Different life situations.

The snow removal people were hard at work when we arrived at the archives today.  I guess if I want to go play in the snow with them I will have to bring my own tractor. 

There are many experiences on this mission that I never thought I would ever have but they keep coming.  For days now the Kennebec river has appeared to be solid but now and then a rift appears and perhaps that has been caused by high tide or something – not sure.  What I am sure of, is that the river is not safe to walk on here in Augusta due to it being swift flowing here.  Downstream it is more placid and it freezes over well enough for people to go out and walk on it.  There is a man who rents out ice fishing shacks and the people go out on the ice, dig a hole through it and fish through the hole.  I really doubt I would want to do this.  They have a rule here that if your car, snowmobile or ice shack falls through the ice, you are responsible for its removal from the river.  I cannot imagine people driving on the ice in a car or a snowmobile – sounds a bit farfetched to me.

We have begun to do the re-works.  The one book we did today was 265 pages and was single page and had to be done on top of the cradle.  We did it one page at a time with the level and every 25 pages we did a new focusing and we hope that this will please the auditors.  If not, I doubt if we have the courage to try to re-work it – do we have to re-focus every 10 pages – now that seems too much to ask.  One question we do have is – how come 5 books failed when all the others in the batch passed?  After all they were all done the same way – refocus every 50 pages and do the spirit level every 5 pages.  Logic would have us believe that all of them should have failed or on the other hand, all of them should have passed since they were all done the same way.  Today’s book took us 3 ½ hours to do.  That was a long haul.

All of our shuttles are in Salt Lake City as far as we know and we did not know how we were going to get this week’s books out there on Friday.  So, today, surprise of surprises, one box showed up and we loaded 20 books onto it – it took 30 minutes to load the finished files onto the shuttle.  What a relief to have at least one shuttle to use this week.

Met a young girl this week that is going through a divorce and she has two little children 4yrs and 2 yrs.  I came to find out that she used to walk to Gardiner, a town down river from Augusta and it took her 3 hours to walk there, go to work at Mc Donalds and then walk 3 hours home.  Her husband has the children through the week and she has them on the weekends.  A young lady in our church befriended her and got her a closer job – at Sears for over the Christmas holidays and now she has a job at Tim Hortons (coffee shop and snack shack type shop) that is only ¼ mile from her home.  Jobs are so scarce that I guess desperation caused her to walk 3 hours to her job and 3 hours home.  That is not an easy walk by any means.

I met a man at the YMCA who assured me that he was a healer.  I have been in many places where people have assured me that they are healers – like the apothecary shop in Shibuya, Tokyo, where the kusuriya said that to drink the liquid from the bottle containing a snake, would give anyone a burst of energy like they have never known before.  I did not drink it – just the sight of the snake alone was enough to make me run the other way.  I saw bottles of aphrodisiac being sold on the train station platform in Japan – usually bought by old men wishing to regain their vim and vigor – and they usually had a pretty young thing on their arm as they waltzed into the train.  In the gas station close to where Sara lives, they sell bottles of stuff that is designed to give you 10 hours of unlimited energy.  They were also selling bath salts – that’s the latest craze of the drug generation.  The man at the YMCA gave me his card – in hopes that I would take him up on his offer.  I went to his web site and was amazed at what I found there.  I am not sure if he uses hypnosis or auto suggestion to achieve his results that he claims, but one thing he does use is a crystal skull that is touted at being the be all and end all of experiences.  I guess there was something to the tale by Indiana Jones when he found crystal skulls and worked his magic on them.  I never cease to be amazed at the belief systems  that people adopt to achieve relief from every day ills.
He calls the Crystal Skull, 'Skully" and rents him out for parties.
I don't do skulls!