Markus' Big Day

Markus turned another year older last weekend. He had a weeklong birthday. Here is the Emperor and his new clothes, throne, septer, and mead and underwater breathing devices. What more can a Royal ask for? His first present?








A broom! I had been holding out on getting a normal broom despite his pleas as I’d purchased my authentic Samoan broom (pictured here-isn't it pretty?) and by gosh we were gona use it. Apparently, this authentic Samoan experience was lost on Markus in particular as he was trying to sweep up salt and shards of glass off the kitchen floor when, once again, I’d not screwed the top back on the salt shaker because the salt gets all clumpy here and in the humidity expands into “super salt” no matter how many crackers, rice, etc. is added.








Ok. So I didn't just get him a broom . . . Markus also got a nice leather office chair as he spends most of his days at home in front of the computer “working”, i.e. planning his next dive, playing with the Geeko GPS from Andrew, taking Einstein to the beach . . . I figured his body heat would keep the mold on the leather at a tolerable level.












I had a formal male lava-lava made for Markus, which he was ecstatic about. This from the guy that was telling me he’d wear a man-skirt over his dead body only a month ago. He especially enjoyed having something tailor-made especially for him. There’s nothing like having all the attention of someone about to make clothes that will only ever fit you perfectly. Most people here have their clothes tailor-made.










In a present in which I will benefit greatly, Mr. Beer made his debut at our house. I’d tried my best to encourage Markus to bring his beer making supplies to Samoa. For some reason he wasn’t obliging. I couldn’t understand this because he was considerably less optimistic than myself about the beer situation here, even when I read about Samoan’s own beer, Valima. “Listen! The guidebook says it’s good.” To which he had responded with a disbelieving wag of the head.









And, unfortunately, he was right. His reasons for not bringing brewing supplies has to do with little issues of supply of hops and brewing temperatures and blah, blah, blah, excuses, excuses.














After a month of limping along with an occasional $3 canned Guinness, Markus was as happy to welcome Mr.Beer into the house as I. This beer kit has my hopes very high, despite the plastic bottles, the prepackaged mix and the plethora of Mr. Beer stickers supplied in the kit.













Markus promptly applied the Mr.Beer stickers to his NEW TANKS. Markus was nearly rapturous when he found an industrial diver (welding, etc.) that was selling his recently certified used-tanks. This meant he didn’t have to pay $600 in shipping for $100 tanks from the mainland and he could start diving right away without having to be a tank burden to his diving buddies (yes, he’s here one month and he has dive buddies). The tanks need to be uniformly marked for reconcilability when they are taken in for refills so Markus used Mr. Beer stickers to demark his tanks. I think he’s hoping that they will come back filled with beer.
I also arranged with his buddies a dive on his birthday.





Afterwards we went to Larson’s beach with what ended up being like 30 palagis (not there for his birthday but in some out of hand word-of-mouth meet up had all decided to go to the same place). You can see more pics at the Coletti's blog from which I borrowed this picture-thanks guys. I nearly killed myself snorkeling outside of the reef with three other snorkelers. The people back at the beach were fearing we would never return. We had to go through this insane alley in the reef and the wave break was, shall we say, impressive that day. We all had a good swim once outside, the others saw jellyfish and a school of squid. I unfortunately, saw my imminent demise and was happy when we headed back. And then, once I saw the sets coming in one after the other which I would have to time to SWIM, SWIM, SWIM between into the narrow channel which you couldn’t see until you were in it, and which was bordered by coral reef with maybe two inches of water on top (when there was a wave). I decided maybe becoming a mermaid could be a logical change of profession.

I did eventually make it back, blood trickling down my coral chewed legs. Those back at the beach seemed genuinely glad to see we were alive, I think they were not looking forward to going out there and hauling our lifeless bodies back to shore.

Afterwards, we had a fine dining experience at Checkers, well more accurately, in the Forester after ordering from the take out window. Ok, you might poo-poo the culinary attributes of a place that’s entire fast food them is based around NASCAR. But I’ll have you know that burger’s with fresh lettuce, tomatoes (for Markus) and red onions are a rare treat on this produce deprived lava rock.

For dessert, Markus was treated to a chocolate cake I’d made from coco-Samoa. In my pre-travel reading I’d learned that Samoa is known for it’s great cocoa. After I read this I immediately booked my flight. Unfortunately, processing of the cocoa bean seems to be a challenge in Samoa. The product is a semi ground up lump of cocoa beans poured into a Saran Wrap lined Styrofoam cup. If you use this for cooking or drinking you should like your cocoa crunchy, like eating coffee beans. Mmmm. I determined that this cocoa would be amazing if I could get it into powder form. And I was correct.







At the sacrifice of my coffee grinder that had it’s blade come off during the last grind (which healed nicely after some Gorilla Glue-all hail Gorilla Glue!), I was able to grind to powder this cocoa and made what was perhaps the best chocolate cake I’ve had, if I do say so myself. There wasn’t enough powder cocoa left for the frosting so I attempted with the semiground stuff. Mmmm crunchy frosting. We went without frosting. Markus blew out his tiki-torch candles, which had no representational value in the number of years he’s been around.

It was a good day.

I’m glad he was born.