Last weekend our group was officially COVID-free!! We celebrated by enjoying a few hours at a nearby beach together wishing Ray and Willa their final and most official felicitations on turning 7 and 9.

As a general rule we have become numb to the odd things you encounter here. For example, we have fruit bats all over our skies and nary a seagull in sight. At first that completely threw me. We live at the ocean. Those swirling black things should be swirling white things! Years ago they became so very normal that I simply don’t notice them anymore. Dolphins skimming the water as you drive down the road, cockatoos flapping and screeching throughout the neighborhood… all normal. The same could be said for resorts and cassowaries. The various local resorts tend to keep baby cassowaries around as a novelty for guests. They aren’t that mythical for us anymore as we’re quite used to seeing their smallish brown bodies running around begging for some food. This one, though, took us by surprise. It’s been at this location for a couple of years, but normally these birds “disappear” before they hit the true juvenile-adult stage. They are incredibly dangerous. And yet there it is, edging straight into its adulthood with the beautiful blue head starting to develop. I hate to see it caged up like this, but the value of life (especially of animals’ lives) is vastly different here. As an animal lover at heart, it’s a hard thing to emotionally navigate and something I’ll simply never get used to.