Dean II

Dean is now projected to come in quite a bit further south from us. I still hold to the fact that I think it will turn north. Which now means, that if it does, instead of turning north and brushing, or missing us, it would come right at us.

I am not sure what the projected time of arrival is. But we are starting to get elevated winds. Nothing to write home about and not any higher than normal storm winds. We are probably 5 hours away from getting rain from the storm.

The Mrs. and I had a brain storm of an idea today. I won’t tell you about it until the storm is over, just in case it wasn’t as brilliant as we thought. I will take pictures to show you after the adventure is over.

There is a good possibility that we will lose power for some time. If so I get to fire up my ham radio and get to relay information back to the US about the health and welfare of all my friends. That will be fun. I have a nice antenna that I have never taken the time to set up that I will pull out to work with. I pulled my other antenna down yesterday afternoon so that I don’t lose it in the storm.

I will probably get a few more posts up before the storm moves in and knocks me out of commission. If I do lose electricity for any extended period of time, maybe I will be able to get caught up on my reading.

Mine!

We are at the “THAT’S MINE!” stage with our daughter (3 years old). Our son (9 years old) has done pretty well with it and is usually pretty patient with her. Usually.

You know it is getting bad when you hear this.

Scene: Daughter walks downstairs and sees ants crawling on the counter.

Daughter: “Ants! That’s MY ants.”

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.Hurricane Dean Advisory 21

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.Mayapan

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.Volleyball in the rain

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.