A lot of talk has been going on lately about the health care bill that has been going through congress. Our president and his supporters have been pushing very hard to get this bill passed as soon as possible. "What's taking so long?" they complain, "this is the right thing to do, so lets just pass it!" they yell.
If you are at least somewhat familiar with the process that our congress has for passing law, you know that each bill must be read before the house of representatives and the senate before being voted on.
Ah, the DMV. Who doesn't enjoy the euphoria of basking in the utopia of the regulatory government system that keeps all traveling peoples safe from mishap, and in perfect harmony? Socialism at its best.
These past few months, especially since graduating from NTBI, I have been weighing options for finishing my college education, and I have finally come up with a solid plan. I mentioned in a previous post that I have been considering getting a degree in electrical engineering. The method I will be using for this goal is as follows: for the purpose of keeping cost and time down, I will be doing 16 transferable credits with College Plus (a test for credit system), and then transferring to University of Colorado Denver. While looking at colleges, I had narrowed it down to UCD, and Mines.
It has recently come to my attention that the year is not 2009 anymore. This realization has been somewhat of an irritation in situations such as check writing. The realization that you just screwed up your check blank after you've already filled out the rest of it, the irritated look from the other party to your sheepish look as you fumble with another check... Things like that. However, since it is in fact a new year, this also means that I have not yet posted on my "blog" this year (and the debate about whether or not I posted last year is still going on).
Well, I seem to have found out something new about the particular batteries they put in the 13" plastic macbooks... When I left for Bolivia, I forgot to turn my macbook off, which drained the battery, and put the computer in hibernation mode. Unfortunately, one of the little fineprint things that nobody reads is that if you leave the battery discharged for just a few days, it kicks the bucket. Bites the bullet. Gets a pink slip for life. If you have this happen to you, it's probably a waste of time to bother with the apple store.
Well, I made it there and back. We showed up at the airport in Santa Cruz at about 8:00 pm on the evening of the 1st, found out our flight was delayed for about two hours, and after some sitting, we flew out at about 1:00 am the morning of the 2nd. After 7 hours of flight, we landed in Miami FL, where most of us went our separate ways. I managed to get a flight at 6:05 pm back to Denver, so I ended up sitting at the airport board out of my mind for 10 hours. Oh well, I had some books with me, so I did lots of reading.
Not much to report today. We made it to Santa Cruz via bus today, and found out that the place we were going to stay could no longer accomidate us. After calling around a little, we ended up at a mission home in kind of a rough part of town, but we have a place to stay. I´m at an internet Café a couple blocks away, sitting next to a bunch of gamers. We´re going to get dinner in about an hour, then tomorrow I´m not sure what the plan is besides catching our flight to Miami.
Pray that we won´t get mugged or anything :-)
Today we finished the last chunk of concrete for the basketball court! I wasn´t as busy today as I was the other days because there was no surface prep to do for the next day this time. When I was occupied, it was mostly hand-mixing concrete, and hauling wheelbarrows, so I´m pretty well covered in concrete.
Last night we had a little worship service and devotional, and we did the mime drama that we weren´t able to do previously at the market before. After a short message from the bible, we had a little meeting to give a little history of Manos de Amor, or Hands of Love.
Here we are again. I´m still in Bolivia, and I´m still alive! Not much else to report. One more slab done, and one left. I worked on surface prep on the section we´re doing tomorrow, which is the last one. Work on the water tower was also started this afternoon. I described before how we don´t really have much machinery at our disposal for all this; the way the tower is being done is we have a plywood mold with re-bar inside, then set up a bucket brigade to pour concrete into it from the top.
