Christmas time

Here are some photos taken after Christmas on United Nations Boulevard. They had some really nice ligted decorations this year.

Including this dinosaur made up of plastic bottles to be recycled. Some great imagination inspired work!

Jupiter passing the moon

Well, not really, but it looks cool. January 21, was the night that the moon and Jupiter could be seen very close together. There were actually a few nights where you could see this and it depended on the time of night as to how close they were in the sky.

This photo was taken at 8:20pm just using a tripod and my camera with a 300mm lense.

I'd like to take a picutre of the moon some night to better show the craters and mountains but I'm not sure exactly how to do that.

And then it was gone...

Where the old post-office stood. Home to various departments over the years (English, Corrientes, Guest Ministries, Copy Shop, and others), the building was torn down Saturday morning to make way for more parking spaces.

As each parking space provides income to help offset costs of ministry, and the office space was no longer needed (and the building required upgrades), it made sense to tear it down.

The biggest headache for the Systems department was that all the phone lines (107 in total) for the Hospital and the Radio ran unprotected underneath this building. The punch-blocks for connecting the lines from the phone company to our own internal cables was also built into the wall of this building.

Fortunately, there was enough spare cable under the building to move the interconnect box about 2 meters away from the building. After removing the floor the work crew was able to knock holes in the foundation and dig a trench and bury the cables to protect them from the falling building and the required work afterwards for finishing the parking.

This unfortunately wasn't enough to protect from being cut, one cable carrying 10 phone lines.

We took out the cables which were no longer being used so as not to cause confusion. However, the confusion arose in the time between determining which cables were to be cut and actually cutting them, which for this particular operation, transpired in about five (5) seconds, the time between identifying the cable and reaching over to pick up the hacksaw. The cable to be cut contained fiber-optics, but when the saw hit copper we knew something was amiss.

The good news is that there was still enough cable that we were able to pull it out to the new location of the interconnect box and re-punch the cable, restoring phone service to those lines.

Christmas!

The boys saw Frosty and wanted their picture taken with him.

Their favourate song of Christmas?

I want a hipopotamus for Chriatmas.

Yes, it is a cute song with a catchy melody! But after four weeks of it..I'm glad they're back in school!

What is the problem?

 Joel has had several months with abdominal pains and after consulting with several doctors and specialists, we decided to have an stomach endoscopy done to see if there was any problem there.

Joel cooperated fully and when he woke up in recovery, his first question was, "How did I get here? I was in a different room!"

Turns out that there was no problem the doctor could see with his stomach or throat.

We suspect it's an allergic reaction to some foods or ingredients but we still don't know exactly what causes his pain. The good news is that over the month of December, the pains seemed to go away. He still has a pain attack every now-and-then but not with the same severity and frequency as before.

Praise God!

Talking points..

 Some of the sights that one can see in Quito. Some things are self-explanatory, others are just...interesting!

Sometimes the wait can be long for a bus.

Quito by night...

Taken with my phone as we enjoyed some time getting to know other parents of Joshua's grade. We had Colada Morada with Guagua's de pan (delicious!) and enjoyed getting to know each other a bit better.

This year neither Marlene nor I are directly involved in the class parent groups, which is VERY NICE after heading up Joshua's class for two years.

Heavy duty...

The city was repaving the street just west of the HCJB campus and I thought it rather nice of them to put my name on the equipment.

The team...

These are the great people that I get to work with here in Quito. We took the photo when the team from the hospital moved into the office space on the floor above us on the campus side.

While the "hospital team" has mostly programmers to maintain the hospital administration software, the "campus team" has mostly the hardware people to maintain the networks and computers.

Now the teams on "both sides of the street" can work more closely together. (An integration that took 18 months to complete.)