The Scattered Thoughts of Me

I got back last night from my trip to the border of Mexico and the USA. We crossed from the city of Reynosa in Mexico to the city of McAllen in Texas. It took us about 12 hours each way, so it was a long drive, but not too bad. I went up with Dennis, for the purpose of picking up books for the school. If you’d like to see some pictures from our trip, you can visit his website. It is like a blog, but unlike mine, he actually posts on his regularly. I am no longer in the habit of doing that. Actually, it was never really a habit; there was just a brief period at the beginning when I wrote a lot. Here’s his website address: www.ymimexico.org. There are some crazy pictures of me when we were having fun with the shutter speed on his digital camera. By the by, on his website there is a link called “Tour the House!” which has pictures of my house where I live. They actually lived here for a few months before I did. So you can click on that to see where I live. The site has a lot of pictures of the school and the students there, in addition to pictures of his work teaching youth ministry at the Mexican Baptist Theological Seminary.

We had a good time on the trip. I ate riblets at Applebee’s, a grilled stuffed fajita at Taco Bell, and a cheeseburger at Logan’s Roadhouse. I also got a couple of cd’s and movies. I now own all the Star Wars movies on DVD, so I’m pumped about that. Am I a nerd or what? Today at school I played Trivial Pursuit: Lord of the Rings Edition with some of my students. Yeah, I’m a nerd. I didn’t win though, so my nerdness isn’t perfect yet.

I am so tired now. I am worn out from the trip, and from school today. I don’t have any gas for the water heater, so I can’t take a hot shower, so I am going to take a cold one before I go to bed tonight, which I am hoping will be before 8:30. So this’ll be all for now.

So, I've decided that it is officially getting cold here. Not that I'm the one who decides, but you know what I mean. It actually wasn't a hard decision. The last three days there has been frost on the car when I left in the mornings to go to the school. Not just a little bit, but a good solid layer of frost, all over the car. That never happened during my first time here, so here's my theory about why it's happening now.... I live in a different neighborhood. For one thing, I'm on top of a hill, and we get a lot of wind. So the warmth that gathers during the day is quickly blown away as soon as it starts getting dark. The weather here is so dependent upon the sun. Since we are at a low latitude (technically, we're in "the tropics"), the sun is very strong, all year round. But at our high altitude (about 7500 feet), the thin air warms quickly during the day but cannot hold on to the heat through the night. So the days are great and the nights are cold. I don't know how cold the air has to be for frost to form on a car, but I heard this afternoon on the radio at about 4:00 that the temperature was 26 degrees Celsius. That is about 79 degrees Fahrenheit. So we had a temperature range today of perhaps nearly 50 degrees. Another thing about this neighborhood where I live is that it is a lot more open than my old neighborhood, and with the lack of concrete all over the place the daytime heat escapes more quickly. Yeah... that, and the wind.

I don't reckon that I have anything serious to write, so I'll end abruptly now.