10 Days Later

It’s Sunday and we have been here 10 days. My sister had a baby boy. We are very happy for her and her husband. Everything is going as planned but we still don’t have internet and haven’t received our mail. Hopefully we will get cable internet tomorrow but I don’t think there is a cable that runs to our neighbor-hood. I don’t think we can get DSL either. Other than dialup it might be possible to go wireless. Wireless costs $60/month vs. $25 for cable.We bought a 2000 Chevy S10. So far it seems to be running well enough. Searching for a car was a lot of work but we were able to find one in less than a week and return the rental car on time. We are having fun starting over but it’s been a lot of work. We are not big shoppers so it’s an ordeal for us to go shopping for the day. We did get a HE clothes washer from Sears. It works well and uses very little water or electricity. A good solar hot water system was going to cost around $2000. Now that the weather is more normal (the first few days we had a tropical storm) the water entering the house is almost good enough for showers. So instead of a solar hot water system we are going to go with a simple instant on gas (LPG) hot water heater. They cost $220 at Sears. Since we don’t need to heat the water up very much we shouldn’t use too much gas. We are trying to go green but the solar hot water system is physically big and probably took a lot of energy to make and will need to be replaced in 10 to 20 years. The gas system is quite small, about the size of my lap top. If it looks like were going to go through a lot a gas then we can install solar later. We have been eating avocados from the yard every day. We bought some yard tools from Sears and finally have had some time to tackle the yard. Wow! It’s going to take a few hours every day for many months to get things to where they should be. We took some time off and went to the beach today. The water sure is warm. The days get also get a bit warm. We don’t have a thermometer so all I know is that is it hot. I have my Direct TV installed but my TV is on back order and won’t be here for 3 weeks! Also the Direct TV Latin satellite doesn’t carry the Sci Fi channel yet. Big bummer! We found some furniture we like so we will be buying it next week. The cat has adjusted well but we still haven’t let him outside. Katrina’s Spanish is coming along very nicely. Most of the 63 boxes have arrived. We are still waiting on the rest. This week we plan on getting internet, furniture, finding a bank, installing the gas hot water system and more yard work every day.