Rhinoceros beetle

Big beetle - a rhino?

I thought this might be a rhinoceros beetle based on its size. It would have to be a female since it doesn't have the distinctive rhino horns, but there are so many varieties and most of the photos are male so I gave up trying to determine which type it might be. It could be one called a coconut rhinoceros beetle.  Once again, I insisted on sparing the life of our wildlife and maybe shouldn't have. Coconut rhinoceros beetles can kill the coconut palms! Great.

Check out the size of the horns on these rhinoceros beetles!

I ran across this ad while researching this beetle. For $5.60 you can buy a bag of 2 or 3 cooked rhinoceros beetles, lightly seasoned with soy sauce, lemon grass, and garlic. Yumm. Before you rush out to order a bag, one of the reviewers says that they are super crunchy but have not much flavor.

What happened here?

Moving?

What happened here?

What's this?

Heavy spring cleaning?

Floor polishing?

Did you have a flood?

Painting?

Are you moving?

Read on and weep...

One morning I was sitting at my desk, listlessly flipping through the newspaper as I drank my coffee, waiting for that magic caffeine jolt, when El Jefe said, "So, I was thinking, why don't you go visit Steve and Laura in San Pedro?"

My fingers stopped in mid-air. I paused, lifted my head to look at him, narrowing my eyes suspiciously: "What happened?" I knew there was a reason for this and it couldn't be good.

"I was just thinking that you haven't seen them in a long time," he said with a smile.

"What HAPPENED?"

He paused for a second, and then obviously realizing that he couldn't keep me from finding out, even if I immediately went upstairs to pack, which I wasn't going to do. "The floor in the hallway lifted up. We're going to have to take out all the tile and bust the concrete beneath it."

"The hallway?"
"Yep, and the breakfast area, too."
"I knew the breakfast area was loose, but the hallway?! It was fine yesterday!"

He tries to protect me from these sorts of things. Oh, well. We have now removed and replaced close to half of the ceramic in the house and I'm resigned to sooner or later having to remove, bust out the floors, replace the tile in the entire house.

Thankfully, El Jefe has the system down pat now. He's figured out how to maintain the dust level to the absolute minimum which I really appreciate. The areas to be worked on are wet down each night so we get mud instead of dust. The reason that the concrete floors have to be busted out is explained in another article. It's just too painful to talk about again. These photos should suffice.

The boxes were to stop the rubble
from flying everywhere

We filled 3 or 4 of those boxes with concrete rubble

Even after replacing the laundry room with a new, different tile to preserve the precious few tiles for those that get broken during the removal process, our supply of 'extras' is dangerously low again. The tile we used is no longer available. If the tiles continue to lift up, someday soon we'll be faced with either using an unmatched tile (oh, the horror of that thought!) or busting out a whole room somewhere and replacing it with a different tile to use the old ones as replacements in other rooms (another pretty horrifying thought).

I've written about this before, so if you want to share my pain, check out these articles. Don't miss the video so you can share what I listen to eight hours a days for days on end while the concrete floor is being busted out and the reason why J suggested a 'vacation' for me.

The day my floor exploded

Exploding floor, part 2

I discovered that I didn't write about our other floor eruptions. There was the 2012 episode, when most of the loooong front hallway popped up. Here is a photo from that time.

The year before was when the laundry room floor, parts of the hallway, and the guest bath lifted, I was too sad to write about it or take photos that time, but every year gets a little easier.

Right in the middle of the house
where we had to walk through it 10 times a day

Bust too deep and you have to pour
new concrete and wait for it to dry

Collateral damage

Some tiles just wouldn't come out...
probably next year!

The job is done for now so I can write about it without sniffling. It only took about three weeks. Walls have been dusted and everything is moved back to its proper place. This time, the worker got the concrete busting done pretty fast, but he broke four tiles, chipped several others, and the tile installer broke another one. We don't sweep our floors here - we shovel them!

We don't sweep; we shovel

Simple shopping

 My (not so new anymore) new chair – comfy!

This is another one of those old articles that never got posted. I think this one is a couple of years old.


A few months ago, we made our annual pilgrimage to the big city, San Pedro Sula, thus single handedly improving the economy of Honduras with all of our purchases. ;-)

We always plan to go more often but don't seem to make it for some reason — mostly because a day trip is a real ordeal (about 3 hours each way on a life-threatening highway) and finding someone reliable to stay overnight and take care of the house and animals isn't easy. [The last time we went to SPS, we just missed a tornado, I think. There were fallen trees all over the highway.]

San Pedro Sula, the second largest city and industrial capital of Honduras, gets a bad rap in my opinion. We love it and would go much more often if it wasn't such a long trip. The traffic is kind of bad, but the city is laid out in such a orderly manner that we hardly ever get lost, unlike Tegucigalpa, where we have spent more time lost than not.

I love Diunsa, which is sort of like a Target without the clothes. They even deliver free to La Ceiba. We also stock up at Pricesmart when we can make it there. One incredible bargain was 2 pounds of Cheddar cheese for about L.200 (about US $10.50), compared to the latest we bought in La Ceiba which was 1 pound for about L.250 (about US $13)! I think that price was a mistake, but that's what they charged us.

In the way of grocery stores, I really love Los Andes. I found almost everything on my list plus a lot more that wasn't on my list, even a few things that PriceSmart didn't have. Los Andes has an incredible variety, even by US grocery store standards. They have cuts of meat that I actually recognize. The only thing we didn't find was hand wipes. They had baby wipes and butt wipes, granite wipes, kitchen wipes, bathroom wipes, bleach wipes, glass wipes, yadda yadda yadda, but no plain hand wipes. Maybe next time. [I haven't even been back to see Los Andes new gigantic super store yet!]

Of course, one disadvantage to all this variety is the decisions, decisions, decisions. For example, in La Ceiba, on rare occasions in recent years, I've found sun-dried tomatoes in a jar. Oh boy! I'll buy those. I might even buy two if the expiration date is far enough off. Los Andes had whole, julienned, and diced. They had tomatoes with basil and without. They had different brands and different sizes. Oh, no! Which is the better? Should I get the big one or the medium one? Sliced or whole? With or without? They must have had 30 different types of rice! Up until a few years ago in La Ceiba, you would have never known that more than one type of rice even existed. The first time I brought home wild rice, Arexy thought something had gone terribly, terribly wrong with the rice.

(There is more risotto in our future. Anyone have a favorite recipe to share? Oh, and remind me to tell Arexy not to fry up the precious arborio rice to go with the beans!)

The funny thing is that rather than feeling at home with the bigger and better variety, I felt a little overwhelmed. I realized that grocery shopping is much simpler in La Ceiba, except for sometimes having to go to 2 or 3 or 4 stores and completing a shopping list in one trip is a virtual impossibility because the stores are always out of something, sometimes even the things that are produced in Honduras, like sugar or our brand of coffee.

Still, there are areas of Honduras where the shopping is even simpler. A fellow blogger once noted that in Gracias, Lempira, if the grocery store has ground meat, for example, the only question is "buy it?" or "don't buy it?". No decisions about regular, low fat, chuck, or supreme there. They have what they have and you buy it or you don't.

It was a fun and successful trip. Do you want to hear what we bought? No, that would probably be boring. I will say that my renewed enthusiasm for cooking has caused El Jefe to say that we need to go back more often.