It's off to Tucson today!

1/18/07 The sun has been warming up the midday temperatures to almost 60! This means that I have been able to sit in the sun when the wind died down a bit. It was still pretty funny to be sitting on the beach in sweat pants and a winter jacket on the Sea of Cortes (better known to us as the Gulf of California). I have had a wonderful day in the sun today. The temperature was still only 58 degrees, but the warm sun off the white sand and the only slight breeze made it possible to sit on the beach and read.

1/17/07 When I said I was going to Australia because it was a different culture, the same language and far away, I didn’t realize fully how important the “same language” would be when it came to technology. Our hotel here has an area which is “wifi” equipped. Great, I thought. No problem I’ll bring my computer here and then post a few notes onto my blog. Wrong! First, it was getting my laptop to talk to their network. I asked one of the local techs here to help me and in the process he somehow disabled access to all my files. Several calls to the DOR IT folks have led to more frustration, despite their best efforts. Language, even computer tech talk, is very hard to do across cultural and country boundaries.

You may have noticed that several blog postings have been repeated here. Hopefully they are corrected now, but these occurred because I couldn’t decipher the word for “delete” or “edit” or “remove” or “erase” in Spanish and since I was posting from a computer in Mexico, my blog site must have assumed that Spanish was my first language! Oh well, this whole thing is a learning experience!


1/16/07 The TV reports from across the boarder in Arizona say that this is the coldest weather that the southwest has experienced in 16 years! Informative, but not consoling to my warmth starved soul. The sun is out here, but the temperature is still only 45 and the wind makes it feel even colder; not exactly bathing suit weather! To make it all more challenging, the “techs” in the Cybercafé at the hotel did something to my laptop when they were giving me access to their wifi system. I have since been unable to access my own files in the laptop. This has proven to be a source of frustration – ah, technology! Great when it works (which is most of the time!), but troubling when it doesn’t –like now.