News at last

Hello all, and thanks for the concerned enquiries. However, I’m pleased to report that rumours of my demise have been exaggerated, and we’re still struggling along here. The problem is a combination of ridiculous internet connection problems (as discussed previously) and a large number of guesthouse enquiries. The result is that most of the internet time I get has to be devoted to the enquiries, and the rest of the time is spent either looking after guests or tidying up after them! Sorry Betty, will try to do better.

Anyway, what’s been happening? The adoption police came and went and we now have our appointment with the shrink on 20th October. In the meantime, someone phoned us to offer us triplets. Yes - triplets! Aside from being borderline illegal, I really don’t think we could handle triplets – well, not unless we closed the guesthouse and stopped all our other activities, leaving us no income at all. If on the other hand, anyone would like to sponsor a family, just say the word…

We have a new camera, brought to us by a friend visiting the USA. If you’re interested, it’s a Panasonic Lumix TZ5 with a 10x optical zoom, a 28mm lens and 9.1 megapixels. Unfortunately, until we acquire an SD card for it, we won’t be taking many photos - but I’ll probably have some for the next blog entry. Here’s one of Kelly in the meantime.

Naice has been busy with her Tourism degree (someone here asked her if she would be a qualified tourist on completion of the course), and has been running all over the place evaluating local tourist attractions (conclusion so far – they’re fine except for the fact that they don’t understand the need to provide information or assistance to the tourists J). On the strength of her first presentation, she has been invited to do another one at a university showcase event next week – very impressive.

We have a couple of weeks without guests now, hopefully enabling me to catch up with my personal correspondence (sorry folks), giving us the opportunity to evaluate some other business possibilities, and maybe even allowing us the chance to get out and about a bit. Speaking of which, I’m going down the BR319 with Naice’s brothers on Thursday, to have a look at some land there. The BR319 is the theoretical road running between Manaus and Porto Velho (to be more precise, Humaita). On the map, it’s approximately 700km long; on the ground, it becomes pretty much impassable after 200km. This fact is particularly interesting, given that the land we’re going to look at is 250km away. I’m also going fishing with friend Charlie on Friday, for the first time in an age, and I’m looking forward to it. We hope to both go to Barcelos next week if we can, particularly as there is a chance I can do an article on it for a Dutch magazine (long story – later, later…). Further ahead, we have friends Dawn and Garry (maybe) coming to see us for Christmas, and then…well, 2009 is too far away to think about just yet. Besides, before we get to Christmas, we have a very busy November to cope with, with 14 guesthouse bookings so far (yikes). Interestingly, although December is looking fairly quiet, we have a confirmed booking for….December 25th. Well, why not? In fact, perhaps the Library Board would like to have the Christmas party here – should I get the beer in now…?

As always, will try to post more frequently in future.