Tony’s Guatemala

Well, I’m a little late wishing everyone a happy easter, but I figure, better late than never!

I was out of town over the weekend, and made it back in town just in time to go to the easter service at the church that one of Rachel’s friends is very involved in, okay involved might be an understatement, her husband is the pastor.

They had the service at a local nightclub, called the moon, and it was an interesting experience.

Otherwise, the drive was relatively un-eventful, although, I probably looked like an idiot driving down the interstate with strips of duct tape holding th front of my hood down.

You see; on Friday I decided I was gonna try and fix something that had been bothering me for a while. My hood didn’t latch properly, ever since a kid backed over the front of my car with his pickup truck last year. I’d replaced the hood, but the core support that the hood latch is atached to was depressed. ever since then, the only thing holding the hood down was the safety catch, which isn’t very safe, but it was a tight fit, at least until Friday when I decided to “fix” it with a screwdriver.

Well, the only thing I managed to do on Friday was to bend the latch up a little bit, and make the safety catch fit very loosely, but the hood latch was still too low, so now I had the hood rising with every gust of wind, and I was scared of the hood flying open, crushing the windshield etc. so I added a few strips of duct tape, I looked stupid, but I felt a lot safer with the tape.

I fixed the hood properly today (well, I don’t now if the technique was the “proper” one…) by using an engine hoist and a padlock to bend the core support back up. I used a padlock, because the shackle is about the same diameter as the latch bar on the hood, and it was the only thing I could find. My Method: close the lock, press the shackle into the hood latch until it latches, hook the engine hoist to the lock, and pump the hydraulic handle until it’s bent up.

I was lucky and got it at about the right level on my first try, but I wouldn’t want to try and do that for someone else’s car!

I’m also working with a local company to help them sell some stuff online by taking good photographs for them to use in ads, and I went and worked on that some today…

Well, I’m about to leave on my last driving trip for a little while.

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving for Tampa, seeing a bunch of Rachel’s Friends (and several of them are my friends now)

It’ll be a good trip, but Probably another 10 hours of driving in like a 24 hour period.

I hope we make it back in time for church since it’s Easter Sunday!

Well, I got a new pre-paid phone, I went with cingular pre-paid, and I’m using my Dad’s old Motorola Razr.

I should be able to get the phone unlocked, and use it in Guatemala as well.

Cingular has a decent pre-paid plan, and I got minutes at about $0.10 a minute, and nights and weekends for $20 a month, along with $10 a month for 1000 text messages.

Driving is getting kind of old by this point. I’ve been sick for the last 2 weeks, and driven about 2,000 miles in the same time.

After getting back from Atlanta late Sunday evening, I got a little bit of sleep, and then took back off for Jacksonville on Monday, and back Monday evening. I had a blow-out of the passenger rear tire on the way back, and had to drive the rest of the trip on the donut. I lost about 25mph in speed, and it took a lot longer to get back. I ended up getting home about 6am.

One more trip, and then I’ll be done driving for a while, I look forward to that.

Well, I’m writing this in Atlanta, but I’ll have to publish it when I get back, since I’ve got no internet up here.

Rachel and I had planned to leave Tallahassee at about 5 pm, which would have put us in Atlanta at about 10pm. We ended up spending a little more time in Tallahassee, we ate dinner before we left, and did just a little bit of other stuff, and ended up leaving a little closer to 8pm, putting us through Atlanta more like 12:30-1:00 am.

There was a tornado that tore through downtown Atlanta between 10 and 11 pm. We would have been driving through right in the midst of the tornado if we hadn’t been a little late leaving.

Sometimes God really does work in mysterious ways. We ended up getting in late, and therefore not getting as much sleep as we would have liked before Rachel’s conference the next morning, but we missed the tornadoes without even knowing they existed.

Well, I’m sitting here, about to leave on another weekend trip.

Rachel has a conference in Atlanta for the job she just started, and we’re going to stay with one of my best friends, Dave, while we’re there. It’s always good to see Dave.

I look forward to seeing Dave, but I’m not looking forward to the drive. Especially after driving a total of 18 hours last weekend.

I need a vacation I think, I mean, I’ll be out of town 3 weekends in a row, none of them with less than 10 hours of driving on a 2 day weekend, yikes!

Well today has been kind of interesting, I’ve had another possibility as far as my phones go, since I found my Dad’s phone.

My Dad had a Motorola Razr v3 phone, which conveniently is pretty useable for pre-paid services, I’ve still got to research what carriers it’ll work with, but it gives me another option.

I pulled all the photos off of my Dad’s phone and loaded them onto my Mac powerbook via bluetooth. There where a lot of photos of the family vacation he and my mom went on with my sister last summer, and the first picture he took was of my mom.

The last pictures my Dad took on his phone where actually of me while I was doing a photo shoot for their church.

Well, This week is a busy one, or should be anyways.

I’ve been dealing with the lingering flu symptoms I came down with last week, but hopefully I’ll be a little more productive this week than I was last.

I’ve got to do a lot of work in the shop, as well as getting everything done that’s specifically related to the trip. All in all that means it’s like working 2 jobs!

Things to figure out this week:

Cell Phone, I still haven’t decided, and now I’m without service, which is bad!

Pass-port, Mine expired recently, and I need a new one quickly!

Getting started raising support.

After my relatively late rising, Rachel, Mary and I snacked a little bit, and then went and visited with their Grandmother, also known as “Gan.” I suppose at some point I should find out why they call her that, but I don’t know right now. We visited for some time, and then left about 2:30.

The 3 of us went for a walk, and ended up going down to the French quarter, and had sushi at a place that had very good prices on the lunch menu, but not nearly such good prices by the time we got there, since it was after 3. Afterwards, we walked a little further down Decatur street, and eventually ran into the French market, which looked exactly like what the rest of the country calls a flea market. I’d never been, so we walked through it.

After Rachel and I walked through, we looked for Mary, only to realize that neither one of us had our cell phones with us, so we couldn’t call her. We tried walking through the market several times, but to no avail, there was no sign of her, we where about 1 1/2 miles from the hotel, and we weren’t sure if she knew her way back, so we sought out a plan to find Mary. We looked for a pay-phone, but no-one was exactly sure where to find one, but a nice guy at a place called New Orleans Madness Masks offered to let us borrow his cell phone. Now the dilemma was, neither of us knew her cell number off the top of our heads, so Rachel planned to call her parents and get the number from them, after she called the her parents house a few times and got no answer, I reminded her that they where probably in another state trying to do some fund-raising.

Well, Rachel couldn’t remember either of her parent’s cell numbers, but eventually Rachel recommended that I call my brother and ask him for their numbers, since I’d sent him an Email a few days earlier with their numbers in it so that they could hang out while they where in the same city. Bingo! We got the numbers and on the second call got through to Rachel’s Mom, and got Mary’s number, a few minutes later, we where all happily re-united, and we started walking back to the Hotel

Well, I’m writing this from New Orleans, and I’m tired.

My Girlfriend Rachel’s Grandmother lives here, and while Rachel’s sister Mary is in town, we thought we’d all come over and visit.

Friday morning I got up, and went and got an oil change on my poor little car, then I got a new (used) tire on the passenger side front, since there was a bulge in the tire, and anytime you got over 15mph you got a free back massage. After that, I picked up Gavin, and drove to Jacksonville from Tallahassee, normally  a 2 1/2 hour drive, but since there was a bad storm blowing for about 95% of the drive, it turned into more like 3 1/2 hours. I dropped Gavin off, and drove back, another 3 1/2 hours, then when I got to Tallahassee, I went to Rachel’s apartment, and picked up Rachel and her sister.

Then the drive to New Orleans began, of course, by the time we hit the road, it was 9:30 at night, and with the light traffic, but heavy wind, we ended up in New Orleans at about 3:30 in the morning. We Checked into the Lafayette Hotel on St. Charles Ave, and carried everything up to the 5th floor.

I have a room facing east(ish) out over the park (I don’t remember the name of the park, and as much as I’m tempted to call it Lafayette park, I don’t think that’s right) Of Course, it was about 2:30 local time, which is still pretty late really. I went to sleep and woke up about 4 hours later, since the sun was shining in through the windows, over which I’d forgotten to draw the curtains. I got up, brushed my teeth, since I’d overlooked doing that due to my exhaustion, I also drew the curtains. (After laying back down and realizing I’d forgotten to do the thing I’d initially climbed out of bed to do.) Then I returned to my slumber, and slept for another 3 hours or so.