Internet Access

As Dawn indicated in the last blog, I now have internet access at work! Today I finally got every machine in the building access to the net. So far I have been busy trying to undo all the damage my fellow co-workers have already done. One officer tried to “turn off” the internet before she went home yesterday, so her computer needed a quick fix first thing this morning. Others have become overcome with joy when a pop-up window tells them “Congratulations! You’re our 1,000,000th visitor!!! Click here to claim your prize!” The more experienced of them have already installed every toolbar yahoo has to offer and ask me why their music video cuts out from time to time. “Oh, your work related video?” I ask. I am fighting the urge to introduce a very strict firewall, or worse yet… a cyber-nanny.

I’m hoping my problems will go down significantly once the president of the union returns to work on Monday. When the cat’s away… I am also holding out hope that the novelty will eventually wear off. In the mean time, I’m trying to educate each person as I fix their computer. In some cases I reproduce the problem and have them try fixing it. Other times I wait for them to wander off so I can secretly delete all the crap they’ve managed to install on their machines. I can only do so much.

That’s the work update for now. Things are going to slow down from a crawl to a vegetative pace over the Christmas season. In Guyana Christmas begins on the 15th of December. The schools have already shut down for the holidays. We’re sticking around home for the 24th-26th, but are planning a little getaway over New Year’s.

We hosted our annual joint Christmas party last Saturday. The sister party was held on the same day in Vancouver by Carla Jane and I’m told it was another successful event. We managed to provide enough food for our guests, and I think everyone had a good time. I had originally intended to project a movie or 2 on our huge white wall (Christmas Vacation and the cartoon version of the Grinch) but that idea fell through for various reasons. Regardless, it was nice to do something here that reminded us of home.

Time for a creature update. Dawn may have sugar coated her previous report about how “we successfully trapped our house mouse.” The truth is, the mouse, who we affectionaly call Mr. Jingles, got his head crushed in by a mouse trap. It was pretty cool. This morning, I met our other house mouse, Mrs. Jingles. I was on the crapper when she decided to run past my foot and dive through the crack in the wall behind the toilet. She’s much smaller and craftier than Mr. Jingles so we may have to resort to poisoning the poor sweet innocent creature.

I added a video to Dawn’s last blog of our little cooking lesson. For all of you celiacs, Cassava is the answer to bread woes. For the other 2 of you that are still reading this, I am currently working on a blog that focuses on the people of Guyana. So that means more video and pictures.