Neighborhood Happenings

Sports Central…

Now that we’re settling into our house, we’re also starting to get to know some of the neighbors living in the surrounding homes. On Saturday, following morning shopping for most of the week’s supplies, one of the local children was playing out by our front porch. Housemate Ity was interacting with him and a couple of other youngsters, when an idea was hatched to use a rope we had purchased to try some “jump rope.” Soon, other young neighbors of varying ages joined in, and before long, we had a good size group involved.

"Sports Central"

This transitioned to other local games, one of which involved a rope gradually raised in height where the participants engaged in synchronized dance steps. Another used a tightly rolled “ball” of plastic bags to play a game similar to “dodge ball.” A little exercise, a lot of fun, and some nice interaction with our friends and neighbors!

High Steppin'

Fire…

I had to include this photo of trash and low brush being burned in front of our house. Such small fires are a regular occurrence. They seem to help prevent larger burns. 

Fire!

The Great Water Mystery…

As mentioned in previous posts, we are fortunate that our house has electricity and running water. Service interruptions occur rather frequently, however. A storm may knock out electrical service, for instance, which in turn may lead to water well pumps shutting down and cutbacks in water service. In addition, power frequently fails when dinner is being cooked, and the correlation between water shutdowns and when I shower in the morning is uncanny. Thus, we took a lack of water service recently in stride, comforted by the knowledge that water usually is flowing again within a few hours, and we had a couple of buckets of back-up supply.     

When water was still down the next morning, and then the entire following day, inconvenience evolved to increasing concern. This was compounded by the weekend timing, and the discovery that other houses were getting water. After a third day without water, the toilet essentially unusable, and our supplies almost exhausted, we were chagrined to discover an outdoor valve leading to the house had been turned off. Perhaps we’ll never know who shut off the water or why, but it was so nice to have it flowing again that we could laugh off the episode. In the meantime, we substantially increased our back-up supplies in case a similar challenge arises in the future.