“Jack Of All Trades”

Yesterday’s chores involved most of the skills that we need to live down here. First thing in the morning I (Tom) was feeding the horses and making sure they were ok.

Monthly reports to the Belize Tourism Board had to be completed and I had to fill out Social Security reports for the farm down the road.

Next on my task list, tear down the diesel generator:
• Replace a broken belt
• Check out the bearing on the electric unit (yup, making noise again, probably needs to get replaced, again)
• Clean the air filter
• Change the oil
• Fix the exhaust pipe
• General cleaning

Then I had to work on the small generator:
• Replace the pull start cord (which meant taking the entire housing apart)
• Change the oil
• General Cleaning

Gathering up dropped oranges and grapefruits was accomplished between downpours, hurricane Ida was passing by off the coast of Belize so we were getting heavy rain on and off over the course of the day.

Since the road is so bumpy I had to adjust the passenger’s door on Tinkerbell again. Now that the Georgeville Road is regraded, hopefully we will not have so many things falling off our vehicles.

At the end of the day, since I still had about an hour of daylight, I decided to make a coat rack for our front porch. Yup, the carpenter’s house always needs fixing.

Then, once the sun went down, I turned on the small generator so that I could fix my computer. It stopped booting up so I had to reload windows. Ugh, I think that my computer is dying a slow death and I may have to replace it. Luckily we have Marge’s computer as well. Now I have to move the accounting system to her computer to stay in business and figure out how to print from hers as well.

And to finish off the night, I worked some more on the website for www.kaaxtun.com – an education center in the Village of 7 Miles. Marge and I are helping Julio with the administrative stuff and setting up the web presence, something that will help volunteers and tourists find the park.

There is always something to do out here in the jungle!