Messages: A pretty great week, praise the Lord!

Ralph is doing much better, still a little lack of energy, but I think we both feel that a bit more now with the weather so hot and muggy. Temps consistently in the low to mid 90s with humidity anywhere from 50% to 75%. I got all hot and sweaty just making breakfast this morning and I didn’t even cook, just bagels with cream cheese and mangoes!!

Pastor Jose is doing much better too, and we are thankful. His spirit and outlook has definitely improved!

We did have a tiny bit of rain on Wednesday last week, just enough to put the wipers on for a couple of minutes. It was funny though because we noticed later that you could see the little impact craters of each rain drop in the dirt. Thundershowers have been forecast for more than three weeks now, not one has materialized. The big thunderheads roll in, hang out for a while and roll right back out.

Our cop friend Juan Manuel finally sat down for 90 minutes of chat and Bible reading. Most of our conversations with him have been on the go, when we see him in town or as he passes by on his work shifts or on the way to the super or taking Cruz to and from her job at the MZ. They just live half a block from us. But the other night he stopped, parked and came in and sat down!! It was a blast. He was in the army for six years, then plain clothes investigator for the state police (FBI equivalent) in Culiacan for eight years, but he said there was just too much violence. And though being a cop here is still dangerous (drugs mostly) it is still “tranquillo” compared to Culiacan.

I struck up a conversation with Rosario as she was waiting for the bus in front of the house, she came over to admire our flowers and we just chatted away while she waited, finally Ralph came out to let us know that the bus wasn’t running that day. I hadn’t even noticed!! She would have had a long walk home, about 10 blocks in the blazing sun. Her son is our back window neighbor, but he was at work with his truck. So we said we’d give her a ride home. She was very surprised that we’d offer but took us up on it. She insisted that we come in and wanted to feed us tamales, but we’d already ordered tamales from Pastor Jose, so we just stayed and visited for a while. She has a beautiful house with gorgeous tiles, huge beautiful laquered wood furniture, etc., and she was so nice. She told us all about her family, total of 10 kids, all close by here. She has two conures (little parrots) and two dogs, one of them completely hairless! Had a great time with her, finally had to take off, but she sent us home with pepper plants from her garden! Then later in the evening Candy and I were out front chatting and this pickup comes around the corner and up the road with an arm sticking out of the window holding a bag…it was Rosario with a bag of mangos for us!!

In potting up the pepper plants for the garden I discovered where our homeless gecko had moved to…the pots stored under the stairs. When I picked them up I startled him and he jumped from the pots to my bare foot. He stopped, kinda trying to figure out what he landed on for a few seconds and then scooted under the water barrel. We had a gecko living in our circuit breaker box, but the workers made him leave when they put the new one in a couple of weeks back and the new box is closed rather than open like the old one, so he couldn’t get back into his house and had to find a new one.

And our house geckos have a baby. We discovered him in the kitchen last night. So tiny I could have mistaken him for a bug, but nope! Baby gecko!

Ralph went over to Judi’s for his haircut this morning and her mom and dad sent him home with a bag of mangoes…going to have to make some sorbet I think to preserve them all. Even I can’t eat that many mangos, as much as I love them. They are small mangos, they fit in the palm of your hand, super sweet too because they are ripened on the tree.

And Ralph got his little surround sound system hooked up this morning, we needed an adapter and cable that we couldn’t get here so we got them while we were in Mazatlan yesterday. Now we can compete with the neighbors, music-wise! We have about 50 channels of music on our satellite, so he’s presently got it on “Ultimate Oldies” and he and Pastor Jose were rockin’ out on the patio!

We hired a Spanish tutor to help us with the finer points of sentence structure, verbs, tenses. We’ve just had two hours with her so far and it’s already made a world of difference! She sweet and funny, and is a teacher at the Prepatory School, basically high school. She really is a gift from God for us.

We had our team meeting in Mazatlan yesterday, and at Mary Ann’s suggestion we BBQed at Bosque de Cuidad park. Huge park with very shady picnic areas with grills and loads of kids toys to keep the girls busy. Our meetings are now once a month and include worship and communion, much better format for us all I think. Here are some pictures from our lunch in the park.

Gracie J on the big slide: