Went to BG yesterday for Mo Wang's send off party. Farewell Mo, you will always be remembered as a man who liked to eat meat. Actually, Mo was probably the hardest worker I have ever known too...as well as being really funny and easy to get along with. He is off to Portland now. While in BG I also saw set up a computer for a friend at work, got a computer chair at Staples, got a ton of good Belleville meat and saw Gerry. It was a good day.

Today has been good too. I slept something stupid like 10 hours, fixed a few things around the apartment, and just got back from jogging in the hot sun. I stink like no one's business. Besides that, Anne and I are continuing to look at houses and we hope we can get something we can be happy with pretty soon.

Link-o-rama

Actually, it was pudding inside--something completely unrelated to the printing on the side of the box. Yes, I just wasted your time. I looked the company up and they sell cutsey kitschy stuff from around the world.

Work is getting better. The programmer guy who is going to take away my problematic boring projects is doing well. This is good, because the project team that I am doing the work for have been demanding a lot data lately and I cannot keep any of their deadlines in my head (they are nice people about it, at least).

Anyway, Anne is right on the cusp of "showing" (16 weeks). At 18 weeks, the pregnancy is supposed to be noticeable (with effort) and at 20 it is supposed to be obvious. All I know is that it sure can be felt! There is definitely something in there that is pushing outward. We have the super-revealing ultrasound on August 15th (yes, we will find out its boy/girl status so we can begin getting gender-specific garbage (assuming the fetus is positioned so we can see that important area))!

This box was seen in the basement of a soup kitchen in Niagara Falls, NY. The kids were really confused by the Engrish-sounding box printing. What is in it? Stay tuned!

In other news, something REALLY happy! My division at work finally (actually, the timing was right in line with what my boss said months ago) hired the programmer that we need to automate our (well, ok, MY) meaningless and menial copy-and-paste tasks! This is excellent news because it will free me up (eventually) to be able to do more substantial work. Actually, I have been doing some fun work there as of the past week, but that was a lucky coincidence of all of the dull stuff not being due or able to be worked on. Anyway, this is happy news!

Anne was in Niagara Falls this past week with some junior high youth for a mission trip. This is one of her students running alongside a little girl who was learning to ride her bike. They can't afford to have training wheels, so you learn to ride a bike when you are big enough to balance on one. This little girl was left at a lady's house when she was a couple of months old because her mother didn't want her. She is the first child this particular woman has taken into her house, and more have followed. She has 3 kids who live with her all the time, and about 80 who visit her house during the week. They try to get away from the not-so-great influences in their homes (parents and older siblings who are gang members, crack addicts, prostitutes, and other things), and this woman's house is their safe place. This picture was taken on Niagara's worst street, Ninth Street. You can't go out after 3:30 in the afternoon without encountering the dealers at the end of the street. The gangs come out a little bit later. The Bloods' symbol was spray painted every ten feet on the sidewalk on the next street. It's a crazy thing, urban ministry. They saw lots of amazing things throughout the week...

Anne is back, everyone is happy, and the baby is now four inches long!

Ever appreciate street signs? This was one of the BETTER ones in Juarez. They just paint them on the buildings (see it? next to the "P"). All of my Mexico pictures are available at: zoarlutheran.com/gallery

Well, Anne is still gone. She gets back on Friday afternoon. I have been adapting to her absence pretty well--working on the dissertation. It is nice to have many hours of solid work in a day. It is also bad to see that I still am not sleeping as much as my brain wants to. I guess that is all my fault, though.
While she was gone I bought some Peruvian and Sumatran decaf green coffee as well as some caffeinated Paupa New Guinea and Mexican from deansbeans.com (ethical company, it seems--decent and inexpensive beans too). I cannot wait to make some of that new stuff. Too bad I still have around 15 lbs of mediocre coffee I brought back from Honduras.
I also finally got an MX1000 mouse (on a decent sale, finally). I have a horizontal scroller at work (the kind of mouse where you tilt the mouse wheel to the left and right to manipulate the horizontal scroll bar), and I use it a lot more than I ever thought I would. Hey, when you sit in front of a computer for 12 hours a day, you want to be sure that the interface is as good as possible.

Oh well, Indian food today with Sal and Mo. I am looking forward to that, even though it is sort of a send-off for Mo (he is leaving for his professorship job in Portland next week). Man, I will miss Mo--BG is losing a lot of character and charm with him leaving.

I hope this came through with decent resolution. I played a little with Google Earth and NASA World Wind and I am amazed. They are free, too. They both involve a globe that you manipulate using an interface that is decently easy to use (mainly the mouse). From there, you zoom in and out. You can load different maps which have different resolutions and colors. This picture is of the court I grew up on in Perrysburg in World Wind's highest-resolution B&W map. World Wind even had the small villages Anne and I remember from Bali and Honduras, though I have not found the village I stayed at in Ghana (yet).
If you are geeky or if you like geography AT ALL, you should immediately get these programs. Be prepared for some waiting when the maps are loading, but they are worth waiting for.

In other news, work was pretty cool this past Friday. We had a half day off to have a summer-oriented picnic outside (catered barbeque...and it was good stuff). Unfortunately, it stormed like crazy until 1:30 or so. After eating, the rain let up and we played some soccer. We all sweat completely through our clothes (it was a bit humid) and then I went home early and slept a lot. I am still recovering from not sleeping in Mexico, I think. Last week was not as restful as I had hoped it would be.

Brady is in town this weekend. I saw him briefly yesterday and we played a few minutes of a new fish-themed Brady-invented card game. Possible hang-out tonight...?

Mexico: one of the youth playing with a Mexican kid. We had a "club de ninos" for half of the group. It was a good time. The kids ran the full length from very sweet and nice to acting downright horrible. Some of them had horrible lives--some had good families. I guess money cannot buy you good kids (no one had much money)--but a wonderful mother and loving dad can.

At work today we have a half-day. The rest is a picnic thing where there will be games and stuff. It is hard to believe that we have a neat day at the company's expense, but we finally have a break from the cubes. It is like recess, but you only get it once a year and it lasts 4 hours.

Drats! I was robbed!

We did have a good time grilling, catching up, and playing though.

Juarez, Chihuahua (Mexico)

Juarez. This is a picture of the church property where we stayed--as taken from a neighbor's roof (that we were re-building). We got back from Juarez really late yesterday morning but we are now settled back into Ohio. This was a full-week trip--Saturday morning to Saturday morning. We went with the workcamp group "Youthworks," which we had gone with last year. It was another decent trip. Juarez was a lot poorer and the church was a lot more "rustic" than I had expected. Of course, it was not TOO bad because it was appropriate for upper-middle class teenagers to attend, but it was rough enough to make them really uncomfortable. The work consisted of 2 days of kids' club and two days of hard physical labor (roofing, digging up a foundation, and stuccoing). It was about 105-110 F while we were there. I have never consumed more water in such a short time--while we were pickaxeing, shoveling, and wheelbarrowing dirt for a foundation, our group of 6 people went through around 10 gallons of water (in about 6-ish hours).

It was a good trip. The youth gained a more global perspective, and I am convinced that it will make a difference in their lives. They have now seen what poverty is--and many of them are ready to take the next step and go to see more of the hard life that most Americans don't want to see.

For me, it was pretty good. It was definitely a workout--physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially, and linguistically. Having to be sleep-deprived around sleep-deprived teenagers under those physical conditions was definitely a hard break from ditting at a desk at work. My Spanish really took off too.

Neat stuff:
Propane: it is sold by loud trucks at all times of day...they announce their presence by playing music (like an American ice cream truck).
Insects: there were a number of insects there that are not in Ohio. I was inches from a black widow for about a half hour (and didn't know what it was until later), one girl got a small (yet painful) scorpion sting, and cockroaches are simply EVERYWHERE.
Weather: It was about as hot as I have ever been in. Ghana was much more humid and never let up--at least Juarez DID let up.
Government: I was not aware of how the Mexican government stifled people--they own all utilities, and they charge the people a ton for them. Though the government is not horrible, it does employ a number of tactics to keep the average Jose down.
Factories: American factories that pay about $40 a week have completely changed the social landscape. People flood into Juarez for these menial, long-hour jobs and this transformation of moving from a different city (into an already-crowded one) and then being away from their families for 12 hours a day creates a lot of social problems.
Mothers: Mexican mothers and grandmothers are awesome. The women take up the familial hole that the factory jobs created. These women work really hard. Those who we were helping out were right along side us, tirelessly doing really hard work.
Bad and good: Juarez has lots of problems with violence, drugs, gangs, and horrible poverty. Just as in the US, these problems are taken really seriously by one of the only positive forces around there: the church. The church is one of the only viable ways for people to break these awful cycles, though there is a lot of work to do. It was awesome to see the work ethic of the pastor and the active members. They are REALLY making a huge impact on the community.

More later (I got about 650 pictures).