With Beth, Bruce, and Bruce’s sister Lark
We had a wonderful visit last night with Beth, Bruce and family at Bruce’s mom’s house in El Paso – so great to see friends! Beth’s kids Ruby and Maggie are getting all grown up and beautiful. Ellen cooked up a good dinner and we had a grand old time. We also got to meet several of Ellen’s friends who were a hoot. Bruce grew up in El Paso and his mom is still living there. It was also a treat to see Lark, who I hadn’t seen in many years.
An interesting thing about Ellen are her turtles. She has a bunch of turtles in the backyard as pets – they are so cute! A couple of them came over to sniff my toes – evidently, they thought my red toenails might be strawberries!
Earlier in the day, John went to cycle while I worked for a bit (never enough hours in the week to get my work done, it seems). After that, we went to an Employee Recreation Event at the local water park – we had a burger and visited for a while – boy, was it hot!
This week was a little calmer than last week. We walked down to Teresa and Michael’s last Sunday night for party leftovers and visited for a while, then came home and watched “Wall-E” – cute movie.
We didn’t have anything going on during the week, so we were pretty much home every night – a nice break from the last few weeks.
Mom was put in the hospital for overnight observation on Thursday. Sue called to let me know that as Mom was driving to the hospital for lunch (her habit), she started feeling bad and her vision started getting dark. She made it to the hospital and found her blood sugar was so low, the doctors said she should have been in a coma. Evidently, she had skipped dinner the night before and had some fruit for breakfast and her blood sugar crashed. She was released the next day with instructions from the nutritionist to eat six meals a day. So, all’s well.
We had a bit of excitement near the Consulate this week. The drug violence in Juarez is on track to surpass the 1800 murders of 2008, despite the presence of 7500-10,000 federal troops in the city. Wednesday, a man was gunned down inside a Denny’s restaurant during the lunch hour just a couple of buildings down from the Consulate – supposedly one of the safest parts of town. A little too close.
I visited an American citizen in an El Paso hospital on Friday who was a bystander wounded during a shoot-out last week. The rest of the work week was filled with passport cases, many of them, well, odd. Keeps it interesting!
I’ve started mentoring a class of local staff once a week – they are taking a tough long distance learning course about American Citizen Services, so we’ll meet every Thursday to talk about the material and real life examples. Our first class was a lot of fun. Luckily, we have some long-time ACS employees in the class and they have a lot to contribute and it makes it a lot more interesting.
This morning I watched “CBS Sunday Morning” (thanks to Mary for getting me started on that – it’s such a well-done show) – today was a special edition on animals and was great. The day is off to a good start!