Month: May 2007

Random nothingness

It has been a while since I posted just a bunch of stuff that is floating aCurlersround in my head. Probably none of it is long enough to make a full post on its own.

We put our daughter’s hair in curls. She had a scowl on her face after she saw herself in the mirror. It took quite a bit of work to get her to smile for this picture.

My wife was complaining that her hammock was lumpy the other day. I am not sure how that happens, but I have fallen victim to that ailment sometimes too.

Local elections were held here in Mexico yesterday. Apparently the PRI party swept this area. We are in a very strongly PAN area. PAN was the incumbent party and is the party of President Calderón (elected last year). I was a bit surprised to hear that PRI made a come back. None of this stuff actually makes sense to me anyway. Both main parties have their advantages and disadvantages. As a missionary, PRI is a bit better for us.

Missionary Talks is well over 8000 total downloads now.

I have my first real arena football scrimmage game against another team tomorrow. I heard that the oldest player on the other team is younger than our youngest player. I fall in the middle to lower end of our age bracket at 37. They will probably be faster than us, but maybe we can make it up by actually having brains and using them.Swinging

A few weeks ago we took our deaf church to the zoo. This other picture is me swinging. With the exception of the other missionary family, I am the old guy in the church. We are made up of a group of teens and a couple slightly older people. So when we get together for stuff like this, the kid in me comes out. He is not too far below the surface anyway.

Last week my wife and I went out for Mother’s Day (on Monday) and hit the magazine rack. There are a couple of stores which sell US magazines–at a premium. My wife picked up a couple and I picked up a Runner’s World. I have really been enjoying it. Cover price in the US is $4.50 while I had to pay over $6 for it here. Not horrible, but I still can’t afford to do it all the time. I did find Runner’s World Mexico one time. It was around $4, but I have never seen it again.

How is that for an eclectic mix of randomness?

Missionary Talks 25: David Livingstone (part 1)

The epic episode is half way done. I just posted the David Livingstone episode at Missionary Talks. I am fairly pleased with the final product.

I had a Scottish friend record the parts that were quotes by Livingstone and Moffat. I met Gordon through a mailing list. Well, that is where we officially met. I had known of him for some time, but I made personal contact through the Phedippidations mailing list.

I plan to do more of these types of episodes in the future, but not too often. They mean that I have to actually read books and learn stuff. Can’t have that going on regularly. It might hurt my reputation.

Nice easy run

This morning I went out for my run. Normally on Saturday I do a long run (for me that means more than 6 miles). I am not entirely sure why I save it until Saturday. My work is mostly in the afternoon/evenings. I pretty much have total control of my mornings and can run for 2 hours just about any morning that I wish. But, I save it for Saturday none the less. There is considerably less traffic on Saturdays

Since I knew I would have a football scrimmage game today, I decided to make my run a short easy one. 5K at a slow pace should be around 10:20 for me. This one was 11:06. That was certainly slow.

Though it never really gets cold here, we still have a fairly dramatic Spring. This morning there were lots of trees in bloom. I have read several runners who state that their sense of smell is heightened while running. This is true for me as well. The trees smelled very nice.

Since it was 83 degrees on my run this morning, that also means that the dog “stuff” that was baking on the asphalt had a very strong smell.

One of the smells that I have come to enjoy while running is the smell put off by tortilla factories. We don’t have many on my current route. Only one. On the other side of town where we lived before, I could not do a run without running by 3 or more. They were plentiful over there. That is a nice smell. But, you can always feel the temp rise when running by one. The heat the machinery gives off is amazing. I can’t understand how people work in those places.

Livingstone episode at Missionary Talks

I am working on a very exciting episode of Missionary Talks. David LivingstoneI have not put out an episode for two weeks, but this one should make up for it. It is a short bio of the life of David Livingstone. If you are not familiar with him, you should check out his Wikipedia entry. In general, he was a very quirky personality and probably the kind of guy you could not stand being around too much, but he also did some amazing things. I am going to focus on the amazing things he did for the podcast.

At this point it looks like it will be close to 30 minutes or more in length. I will probably break it up into 2 episodes for the podcast and then have a single episode containing the whole thing that can be downloaded separately. This will keep the podcast within a close semblance of my normal episode length.

I have to get back to my regular arm twisting to get some other missionaries on board with doing some recordings. Starting next month I will begin to have contact with missionaries from different parts of Mexico. That should spice things up a bit. I still have 8 other missionaries here in town than I can interview, but I don’t want to saturate all my interviews with just this area. I am trying to spread the locals out a bit.

Basketball Goal

Basketball goalI had a basketball goal built this last week. I wanted to just go buy one, but the cheapest I could find was $300. A bit more than I wanted to pay. Ok, a lot more than I wanted to pay.

I ended up paying a welder $120 to build the basic goal and then I put together the backboard. Since I was unsure of what materials he would have availbable, I just allowed him to design and build it. He did a pretty good job, though I would have done a couple of things differently.

There was more to the cost than just the welding work. I had to buy wood for the backboard. Plywood is not at all cheap here. I did find a place cheaper than Home Depot and saved myself $10 in the process. Total cost for the project was less than $200. Maybe $180? I don’t have an exact figure, but I saved more than $100 by building it myself.

Now I just have to move some electrical wiring around so I can make better use of the space I have to play ball.