life interrupted

When I wrote about the coldspell some time back, I thought it was the door between the summer/fall wet season and the winter/spring dry season. After several days of relatively cool weather and west winds, it was warm and dry. (75F = cool, 85F=warm) The big puddles dried up, lots of sun with showers in the night. I was already to write about it, and then the wet season returned. The wet season features spectacular thunder and lightning storms, mostly at night, and windy rain squalls that blast through in the course of the day. Typically the storms drive the temperature from the mid 80s to the mid 70s for a couple of hours, and are really nice. Last weekend "hurricane" Ida stayed well west of us, but since there hadn't been any threatening storms this year, there was lots of talk and hyping of it on the Belize media, keeping it in conversation.

Lately we've had erratic electrical service. The Sunday paper carried the news that Mexico is backing out of its commitment to sell power to Belize because one of tgheir plants is down and hydro is weak because of dry conditions. Belize is making do with its own hydro capacity and power it is buying from an aquaculture (shrimp) company that has a generator. The utility claims the interruptions are due to improvements they are making in the distribution systems, but others claim they are due to defects is the system. I'm sure the storms play a role as well.

There isn't a whole lot of redundancy in the systems here. There is one paved north-south road in the country. Between here and the capitol, Belmopan, there are two bridges that washed out many months ago, with temporary one lane bridges carrying the traffic. Whenever there are major rainstorms in the headwaters a few miles inland, the temporary bridges are underwater, and the southern half of the country is cut off from the north.

I tried to post this last night, but we had no telephone or internet. The telco provides the backbone to the cell phone systems and the internet, and last night we had neither, and actually we weren't back in business until 8 this morning. So I prepared this in Word with the hopes of copy and pasting it, but that isn't working, so I'm retyping it. Last night no phone or internet. The night before the power went out at about 10 for 15 or 20 minutes, a relatively short spell. I have all my sensitive electronics like stereo stuff, TV, printer, etc, on battery backup surge protectors. Almost everything else that plugs into an outlet goes through low end surge protectors. This is to protect everything from surges caused by lightning or the utility. The only thing I have to remember is to unplug the cable from the back of the TV during electrical storms.

On a completely different topic, i've picked up two new clients. One is a condo developer that we built a three story reception center for, and is finally putting together the financing to build two 6 story condo buildings. They are in between construction phases, and I'll be handling the bookkeeping during this caretaker phase for a few months, and then who knows? The other is a more complex situation being the business manager for a guy who has an excavating business, with two bulldozers, three excavators and four dump trucks. Does somewhere between $500,000 and $1,000,000 in business annually, but can't read or write. Has to give his checkbook to vendors to write themselves a check, and you know what kind of mischief that can mean. After doing business on handshakes for years, people are now taking advantage of his illiteracy and good nature. What is really neat is that he is the uncle of the young man who led me through Mexico when I drove here last March. I hope the work i do for Jake is as valuable to him as David's guidance was to me last spring.

Well, that's it for now. Have do some work for Jake.

Be well.