Weekly Update

A no picture week!  And only because I forgot to take pictures!

The week was full of work for me, including a meeting with a social worker with and on behalf of a child.  My laptop is now totally geared up, so I have been creating some record keeping tools for myself.  And most interesting was a meeting with the Department of Human Services and representatives from most of the child care centres in the country.  (BTW, I love how my computer at work corrects my spelling to the British/Belize standard!  Behavior=behaviour!)  The meeting was really engaging with a lot of discussion.  One agency, Laugh out Loud (isn't that the greatest name!), which is located in the jungle of south Belize, is fairly new.  As they are trying to develop record-keeping and trying to understand all of the regs, they stimulated a lot of interesting discussion.  Interesting to me is that DMCCC, where I work, is the model for  the country in terms of record-keeping--interesting, especially, when considering that we have the most children to keep records of!  The Department is moving to an electronic system of record-keeping, so some of the training was to educate us on the way the fancy Excel spreadsheet works!

The other exciting occasion of the week was having Yvette Burks (Dave's boss at BERT) and her children (well, young adults), Clayton and Jess, over for dinner.  They are such fun, interesting people!  Clayton and Jess spent much of their time entertaining Maddy, who was devastated when they went out the door.  She hasn't had so much entertainment and attention in her life!  And Maddy is certainly the people cat, who will forever be a two-year-old.  Special, too, was the gift that they brought along:  a set of dishes!  We washed them quickly and used them!  They look beautiful in blues and yellows with my table runner from Cayo...and I forgot to take pictures!  Too busy cooking!  Cooking was a bit of a challenge in that I could not find all of the ingredients that I wanted, so adapted, and I had to use the oven, which is calibrated in Celsius!  It is a wonder that it came out at all!

Dave did a bit of flying, including through some fairly intense weather.  Tropical Depression #2 is gone.  (It was not officially declared a tropical storm until it reached Mexico, as the winds here were at about 35 mph and storm declaration is at 39 mph sustained wind.)  But the amount of water that fell from the sky is more than I've seen in all the years in New Mexico, I swear.  We are still in the rainy season, thus the weather that Dave has seen while flying.  More rain falls in the south of the country, where he most frequently flies, than here.

Maybe pictures next week?!?