Willow's Weekly - Week 02 - Home Life

Well, the rebuilding projects hit a snag... There was apparently all kinds of corruption under the surface - nothing new for Niua Simoa, you might say. Except this was a different sort of corruption that made it impossible for everyone to come back until the island was 'purged'.

However, after a lot of cleaning activities and some false starts, the rebuilding has resumed. Of course everyone has their own priorities, and while Redmond Tagaloa and Big Joe Pataua finally managed to agree on something - namely, that their priority ought to be the rebuild of the PaSimFi prefabs (including their own houses) - her majesty Queen Elesabeti spent a lot of time and effort (other people's, not her own!) on making a perfect playground for her grandchildren here on Waka Island.

I don't mind having the playground next to our house, and it is sort of colourful and cute... But really, a playground? Why not the hospital? Or city hall? Or even the fire station?

The obvious answer of course, is that this is Queen Elesabeti's ham-handed way of apologising to her two younger children for casting them both out of the family... She finally realised that 'out of the line of succession' doesn't have to mean 'out of our lives'.
There's nothing like a bit of natural disaster to help you sort your personal priorities

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Other than the playground, Waka Island also has a new restaurant. An upscale expensive wear-your-formals sort of place, but it does have a stage for entertainment. I hope this will encourage some entertainers to move in.

Of course Waka Island was restored before they started anywhere else. I guess I shouldn't complain, since we live there, too, but it's a bit sad and it makes me feel a bit selfish.

Other than ourselves, the Stevensons and the Tapuwhai family, there are two other families in this part of town - the rest of the houses are empty.

The first of them is Doctor Daniel Tumeke. He lives alone, in one of the houses on Coconut Street. He's busy redoing it, though, because when he bought it, it was furnished - with a nursery and a lot of kids' stuff that he will not be needing (more's the pity).

And the Sevele family live here, too - that is to say, Honare, Anju and Vimal, who bought another one of the ridiculously expensive houses on Waka Island.
Honare and Anju own a lot of venues in town, but all of those will probably have to be rebuild or at the very least repaired.

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In the meantime, my mother and I are settling in very well. And so are the animals. I took a few pictures of them, and since I have nothing else to say this week, I thought I might as well share them here. 

We both took up a new hobby. Mother is trying her hand at sculpting:

And I discovered yoga.

Oh, and of course mother still goes to formal parties. All the time.

I guess it's part of the job if you're a 'dame'.

* * *

PhotoBucket seems to be working again - I re-uploaded the screenshots I still have, but I couldn't find all of them, so there are still some gaps. It still shows a lot of missing pictures, and there are about 30 that I can't replace because I deleted the originals (stupid, I know!)

I used Disk Drill to see if I could find the screenshots on my hard disk and re-uploaded them.
I still haven't heard back from Photobucket "support" about what happened to my original (much larger) uploaded screenshots.