Honduran Independence Day

We are preparing for our 5 day Independence Day holiday and days off for Day of the Teacher...

Today Linnea marched in the pre-school parade.  She marched so proudly.

Jessie arrived yesterday.  She got artsy today and took a panoramic photo...

We are heading out into the city tonight to show her the town.  We have every intention of 

leaving tomorrow morning at 5a.m.  First destination... Sambo Creek.  Then off to Roatan

 for the remainder of the weekend.

Final Days

How does a person convey the experiences and happenings of the last days of summer vacation?  With words, it's a bit hard.  Of course you can imagine the tearful goodbyes.  There was laughter, reminiscence and hopeful talk of visits to Honduras.  But one of the really cool and surprising things took place in our final hours in Sebastopol.

We arrived in California 7 weeks ago with 4 suitcases.  We were trying to stuff our newly acquired treasures into 7 suitcases AND do a nice clean-up job at the last house that we were house-sitting at.  As the minutes and moments ticked away, we grew increasingly testy and frustrated by how the last 10% of stuff was taking 90% of our time to figure out what to do with it.  Then a cleaning sprite showed up at the house.  Not a Mary Poppins, not a professional, not a certified organizer.  Rather, a New Yorker in a brown Volvo with a can-do attitude who took charge and took a lot of stuff off of our hands.  She even brought her 2 kids to entertain ours while we hurried about.  Kim arrived and started sweeping,  recycling and generally keeping us focused so that we'd get out of the house by our 6 pm deadline. 

We made it out by 6 and then I think Kim's true motivation started shining through as she gleefully announced that we were going with her to Aubergine for a celebratory shot of tequila and beer.

So, after the whirlwind packing session, we got to slow way down and kick it at Aubergine, then make our way into San Francicso for a great dinner with Bruce, then off to the airport for our 1:30 am flight.  The flight went off without a hitch and we arrived in Tegucigalpa this morning just after 9am.  As we approached the city and the airplane made its signature hard bank to position itself towards the runway, we looked out the window and could see our house, the school, El Picacho, people!!  What a great bienvenidos to the city.

Here's a little of what we did during our last weeks on California...

At our camp in Lassen Nat'l Park

A boy and fire

A beautiful afternoon rain shower near Drakesbad Lodge.

A hike to a lake near Plumas Eureka State Park.

Drawing time during an afternoon rain shower.

July 29th came a little early as we celebrated

Linnea's 5th birthday with her friends at a park.

Some of the sweet friends who could come!

packing up

We're making preparations to come home.  Got the packing started this morning.

Gato Prohibido!

Well today was a whirlwind of activity and excitement. We woke up and went to the school and saw J's classroom and E's office, both of them need some sprucing up but we think it will be fun to start working on making the spaces ours. Both kids spent some time in the daycare and were a bit slow to warm up but having three great daycare staff all to themselves ended up making all the difference and by the time we came to get them they wanted to stay! We found an apartment that looks good (more on that tomorrow) had some orientation meetings and then went to the mall food court for lunch. The mall is more like an amusement park here than a mall!

When we were returning our group got a call from the hotel... turns out one of our fellow teaching couples was hiding their cat in the hotel room... the cat was discovered and kicked out! Gato Prohibido! In the end they were allowed to stay in one of the adjacent apartment like dwellings but for a couple of hours we all thought that they were going to be kicked out of the Honduras Maya all together.

After that we all spent some time relaxing at the pool and having a few Salva Vidas (Decent Honduran Beers) and then we went to one of the High School Principals houses for Pizza. The Pizza "Place" was classic! It looked like a family converted the area in front of their house into a pizza cooking area and now they make great pizza. It was enjoyed by all!!

Oh Yeah I almost forgot we are in the paper!!! Link to the article in the Sonoma West Times.

Preparation Update

We are quickly ramping up our preparation for our departure to Tegus. Our plan is to take the summer off and travel and visit family during June and July before we leave the country at the end of July. We have to be out of our house by June first and we are spending most of our time doing the odd house repairs and maintenance that we have been neglecting to do. It is sort of funny that we are motivated to do all this work to our house and we are not even going to be living there.

Garage sales are such an amazing event. We had our first one a couple of weeks ago and it was crazy! It seems like the entire community comes out to these events. We figured that our sale was especially good because we are not just selling the stuff we do not want anymore but we are selling cool stuff that still like.

Having a garage sale has reminded us how cluttered our lives had become. For some reason we tend to accumulate stuff in our society, stuff that we don't actually need. Children tend to exaggerate the stuff accumulation. All that stuff creates a clutter problem and the clutter tends to take over. It is nice to get a leg up on all that clutter. I am imagining that our lives in Honduras will be simpler on many levels and hopefully less cluttered!

Next job: Paint the picket fence!