact that my brother reads this. I will say it wasn’t a total fail, but the ease I had so arrogantly anticipated was illusory. An experience that typically takes around 20 minutes at the spa consumed 2 1/2 hours of my Saturday and it was nowhere near complete; it turns out, I am not as bend-y as I like to believe. Another unpleasant side effect was the unrelenting crick in my neck that lingered for 3 days following due to all of my below-the-navel gazing.
Alas, bikini waxing remains a service I still wish I could pay somebody else to do. I suspect I will improve as a self-waxer with time, but it’s a lot tougher than I presumed and there’s only so much you can do with one set of hands. Until I can work up the courage to try someone new again, I may just have to make it more of a festive affair by adding music and copious amounts of wine to my self-waxing Saturdays. But I would like to send out this S.O.S. – if you live in the big world and are an adept esthetician looking for an island adventure, pack your bags, friend, and head for the tropics. You can stay at my house. The wax is already warm.
by Melissa Rogati
Back when my husband and I first got married, we lived on a somewhat small and very sparsely populated island in the southern Bahamas. All the Bahamian locals were friendly and welcoming. A lot of them remain good friends today that I still keep in touch with. We were asked to dinner often and while it was always delicious, it was always “local”: Jamaican curry goat, fish and grits, and all the lobster a girl could dream of (steamed, boiled, grilled, baked, sautéed). Lobster was plentiful there because everyone, including me, speared it themselves.
But these dinners were always out of my comfort zone as well. As fun as they were, they were never quite “comfortable”. I had to explain over and over again why, because of my suburban Atlanta upbringing, I didn’t mind one bit giving up the eyeballs out of my fish to someone more excited about the treat. Or why I wasn’t “finishing” my chicken by sucking every last bit of gristle and tendon off and even removing the marrow from the bone. Or that I really would rather let the home’s resident nine-year-old finish my Vita Malt (I could never figure out exactly what the thick, warm, heavily-malted beverage was good with). No one was ever rude about my finicky nature and I wouldn’t give up the years I lived among those friends for anything, but due to my polite Southern upbringing (you finish what the host serves you, say thank you, and possibly take another helping), I always left feeling like I had been somewhat rude for leaving the fins of the fish on my plate. And no one likes to constantly leave dinner parties feeling rude.
Toward the end of our time on that island, a couple from Key West moved in a few dirt roads down from ours. They had spent many many years of their life living on their sailboat and decided it was time to settle down (for at least half the year) and build a permanent structure they could spend winters in. It was so nice to have people moving in near us because our home was so remote. Maybe 3-4 other people lived out on our long road in our sparsely populated settlement. Multiple days could go by without another car driving down our road. So here we were, with new potential friends right in the “neighborhood.” They invited us over one night for a little dinner party, and the thought was so comforting and familiar (steak fajitas! margaritas! guacamole!) that I could barely stand the wait. When you live and eat outside of your comfort zone for long stretches at a time, the thought of a brief encounter with the familiar really lifts your spirits. They even invited us to bring my dog over instead of leaving her home alone. New friends (not easy to come by in such a small place). Familiar food. An evening I had no way of failing at.
You see where this is going, don’t you…
On the highly anticipated evening of our little gathering, Seth and I loaded ourselves, our appetizer contribution, a bottle of wine, and my dog, Saylor, up into our truck for the 1/2 mile dirt road drive to their place. Once there, Saylor bounded out of the truck and tore furiously around the yard. Because I didn’t have a fence at our house, she didn’t get a lot of free time outside. I decided to let her run while I carried the appetizer inside. About three minutes later, I came out and called her name. Nothing. I wandered down the driveway a bit a called again. Nothing. Annoyed that she might have run into the dense island bush surrounding their yard, I called louder. Then I wandered out into the road, and there she was. I could see her shape lit up under a lonely street lamp on the little dirt road, not moving, lying on her side. None of us had heard the car. Maybe one, two at most, would drive down our road in a day’s time. But in the three minutes I had carried our appetizer inside for our glorious, long-anticipated dinner party (steak! on our island! completely unheard of!) with our new potential friends, someone had driven by and hit her without stopping.
I stood in the road, crying, and yelled for Seth. He came out with our new friends following behind him. They were now confronted with us: two people they had just met for a total of ten minutes, invited into their home, now standing and crying in the road with my dead dog lying ten feet away. (Clarification: I was distraught. Saylor, named after a very dear friend, had been my dog prior to marriage and Seth’s arrival on the island. She had kept me company as I lived there alone for a few years. Seth didn’t have much of a problem holding himself together.) There were no vets on our island. One would come from a bigger island once every few months. If you had a dog you needed spayed or neutered, he’d do it for you then. In your driveway. Or on a back patio table. So there was nowhere to take her. I was so thankful that we were able to determine that she was, in fact, dead because on that island when you had an animal that was suffering, the only option was to call a police officer and have them shoot it. You think having your dog hit by a car can ruin a dinner party? Imagine having the police come over to shoot it in the head. That’s pretty much the definition of party foul. But fortunately, that wasn’t necessary.
Our new friends offered to help us bury her. So with our fajitas and fresh guac waiting inside, we loaded my dead dog into the truck and drove her home as I continued to cry. Seth and our brand new friends took turns and dug a big hole in our side yard, wrapped her up in an empty dog food bag (as a deterrent to other dogs thinking they’d dig her up), covered her with rocks (also a deterrent), and buried her. They even brought a palm tree to plant on top of her (another deterrent – though this was a long way from home where my family buried hamsters wrapped up in pretty cloth and planted azaleas on top of them). After burying our dog, our new potential friends said something along the lines of, “Well, we still have fajitas…”
Remember when I said I was so excited about this dinner party because I knew it would be comfortable and familiar? Almost like I was home again? That there was no way I could mess it up? No fish heads to leave on my plate? Or bits of a goat’s leg bone chips to spit out? Well, yeah, having my dog die and then allowing practical strangers to help us bury her within the first 30 minutes of our dinner party topped all of those. So I drank margaritas and cried all the way through the next few hours. And they made sure my glass stayed full.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the night, but we must have made a good impression because we’re still friends with this couple today. (Meaning, Seth must have made a good impression because I lost count of my margaritas and the tears only increased per drink.) We went beaching with them. They gave us plants for our yard and helped me learn about gardening. We exchanged recipes that were possible with the limited ingredients available on island. When we needed it months later, they helped us out with some of the moving process as we prepared to move our life to another island. But, I can’t say I remember being invited to any other dinner parties at their house.
by Ashley Ladlie
Island life is not hermetically sealed. Excluding those wealthy enough to blast the AC year round, most island residents live with windows open most of the time. Life here has a campy, indoor/outdoor vibe. Generally speaking, people who choose to live on a rock appreciate this aspect of island life. Myself included. Oh, how I longed for open windows and fresh breezes during the upper Midwest’s annual six month hibernation. Always the holdout among roommates over closing windows and turning on the stuffy AC, I only shutter-up now when desperate for some privacy from my home/work.
The screened-in-bubble room
This means I’m subject to all neighborhood noises. In addition to the sound-scape of birds and tree frogs that you might expect to enjoy in the tropics, the following make up the discordant symphony of life surrounding my Love City abode:
Roosters Crowing. My recent bout with insomnia allowed the opportunity to log the day’s first crow. Yesterday was 3:17 am. This morning a bit earlier at 3. Crowing continues in surround sound, growing more boisterous until somewhere between 8 and 9 am. Then they lay off for a few hours until mid-afternoon. Not that there is any official schedule. My mom listened to a cock doodle-doo all night once and swore that by dawn it was hoarse.
Hens Laying. Have I yet mentioned that families of free-range chickens roam the island? Despite growing up in farm country, I somehow managed to avoid familiarizing myself with the sound of a hen laying an egg. Now that I live on a Caribbean island, I experience this wretched ear-pollution at least once a week. It’s probably not so dissimilar to what you or I would sound like mid egg-lay, except that the horrific bawwwks of pain are separated with clucks instead of curses.
Hen with hatchlings in tow.
Heavy Equipment. Two houses and one resort monstrosity are being built up the hill, bringing all sorts of loud construction machines to the ‘hood. During excavation, we’re tortured with the percussion of jackhammers throughout the entire work day. One guest suggested they might refrain from jack-hammering until 9am, so as not to disturb those on vacation. It would be nice, indeed, but I chose not to march my white ass up the hill and ask the construction crew to postpone their workday by an hour.
Cat Yowls. I can never tell if I’m overhearing a stand-off or a sex-off. Either way, I’m disturbed and embarrassed.
West Indian Neighbor’s Soundtrack. Up the hill lives a local gentleman whose taste in music vacillates between two extremes. He mostly favors Calypso and its sub-genre, Soca. With song titles like,”Big Banana,” “Bring de Kitty,” and “Cherry Garden”, it’s some of the raunchiest, most innuendo-filled music I’ve encountered. But a good chunk of the time he’s in a more pious state, favoring Christian and Gospel. For the first year, I could stomach the Jesus songs only because they were in the calypso style, so I could extract some charm from their uninvited presence in my home. But then came the Lenten mix. Played over and over again. Daily. And songs like,”He Liivvveess….He Liiivvveesss…..He Lives Inside My Heart!,” started to loop in my head. The seasonal nadir being the day a guest returned from church singing the same song. It was like having the black version coming out of my right speaker while the inferior white version blared from the left.
*Click for photo credit
White Neighbor’s Love Mix. I know when the white neighbors up the hill are feeling amorous because I am suddenly assaulted with early 90’s ballads from the likes of Celine Dionne and Whitney Houston.
Neighbor Sneezes. Different neighbor? Same one? Not sure. But someone sneezes so violently and in such rapid succession that I was initially concerned a vital blood vessel might rupture. I’m told by a predecessor that this sneezing has gone on for over a decade, which tells me there are no immediate health concerns.
Sunday Funday, Santo Style. Maybe the least annoying track on this tape is the Spanish music played by the Santos down the hill. (Santo is local nomenclature for people from Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic.) I learned immediately upon arrival that Sunday is their day to relax with the family, have fun, and party. Their music adds exotic spice to the neighborhood. Their laughter adds zest for life. The few times it has devolved into fighting, I could do without.
THUMP.
Iguana Falls. Iguanas are known for falling out of trees. Especially during summer when the flamboyants are in bloom. Sometimes they’ve fallen asleep. Sometimes they’re clumsily trying to reach a precarious bloom. But it’s a frequent occurrence to hear a loud THUMP in the yard, followed a few seconds later by the crunch of twigs and leaves as the iguana works its way back to the base of the tree. Twice I’ve been startled awake from the sound of one hitting my bedroom roof. Last year, I came upon a dead one inches from the building. It gave me quite a start. My only guess as to how he found this fate was by hitting his head during a fall from the roof. Most of the time, however, these prehistoric critters are amazingly resilient.
Car Barge. Some communities have clock or bell towers marking the hours. I have the screeching car barge ramps. Whenever I hear the nails-on-chalkboard sound of the gate going up, I know it’s either the top or bottom of the hour. A good friend who works on one of the barges was shocked to hear it from my house. I asked if bringing a can of WD-40 down the hill and offering to oil the hinges might help, but he claims the problem requires more than a routine lube job.
*click for photo credit
Tarzan Calls. I can’t be certain, but I think this is the same fellow with the schizophrenic music mix. At least once, but sometimes several times a day, he emits what I can honestly best describe as a Tarzan yell. At first, I thought I was hearing an orgasm noise, and was again, a bit embarrassed. Then someone told me they thought he was a Calypso singer, and maybe these were vocal exercises. This made sense, especially considering his predilection for the genre. But then a few weeks ago, I was at a group meditation where we were taught how to scream into towels as a means of releasing stress and other negative emotions. There were several pros at this group, and once the meditation began and the towel-screaming commenced around me, I couldn’t help but think this sounds exactly like my neighbor. So maybe it’s just a primal scream sort of activity to purge frustrations.
Property Noises. And so I can always be reminded that I’m at work even when I’m at home, I am intimate with all of the property’s noises: gravel crunching in parking lots and on paths, the distinct sound of each condo’s door, the pool pump turning on and off, guests talking and sliding lounge chairs. I’m most grateful for being keenly in touch with the slam of the gate closing when someone approaches my cottage. The only time I’ve stood watching the clock, waiting for it to chime 10pm so I could enforce the noise rule, was when a lovely, extended Korean family visited for a wedding. And brought along, all the way from Canada, their karoake machine. Even my AC and headphones couldn’t drown out the sound of my favorite Elvis ballad, “I Can’t Help Farring in Rove with You.”
*Click for image credit
No surprise then, that I burn through a couple pairs of padded ear-encompassing headphones a year. If anyone is planning to get me a 30th birthday present in June, I’d love a set of the Bose noise-cancelling variety. Thanks.
