We had a mostly glorious week this past week with one major exception. You’ll remember Travis and Emily Mitten who had to return to the U.S. because of Emily’s incredibly difficult pregnancy. We learned last Wednesday that they lost the baby. She is still carrying it and and we are all praying that her body will release it soon and naturally because she is so weak from her illness that surgery is pretty risky right now.
Travis was here with us when Emily learned of the baby’s death. He and his brother, John, had come (along with John’s two oldest daughters) to finish cleaning and packing their house. Almost all their big items are in a storage building now. Thanks to tremendous help from some friends, they finished quickly and, on Wednesday morning, we all went to the beach. When I got back to my phone I had a message from Emily to have Travis call home right away. You can read Travis’ perspective here: Light in Our Hearts. We also talk about it in the HRGS Update which you’ll find at the bottom of this post.
That’s in contrast to an otherwise fabulous week. We are now into our second week of all day English and all day Spanish. We only had one little surprise. The instructions for our automation software made no mention that it only runs reliably on one processor. So we had a couple crashes before Peter stumbled across that information on their web site and I disabled one of the processor cores on each computer. Rock solid now. I’m putting the finishing touches on the replacement FM broadcast computer now. There’s more info in the HRGS Audio Update at the end of this post.
Partly related to that project is my desire to make a trip over to Utila. I need to see what is keeping the transmitter from going to full power. I also need to get the phone line fixed so we can again use the remote control and monitoring system. And, since we will soon have a team here replacing guy wires, I need to see to a few preliminaries related to that. I had hoped to go Monday, but events conspired against me. Mildred has been sick, mostly sick in bed, for several days. Now I think I may be getting it, but so far, it seems like a much milder case than what she has. But when I woke up at 4:40 to get ready to go to the ferry, my throat was pretty sore, my body was pretty tired, and the waves were really big. Riding those waves the way I was feeling didn’t seem like something that would lead to a productive time on Utila. I hope I can get over there before the end of the week. Mildred still doesn’t feel good and her voice is way too shot to do anything with a microphone, so I’ve taken on some of her duties. Of course she had already done some of my studio work during the full court press to get the dual language project on line on time, so I guess I owed her. 
When we went to the beach last Wednesday, the wind was blowing the wrong way for good snorkeling, but it was still a beautiful day. I put together a little photo gallery showing some of our contrasts here on the island. There are pictures from where we went last week, West Bay, which is one of the finest beaches in the world. For contrast, I took some shots of the beach in front of our house. Since we are on the normally windward side of the island, cleaning the beach is a non stop chore for this part of the island. Lastly, we received a visit yesterday from one of the largest cruise ships in the world – the Norwegian Epic. NCL just took delivery on her about a month ago, and this ship is huge.
There is plenty more to tell about, but no time to write it and you wouldn’t have time to read it. Here is the photo gallery. I hope the captions explain things for you. Don’t forget to scroll down and listen to the Update. Thanks for your prayers.
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