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Going through Audible.com’s catalog I came across this little-known gem by Mark Twain entitled Buckshot Cheney’s Last Trainride. If only the late night talk show hosts had known about this back in February 2006.

“I’d rather watch the sewer back up than watch a soccer game. . .Larry F on Yahoo Sports”

In front of the house here in Potrerillos is a flower garden in which resides a single hummingbird. As far as I can figure out through Ridgely and Gwynne’s A Guide to the Birds of Panama and Glen Bartley’s Birds of Costa Rica web site (we’re only about 35 miles from the Costa Rican border here) this bird is a Rufous-tailed hummingbird.

It’s quite a feisty little beast. Nearly every morning when I go out with my cup of coffee to gaze down the mountain this little bird comes zipping out of nowhere to hover about 10 feet in front of me at eye level as if to say “okay, buster, stay right where you are. These flowers are MINE!”

And guard its patch it does. Every now an then another hummingbird will come to check out the flowers and is immediately put to flight by the resident monarch. And are these things ever fast. In only a couple of seconds they are off into the trees a couple of hundred yards away…ZOOM! You can almost hear the sonic boom in their wakes. So zealously does this little bird guard its domain that it often attacks the butterflies that come to savor the flowers.

There are a couple of kinds of birds that the monarch of the garden simply ignores probably since they present no competition for the food source. I haven’t been able to successfully figure out what they are. One has a vivid yellow breast and dark brown, almost black head, back and wings. Closest I can figure out is it’s some species of fly catcher. It’s about half the size of a robin. Towards the end of the first video you can see one fly in and land near the hummingbird. The other is a small, sparrow-sized bird that is only interested in the seeds of the weeds that grow around the garden.

My late Uncle Howard, my mom’s brother, was an avid bird watcher. In my walks around the area I have seen dozens of birds that you certainly don’t find back in the States and I know that Howard would have been thrilled to spend time here on the mountain.

For some unknown reason I tuned in to The Early Show on television this morning. I usually don’t watch shows like that or Today at all, though I do get up early to watch Sunday Morning. A story today that I found interesting was about a couple, Alex and Donna Voutsinas http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/17/earlyshow/living/main6591229.shtml. (I don’t know how long that link will be live.) A few days before their wedding they were astonished to find a 1980 family photo of little Donna at Walt Disney World — and incredibly little Alex in a stroller being pushed by his dad in the background. Cue Twilight Zone music.

In my own family there is a similar coincidence, I think. My mom’s maiden name is Eaton. There were Eatons on the Mayflower. As far as we know our line doesn’t descend directly from them but from one of the Eatons who came shortly afterwards and who settled in Watertown, outside of Boston. My dad’s family, the Philbricks, arrived in the colonies in the early 1630s and also settled in Watertown before resettling in New Hampshire. In the 1630s the population of Watertown, second in size only to Boston at  the time, had to have been small enough that the Philbricks and the Eatons must have known each other. I find it serendipitous that 3oo years later descendants of the two families should meet and marry.

Almost three days, well in another couple of hours, since there has been no internet at the house. I called twice and they say they know of the problem in Potrerillos and are working to fix it. I don´t believe Potrerillos is a huge profit center for them so I doubt they´re working real hard. I found this internet place in Dolega a  small town heading down the mountain to David. It costs seventy cents an hour for access and it’s really difficult using the Spanish keyboard. While the letters are in the right places the punctuation marks are all over the place. Forinstance, to get the @ you have to press control+alt+q.  That{s the easiest example I can come up with. Also, the left hand shift key is tiny and I’m constantly hitting< so, I’m going to wait until I get reconnected at the house.

Recently I’ve come across three different blog posts concerning bread. The most recent was Don Ray’s Chiriqui Chatter about the opening of a French Boulangerie that relocated to the city of David from Bouquete.

Joyce who lives not far from where I’m house sitting decries the lack of decent bread in Panama and describes baking her own in http://joycepa.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/the-staff-of-life/ I have to agree with her. I bought some hot dog buns last week and they were inedible not only to myself but the generally ravenous dog that came along with the house turned her nose up at the things, too. I hope they won’t destroy the compost heap.

The post that made a lasting impression came from American author T (Teresa) Stores who has a blog entitled Strangers in the Village where she chronicles her 10 months stay in a small village in the south of France. Bread from the boulangerie just outside Port Vauban in Antibes was a daily joy and I rarely eat bread since I left France. But the opening paragraph of Teresa’s post have echoed in my head since I first read them:

“When I was a child, I memorized the Lord’s Prayer, Christ’s response to his disciples when they asked him to teach them to pray. The only request for a tangible thing in the entire prayer is “give us this day our daily bread.” Not for tomorrow, just for today, because we must remember to let the future take care of itself. We must eat today. And it’s not a six-course dinner we need, or even a full meal or meat or vegetables. Just bread. Just for today…”

Just for today. Have any of us really thought of those words we learned by rote when we were children? I must confess I never did…Just for today.

The ongoing tragedy of the BP oil rig disaster and attempts to mollify it with dispersing agents remind me of two experiences I have had with these things.

The first time I dealt with this was while I working as a crew boat captain in the Kerr-McGee oil production field in Breton Sound, Louisiana which is where the BP slick is centered. We actually lived on Breton Island and serviced the hundreds of oil and natural gas wells covering several hundred square miles to the north and south of the island. Scattered throughout the field there were six “facilities.” These facilities were about 50’X50’ and stood , maybe, 40’ out of the water. Each one was the center for several hundred wells. At the top of each facility was equipment to separate water, sand and gas from the crude oil which was then sent to large “collection barges” where the crude was stored until tug boats would come out once a week to swap the filled barges for empty ones.

One day one of the large hoses that transferred the oil from the facilities to the barges broke and an unknown amount of crude oil was released into the water. The four crew boats servicing the field were immediately called into action. We were loaded with what looked like those pump up insect sprayer things you buy at Home Depot but much larger. They were filled with a dispersing agent not unlike liquid detergent.

We spent the next few hours running around through the slick that covered several square miles spraying the dispersing agent and using the boat’s wakes to mix it all together. Eventually the sheen wasn’t noticeable anymore and the spill never happened as far as the Coast Guard knew.

My second go-round was much more personal and is told only with the safety of time and the certainty that the statute of limitations has run out.

After bringing Jolie Aire, the 85’ ketch I’d been running on the French Riviera to the States we were docked at a well-respected boat yard, which will remain anonymous, on the Dania Cut Off Canal outside of Fort Lauderdale.

It was a Saturday evening just after dark and I was filling the water tanks with a hose from the dock. The only other person on board was the young Irish lad, Martin, who had helped make our crossing of the pond such a delight. I had planned on making chili with some excellent steaks left over from the cruise and Martin came on deck and offered to finish topping off the tanks so I could start dinner. I’d been in the galley for about 20 minutes when the strong odor of diesel fuel pervaded the boat followed by diesel fuel itself spilling out of the galley vents.

I burst out on to the deck to find the fuel tank overflow vents spewing diesel fuel into the winch island recess. The photo shows the recess full of snow from over on the Riviera but you get an idea of how big it is.

It was almost filled to the brim with over 30 gallons of instant disaster and more being added every second. What had happened was after filling the first water tank Martin, without using the flashlight I’d left with him, opened another deck fill and stuck the water hose in a fuel fill!

Luckily we were the only boat in the yard with anyone on board, so except for the guard at the gate there was no one around to smell the diesel in the air. I looked over the side and there was a slick that filled the yard’s turning basin and it was being sucked out towards the Intracoastal Waterway by the falling tide.

We got into the car and raced to the nearest Publix supermarket where I was able to buy a small pump sprayer and eight gallons of Tide laundry detergent. Back at the boat we rode around the area spraying Tide on the slick then putting the bow of the dinghy against the floating docks and revving the outboard as high as it would go to bring the water to a rolling boil to mix it with the detergent. We kept this up for several hours until all the Tide had been used up.

The next morning I got up early and there was still a light sheen over the entire area. We drove to another supermarket and bought an additional five or six gallons of laundry detergent and repeated the process until the detergent and ourselves were exhausted. Since it was Sunday there was no one around the yard to witness our nefarious activities. On Monday morning there was no evidence that anything had been amiss.

It was our good fortune, if there was any in this story, that the night of our spill was also the night of the annual Christmas boat parade in Fort Lauderdale so every Coast Guard, police and Sherriff’s boat was on duty at the event and none around to catch us.

Am I proud of what I did? Of course not, but I also could not have borne the burden of the multi-thousand dollar fine that would have resulted had I reported what had happened to the authorities.

Granted neither of those events come close to the catastrophe that is occurring daily in the Gulf of Mexico, but I do have first-hand knowledge of the use of dispersing agents on oil slicks.