I keep reading on Facebook how cold most of you are. I guess the global warming has been canceled and maybe now we can go back to fretting about a global freeze which was such a popular topic not many years ago. Well, I want to tell you it’s been brutal here. Lots of people are going around in windbreakers here on Roatán. One morning it got down to a bone chilling 68 degrees. Still not enough to make me wear long pants except at church, though, but it sure has been a big help with our electric bill. Electricity costs at least four times as much as back in the States, so any time we can give the air conditioner a break is a break for us. As a result, I want to thank you for the frigid weather you are experiencing because, as it spills down this way, it saves us money and gives me a rest from the power-sweating. 
Today is our day off, and we are not yet sure what we will do with it. Obviously, we are not going to the beach. That’s not a lot of fun in 75 degree rain. It has been raining almost continuously for about a week now. As Travis mentioned in our HRGS Update, he is finally getting to see what rainy season is really like here, after an unusually dry December. I should probably get some chores done here at the house and maybe work on a sermon, but we haven’t been out much lately and the urge to go somewhere is building. We’ll almost for sure go out to lunch, but where to go is a harder decision.
This week we began to get serious about our furlough plans. Mildred managed to buy our plane tickets a couple days ago. That was yet another example of the uphill nature of life here. She tried to buy them on line. TACA Airlines had, by far, the best price other than Spirit Airlines. But with Spirit, we would have needed to be at the San Pedro Sula airport at 2:00AM on the way out which would have meant spending the “night” in San Pedro Sula. I didn’t even know that any Honduran airports were open at that time of day! But our credit card company would not let us buy the tickets from TACA on line. Mildred spent at least an hour on the phone bouncing back and forth between the bank for our Visa card and “Verified by Visa.” After lots and lots of finger pointing, the bank finally said, we just cannot buy on line from TACA using that card. So, we went to the airport to buy tickets there. Nope, can’t do that either. Why? Well, they had one ticket agent busy checking in the passengers for the next flight, and the only other one was fully occupied telling us they didn’t have time to sell us a ticket. But she did give us a phone number for the TACA call Center in San Pedro Sula and Mildred finally got tickets that way. The aggravation nearly made it worth it to spend the extra $500+ dollars to fly Delta.
Lord willing, we’ll head for Tampa, via San Salvador and Orlando, on March 7 and return to Roatán on May 10. We’ll be in the Tampa area for around a month. Then we’ll head north to Ohio and Iowa. We’re working on details and dates now. We have supporting churches and individuals in all those areas. We won’t be able to see our supporters in other states due to the shortness of this furlough, but hope to make up for that next year. We are experimenting with shorter, more frequent furloughs to make it easier for Mildred to catch up on the financial records when we get back home.
I’ll let the audio update tell you about recent events and our plans for the upcoming week. One thing we did not talk about is that I will probably be going to Utila sometime next week. Our microwave receiver over there has not been working for a long time. We have been using an FM receiver to catch the signal and feed it into the AM transmitter so we can reach the coast. I have a functioning microwave receiver here that I want to put in place. I may also be doing some other chores over there, but that is my main reason for going right now. So I’d appreciate your prayers for travel safety, technical success, and fruitful contacts with listeners and strangers alike. That’s about it for today. As I type this, I’m listening to Thru the Bible, and as J. Vernon McGee would say, “May God bless you richly.”
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