Happy weekend to me...

At the end of the driveway to our group of houses there's a laminated A4 piece of paper, attached by string to a traffic cone, which reads "caution: lazy cat". And sure enough, that mangy cat is always there, permanently lazing around in the middle of the road, ignoring any of the 4x4s or person who passes him by except for those who will give him some attention.

The sign might as well read "caution: lazy island". That's the feeling the place seems to exude this Saturday morning, and indeed each of the afternoons and evenings after we've finished work, when we've wandered down to the beach to put on a snorkel and check out the sea life, or borrowed ocean kayaks from the boy scout camp at emerald bay, or rocked up at the "pot luck" dinner with the island conservancy guys with a plate of stuffed eggs. People just seem to be relaxed and happy wherever we go.

Before you go getting too jealous though, I have to point out that this pace of my post-2.30pm weekday life contrasts dramatically with that of my 5.50am-2.30pm working day.

I don't like waking up in the dark. I guess you'd say that I am more of a "morning" person in general, but there's something wrong about an alarm clock that goes off before 6am. Getting up and ready in a house is a hell of a lot easer than in a campsite though, and the drip coffee machine in the kitchen makes the whole thing taste better too. The 6 of us are out into the jeeps and on the dirt tracks that qualify as "roads" on the island at 6.30am, from where we've watched a couple of spectacular sunrises over the cloud inversions.

Then, after some morning stretching, our fennel-killing tools (pulaskis, cut-o-matics and shovels) in hand, we get to work.

It's usually around 8am that I make my first complaint about the heat, which is at this stage higher than any temperature reached in York or Stockport throughout the whole summer. My jeans cling to my legs and sweat carries sunscreen down my forehead stinging my eyes, and it feels like all my energy is being washed away with it. The temperature then continues to rise throughout the day, probably reaching around 100 degrees at its peak. It's hot enough that even if I were in shorts and t-shirt and lying in the garden I'd probably still think about going inside for some shade and a cool-down, but this island climate doesn't seem to lend itself to growing big shady trees and so there I work, cocooned in heavy jeans, ACE t-shirt, gloves and, if I'm behaving myself, hard hat, in direct sunlight for the whole day.

And the work is physical. For those of you not familiar with fennel's growth tactics - and I would hope that's most people reading this - it likes to hide in cactus, establishing huge roots which often lie horizontally under rocks. Lots of the roadside patches we're "treating" (which sounds very 1984 to me) are on 45-degree-plus inclines and we have to do battle with the weed on this steep, rocky, spiky terrain.

All in all, it makes for a pretty hot, tired, stressed, Jen. I mean, I signed up for this: I knew it was going to be tough at times, and I suppose I do want to be challenged, but sometimes, when I stumble for the third time on a rock and come crashing to the ground bruising my hand yet again, that I find it really hard not to have a huge temper tantrum. Which is kind of silly, when I'm the oldest member of this crew by a couple of years and everyone else seems to be coping just fine. I comfort myself with the knowledge that to be fair, 2 of them are from Israel, and the others have been working in this heat for a while now.

Anyway, I've survived a week of it already, and I do love living here. We've been working well as a team- with the exception perhaps of last night's doomed attempt to walk out to watch the sunset, ending up with us lost in a sea of cactus (and at least one rattlesnake) on a mountain with nothing but moonlight to guide us. I'm loving island life, and looking forward to camping out somewhere tonight and then going to the island's only city, Avalon, tomorrow, where there's a blues festival going on, and then taking a boat trip into the ocean in the evening. I'm enjoying hearing debates and conversation that switches between English and Hebrew depending on whether or not I'm in the room. I love being able to drop a couple of emails to friends and family before I go to bed at night and knowing I'll probably have a reply when I wake up in the morning. I like having Turkish coffee and banana pancakes made for me, and I like bbqing beefburgers on the beach. I love those big orange garibaldi fish (why would you name a fish after a biscuit?) that swim right up to you when you're snorkelling. Yeah, I like Catalina.