November Fun

Now that the wedding is behind us it was time to recover and then get back to our other projects. We definitely are not planning on slowing down any time soon.

We don't have pictures for this but our church is beginning to work on their new property. This required moving of a lot of dirt. In the true Mexican fashion, the plan was to move it all by shovel. Walt spent a Saturday afternoon with the pastor and they soon realized the impossibility of this task so rented a front-end loader. Walt went and helped the day the tractor was there and even wangled an opportunity to drive the tractor and move a lot of the earth himself. Since his farm days, he has dreamed of driving a tractor again so another dream has come true.

The following week more "cubbies" were required for the boy's home as they now have 18 boys living there. So Walt went back, bought more lumber and built the cubbies. You can see the new ones here. The neat part of this was Walt is beginning to replenish his tool supply and bought a brand new circular saw. As more projects come in he may get all his tools back again. Although he has found a Mexican who is related to seemingly everyone here and can get Walt into a fully tooled woodwork shop.

Nancy has not been idle. We thought it would be nice to invite one of our Spanish teachers and his family with their five kids for Thanksgiving. However, the response was that they always like to do something for students from the US that happen to be here so they are not alone at Thanksgiving. So Nancy said fine only to find out that there were eleven students with their families. So the total came to 25 people for dinner. Needless to say, Nancy went all out and did spent several days preparing. Photos of this event can be seen here. Again we learned that when you tell God you are available for service - look out!!!

We "think" it will be a quiet Christmas for just the two of us this year, but who knows what God has in store for us. In a week we are going to Laredo to send packages and, of course, shop. Then in January we are headed for Thailand again, this time with Nancy's sister Joy. Our project there will be to show spend time with our family, including extended members, show Joy around and build an entertainment center for Adam and Cindy's new house. Sean, who went over with Adam and Cindy, has already set up a workshop for Walt.

This week the locals are working up towards Sunday when they celebrate their Ajijic's patron saint, St. Andrew. So each day and night are filled with church bells ringing and rockets going off all the time. Each group, like construction workers, gardeners and so on, have their day to compete for the most rockets. We heard the gardeners have 1,000 rockets. The most we have heard is that in the past the construction workers had 7,000. As we are writing this post, we can hear the rockets continually exploding in the air. ¡Viva México!