Mexico – Page 16 – My Thought Spot

Dean

Last Wednesday a new family in town called us and asked if we were all going to die. I think we somewhat calmed them down. Being from Kansas City they were not familiar with the fact that hurricanes are not totally predictable. They have never been through the maddening F5 complex of refreshing the web browser every 5 minutes to see if NOAA has updated their 5 day forecast cone, only to see the path change drastically for the better or worse.

Yesterday I called this family and asked them if they wanted to go bowling with our church group today. “Bowling! Are you crazy? We are all going to die on Tuesday!”

More calming.

The hurricane may hit us Tuesday, something that I don’t want to be nonchalant about. It is a pretty major storm coming in. Currently 150 MPH winds and expected to strengthen before it hits us. But I also know that there is nothing we can do to change its path. We need to prepare the house as much as we can, but also know that Tuesday is a long way away in terms of what the storm could do.

Right now we are planning to ride it out here. Dean has to travel 200 miles across the peninsula to get to us. If we leave we will be faced with the possibility of not being able to get back for several days to start the clean up. By staying here though, we may be faced with several days/weeks without power.

We will see what happens. Right now I have to get ready to go bowling.

Mayapan

Today our main activity at camp was to go to the old Mayan city of Mayapan. This was inhabited between the years 1200 and 1440 AD.

This was the first Mayan ruins that my wife and I had ever seen back in 2001. Today was amazing to see the difference. When we were here in 2001, they had just started doing a rebuild of the city. Though I don’t remember everything that was there back then, I do remember that there was much more growth on many of the structures. Also, there were many foundations for buildings with piles of rocks beside them.

Today it seemed like we did not walk in the jungle as much to see the place and there were many more structures. Where there were piles of rocks before, there were now buildings. In the piles of rocks previously, there were many rocks with numbers on them. That was to help when they finished repairing the inside of the structure, they would be able to place the outer rocks in the original place that they came from if they knew where they were before.

I think everyone had a great time at the ruins. Many of our church congregation has never been to this archaeological site. It is only about 45 minutes from town and is not overrun by tourists.

After the trip to the ruins, we went back to the campground and played there for the afternoon and had 2 great church services this evening. No rain today.

First day of camp…and the rains came

Today was our first full day of Deaf Camp in Yucatán. We had 14 people in our group.

We did the normal camp stuff of playing games and eating hot dogs. Since this is a day camp (we are not sleeping at the campground), we had to be up early to gather everyone and get started. We had a slow start this morning due to broken down buses and having to wake people up to come.

When we arrived at the camp there was some work going on in the auditorium. There were electricians installing some lighting (for which we were thankful this evening when it got dark). That delayed us even more. The morning schedule was all a mess, but we managed to have time to get our services in. Then we had lunch and got ready for soccer in the hot weather.

After soccer we set up the volleyball net and were having a grand time when the rains came. All, except 2 girls, enjoyed the rain. We played volleyball longer in the rain than out.

Other difficulties kept us from doing all our activities this afternoon, but all had a good time. We just shifted things around and I don’t think anyone missed much.

Tonight in church while we were singing the last song before the preaching, a bat flew in and would not leave. With the Deaf, it is important to eliminate all the visual distractions that you can. When they are looking at a bat flying around, they are not paying attention to the speaker. Eventually the bat got tired of us trying to evict him and he flew into a cubby hole in the church. I think that was his home. I watched the rest of the evening and he never came out again.

I almost killed a dog

Yesterday morning on my run I almost sent a little dog to the grave.

I was coming up to an intersection which had a dog sniffing through some trash. Apparently I run quiet enough that the dog could not hear me until I was right on it. When he saw me it scared him (no comments please). He took off running away from me, right under a VW Jetta. The Jetta tried to stop when the dog realized his plight and turned to run back towards me. Because of this, when the Jetta hit the dog with his tire, it just squeezed the dog out and to the side of the road. He jumped up and scurried off behind me. He looked to be fine.

While I am no great lover of dogs, I don’t want to see them killed or maimed in this way. Especially 3 feet away from me.

Of the dozens of dogs I see each run who are under no human care, this one was actually a nice looking Cocker Spaniel. Seemed to be well groomed and fed. It was by no means a pure bred dog, but it did appear to be someone’s pet.

New Electrical Boxes

Today a friend came over and helped me install two new main cutoff switches to my house. Or, maybe it was I who helped him. I at least knew where the tools were and did a fairly good job of keeping him supplied with the right tools at the right time.

I am not getting consistent power in my house. Particularly the upstairs. I have two boxes, one that controls downstairs and the other for upstairs. The old fuse boxes are old. The lever that you throw to cut off the power on one of them was mostly broken. The way you would have to cut the power was to reach in with a pair of pliers and pull the interrupter switch out manually. Not good.

We mounted the newer, smaller, boxes inside the old boxes. That gives them one more line of protection from the weather. And we did something novel. We actually grounded the new boxes. Now there is much less of a chance that you will kill yourself trying to cut the electricity to the house.

I have asked 3 different electricians on 4 occasions (one of them I asked twice) to come and replace these boxes. They never came back the next day to do the work. It only took 2 amateurs 3 hours to do the replacement, not including the almost 2 hours spent yesterday shopping for the items we needed. I am not sure why an electrician would not want to take on a job that should be easy money.

Now the next project is to run a ground wire to a couple of outlets so that I have some grounded ones for my computer equipment. That will be a nice change.

If there were only something we could do about the 190 Volts coming into the house. We should have 220 V. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It just fluctuates. The electric company won’t do anything to investigate the problem until you get a certified electrician to write a report saying that the problem is them and not the house wiring. All 3 of my electricians said they would write the report when they came back to replace the boxes.

Still waiting.