Tonight is talent night at the meeting house. The high schoolers put on this annual talent show for the community, and it gives us something fun to do together on a Friday night.
We're looking forward to it, it'll be interesting to see what these young people are capable of.
Work has been interesting this week. No two days are the same, different challenges come to us daily. For example, yesterday someone came and mentioned their children are attending some online college courses, only parts of the website would not load here.
Well in order to track web usage, secure and limit usage, we use a proxy server. That proxy server is having a lot of problems with port 8008 and we can't get this site to work. So, we have two choices, poke a hole in the proxy and thus make things a bit less secure and harder to manage... OR .. get creative.
So I wrote a long letter to the christian university's webmaster asking for them to look into the problem and see if they could propose any interesting solutions for us.
We'll see what they say. Part of the wonderful fun of this job is that not only do they not FROWN on thinking outside of the box, but they require it. Resource limitation is king here. While we can't implement solutions that others behind us will have a hard time administering, we can implement solutions that would otherwise be frowned on by larger corporations.
This place functions greatly on hand written scripts running on several machines. There is one man who knows where they all are, and how they all work, and he leaves in a month.
I've been scurrying around trying to figure out these scripts, so that the whole place doesn't come crashing down when he leaves. Part of my challenge will be to centralize the scripts and standardize them somehow.
Get me.. standardizing... that's crazy. I don't standardize... I'm usually the maverick, it's a new role for me.
So Sunday is Mother's Day.
Happy Mother's Day to all you moms! Where would the world be without moms!
As I was trying to figure the logistics of getting food for a nice brunch, and hiding it from my wife (secrecy is hard here, people see you at the store and know your whole family), I got a nice email.
A couple here on center is throwing a big mother's day brunch as one of their traditions and as a way to raise funds for their tickets back home. So I bought 4 tickets and we're going to enjoy a lovely mother's day brunch OUT.
There are not really restaurants here, so ANY meal where my wife doesn't have to prepare it herself is a good gift! She's adapted quite well to the menu here, and we definitely haven't been starving. We've adjusted to different types of meals. I'm eating more noodles and tuna than I ever have.
Oh and we've started eating tinned ham. My son loves it! I admit, it's tasty in a breakfast burrito too. We buy 2 dozen tortillas on Tuesday from a Papua New Guinean woman who makes them weekly. Tuesday night we have taco night (assuming the store had cheese this month).
Getting supplies is becoming trickier. Food containers from Australia and America arrive at irregular intervals to the store here. Lately the road conditions, political conditions, and the fact that some trucks have broken down have made the flow of groceries varied. On a good month there is cheese in the cheese, and the "good" noodles and tuna on the shelves. On a very rare occasion there is Dr. Pepper in the fridge (or I have heard there is I've yet to see it.)
So grocery wise, whatever the store has dictates what we make for Mother's day.
My wife received her bread maker in our cargo this week, and so she's been baking up a storm. She made pretzels, papaya bread, bread, hawaiin sweet rolls, and more!
