• Film footage of Trinidad from the 1930s & 40s
  (tags: trinidad+tobago film archive history)

I’m in the mood to post something on this blog, but not in the mood to write, which is a shame, as there are so many things I would have posted had the situation been different. I might have written about the crime watch service I’ve set up for my neighbourhood, for instance (thank you, Ken Banks, for helping me out with that one); about Salvador, Delphine’s adopted brother who left the shelter on November 28 last year to begin his new life in Blue Range; or about the renovation exercises that began my home at the beginning of this year. But no—all I seem to be able to do these days is take pictures.

But if it’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that the path of least resistance is usually where it’s at. I’ve never seen myself as the diarist sort of blogger, but as my main preoccupations these days are very close to home, here goes: below is the latest of the renovation photos from the “Don’t try this at home” photoset, accompanied by a fairly substantial caption.

Mixing cement, along with pumping gas at the gas station and filling a brown-paper bag with loose flour or sugar and neatly folding the top, was one of the activities that fascinated me as a child.

I can now vouch for the overrratedness of gas-pumping, and wrapping thousands of presents over the years has erased a good part of the wonder involved in folding paper of any kind (maybe I should take up origami?). But I'm yet to mix cement, though it's an activity that takes place almost every day around my house these days.

I was lucky to have checked on the goings-on in the back yard just as Ronald had finished carting several wheelbarrowloads of gravel there in preparation for a marathon round of cement-mixing, and found these neat peaks resembling a mountain range in a child's drawing.