I know. It’s been a while. Like five years. What can I say? We dropped the ball. In our defense, having a blog can get tedious. You have to take pictures of everything. And write stuff down. It’s a drag. However, it’s amazing to be able to look back at places you’ve been and things you’ve done. Plus it’s a good way to stay in touch with family and friends. And let’s be real, we’re not likely to start scrapbooking, are we? So we’re back.

Here, in no particular order, are the broadstrokes of our past five years:

These are some shots from the early days. This is basically what it looked like when we arrived back in St. John ready to move in. Air mattress was key.

• Fall 2018. We escape the Travato life and move back to our not-at-all-finished home in St. John. We go as far as the insurance money takes us and call it a day. We are very, very, very finished with living in the van. We didn’t have any photos of the house reconstruction as it went along and we weren’t able to go check on it so we just trusted the builder guy. This is not a recommended practice. At all. But it works out for us. Super lucky. It helps that our bar for livablity is very low.
• We spend the next two years living in various stages of construction and complacency until we have a fully finished rental cottage (Little Spice) and a good-enough-for-us and way-better-than-it-was main house (Sweet Spice). Things are ticking right along with the rentals, Jennifer travels back to Indianapolis every few weeks for work. We’re cruising.
• 2020. We get pandemic-ed like everyone else. St. John is not a terrible place to be. At all. We alternate being completely locked down and overrun with tourists. The big change is Jennifer goes to work at the hospital on St. Thomas (our neighbor island). Because she has to be available 24 hours a day during her work weeks and because the ferry doesn’t run 24hrs a day, we rent a place on St. Thomas to use when she’s working. After about a year of going back and forth, we decide we’re being ridiculous. We buckle down and finally get our house finished enough to rent to people on vacay and we settle into full-time life on St. Thomas.

This is what Sweet Spice looks like now. It is very nice now that we don’t live there anymore. It’s probably hosting some honeymooners right this second!

This is Little Spice. It’s come a long way.

• Fall 2023. So that’s where we are. We’re renting a pretty nice little place on St. Thomas. Our landlord is awesome. He has a very nice place and we live in a little one-bedroom guesthouse on the property. It’s very Magnum PI-esque. Jennifer works at the hospital. Cj manages the two rentals on St. John.
• But most importantly there are major changes in our family. Wembley passed away a couple of years ago. That guy was all hero, no zero. We are heartbroken. We swear that we are done with dogs. Frances is about five and still a terror. We decide that we are going to be a one-dog family for as long as she is around. Then we’ll become dogless and free-wheeling! We keep that up for about three months. Frances is sad. We are sad. We cave and get Agador Spartacus, World’s Greatest Basset Hound. He just turned two. No regrets

And here are the pups!

Somewhere along the way our siblings made more kids, bringing the total count to three nieces and a nephew. This shouldn’t really affect our lives but it does. We are now the type of people who have pictures of children on our phones. Who knew? Highly recommend aunt-hood.

Hope the past five years have been good to you guys, wherever you are. Feel free to drop us a comment (or give us a call, family and friends) to let us know what’s up with you. It’s probably been too long!