... you say papaya ...

... but hey, let's talk pawpaw for a minute ... call it papaya if ya wanna, but I'll go with how I was raised to sow it, grow it and know it ... pawpaw trees grow easily, given fertile conditions, and they can present a positive practicum, educating people on raising a fruit-bearing plant, a metaphor for life's cycle itself ...

... this one was grown by someone else and came to me ready for consumption ... a couple of judicious morning incisions and I had cut open the most promising pawpaw of the year so faw ...

... I mean, far ...

... the fragrance hit me in the nose, which doesn't always happen ... pawpaws vary from plant to plant, ranging from watery and delicate to spicy and pungent, with a wide spread of sweet and delightful in-between ... hmm ...

 ... some of these succulent, fleshy, smooth-skinned delicacies come flush with seeds, which resemble tadpole-sized spermatozoa or uterine ovum depending on your ... ahh ... perspective ...

... jus' sayin' ...

... those womb-like visuals bring the words ovarian and fallopian to fore, making it fitting that the first wedge be cubed to nurture in a schooler's snackbox ... but further parsing, to provide breakfast for three adult couples, is a figurative reflection of fecundity and an underappreciated manifestation of papaya aphrodisia ...

... remind me to canvas for feedback ...

... so, what's with the cruiseships? ...

... following the tragic and titanic fail of the Costa Concordia on the rocky Italian coastline, we won't look at these behemoths quite the same way for a long time to come ... but at rivieras and coastal hotspots worldwide, they're still crucial to livelihoods as emblems of maritime leisure - swank high-seas accessories ...

... and, loathe as I am to flash yet another vista dominated by a shiny-floaty city, I could scarcely resist today when lookalike sistership, Costa Luminosa, took a reach-out-and-touch route, more hither than yon, gliding into and out of my view ...

... I'm fairly certain this skipper had both hands on the wheel, a "sonar-my" of computers, dolphin spotters for co-pilots and his most reassuring "this is your captain speaking" vocal delivery for all the starboard peepers with one eye on the Antiguan rocks ...

... ackeelover, going forward in the now ...

... well, it's been a helluva year so far ... a couple weeks in and I've gone from snow and sub-freezing to sandcastles and sunshine ... from prolific blogging and twitter-tude to internet void (since rectified), and from Netflix-on-demand to no-TV-at-all ... but a couple of things have remained the same, the spinach-to-Popeye power in a meal of ackee and saltfish and the comfort of nature's beauty to the watchful eyes of this beholder ...

... the former is compromised by canned ingredients up north but redeemed by the fresh stuff down south ... and the latter? ... well, winter in Algonquin serves up its dashboard version of beauty (see Dec-16, 2011 post) and high-season in The Caribbean displays seaside charm through metal grillwork ... Ackeelover Chronicles continues to toggle between these two realities ...














... being back by the beach, observing neighbors and seafaring traffic through a long lens, reminds me of  "Someone's Looking At You," by The Boomtown Rats and Rockwell's whiny smash hit, "Somebody's Watching Me," - both songs provoke less of a voyeuristic creepy-cringe than an acknowledgement of shrinking personal space on this crowded planet ... or an allusion to Big Brother (Orwell, not the reality show) ...

... but more than that, comes the peace-of-mind required for scatological thought to flourish in my head ... this is when I think, write, photograph ... and express the thoughtstream which comprises these Chronicles ...

... thus far in 2012 the tendency has been to look to the future - better, I suppose, than looking at the past, but still decidedly short of Buddhist-type meditative ideals which stress practicing observation of the present, this moment of  "now" ... still, the past is a factor of "now," and "now" is a function of what the future will be, innit? ...

... exposing readers to my roving ramble is increasingly a compulsion, so this year you'll see more spontaneous "ting an' ting" on this site ... often with cool Canon pics from my "now" ...

... rest assured there'll always be music in these pages ... but with this being the Chinese Year of The Dragon, coupled with me being born in a Year of The Rooster (a.k.a. The Cock, where I come from), there's an impulsive temptation to get more "extra" - (delivered, of course, with Jamaican inflection to squeeze hyper-meaning out of the word) ...

... if all goes to plan, more "sexxyyy" too ... Happy New Year! ...

 JAMAICAN GLOSSARY 
"ting an' ting" - things, all kinds of everything

"extra" - over the top, "out there"