Some long weekends just aren't worth it...

Jenny, in her most recent post, mentioned that Chuck and Patty came over (I think Saturday) to see what the workers had done at our house. Then she said it was another story for another time. That time is now, friends! I've decided to tell you about the workers and their.... umm... work.

By now, everyone should already know that Jen and I moved into a two-bedroom house earlier in June. The house is sort of... I'll say "dividable" in that you can close a couple sliding doors and essentially turn the house into a main group of rooms and a guest set of rooms. That being the original intent of the layout, each side even had its own climate control. The only problem is that the A/C on the "master" side didn't work worth a hill of beans, so we wound up spending a good deal of our home time in the guest side, where it was cool (usually). Well, Chuck and Patty decided to do some work on the heating/cooling situation. The plan was to put in a swamp (evaporative) cooler (for inexpensive cooling in the dry time), as well as a new heat pump (for heating the house in winter, but it's also an air conditioner for cooling the house during the monsoons, when a swamp cooler won't work). And the new package would heat and cool the entire house, rather than have two independent units working. Sounds great, right?

So the workers came on Monday and started working. (I feel a note should be made at this point that the workers are Mexican just like most of Douglas and, thus, have the very typical "manana" mindset, which means there really is no sense of urgency when it comes to working. A job gets finished whenever it gets finished, and there's not much you can do to hurry things along. This mindset is the reason Jenny and I no longer eat at Denny's in Douglas; even the waitresses live by it.) They made some decent progress, and at the end of the day, they told us they'd probably be finished sometime on Tuesday. Tuesday came, and they didn't get as much done as they wanted. Wednesday, I stayed home from work so Chuck or Patty wouldn't have to spend the day sitting in our house with the guys. They showed up around 7:30, worked for an hour, then said, "We have to go to Sierra Vista for a part. We'll be back in the afternoon." So I sat and waited. And waited. And waited. And they never came back. Well, they finally came back Thursday and got some stuff done (I'm guessing; I wasn't there this time), but they didn't finish the job they told us would be done by close-of-business Tuesday. This whole time, they were just leaving their trash all over our yard and house, because apparently cleaning up after yourself isn't something they teach you in Heating & Cooling School. I can't recall if it was Tuesday or Thursday when they installed the control unit for the swamp cooler, but they cut a hole in the wall right above an old standing clock, without moving the clock first, so the little German-looking figurines on the clock were pulverized by hunks of sheetrock. This, unfortunately, wouldn't be the last damage they did.

On Friday they came back and worked most of the day, which meant we weren't able to change our drivers license addresses or do our grocery shopping. At some point in the afternoon, we heard a tremendous crash like something got broken. We went to investigate and everyone played it all cool like nothing had happened. After they left for the day, I went into the guest bathroom and noticed they'd knocked a chunk out of our tile countertop. That, apparently, was the source of the crash, but they made a point of NOT telling us they'd damaged our bathroom. I think it was also on this day that they installed the control unit for the heat pump. But the first hole they cut in the wall wasn't in the right place, so they cut another one, which left a nice, square hole in our living room wall. Then the guy wired it wrong, so the A/C control turned on the heat instead of the cool.

On Saturday, they came back to finish up. Jenny couldn't take anymore so she went across the road to visit with our neighbor. I was sitting in the kitchen playing a computer game, and the guy came back in to re-wire the heat pump controls. He fiddled with it for a while, then tried to call someone, then turned and said to me, "You don't have the internet here, do you?" I told him I didn't, so he wandered off to try to figure out how to fix his mistake. Meanwhile, the other two guys, who had come in to hang out while wiring guy tried to work, decided to watch me play my video game. And ask me questions about my video game, and whether I'd ever played Halo 3 (which, as far as I know, they don't even make for PC). Then wiring guy came back in and fixed his mistake. Then he fixed the hole in the wall, which left a big white circle on our wall where there used to be pretty yellow paint. Some time after that, I heard another tremendous crash. Jenny was still across the road visiting, so I went to investigate, determined to get a straight answer this time. It turns out one of the guys broke through the ceiling in the garage, leaving a hole in the ceiling. But that's not all. The guy broke through right above a lighting fixture, the kind they have in businesses, with the long flourescent "bulbs" in them. So he bent one side of the fixture, at the same time knocking out the "bulb" and shattering it all over the floor. That was the last straw for me. I called Jenny and told her what happened. Then I called Patty and told her what happened. Jenny came home, and Patty came over to check things out. Then she laid down the law for the workers. This is where it gets really amazing. Patty told them she wanted the white circle on the wall painted. They asked if she had a can of the paint they could use (I'm not kidding). Then they suggested hanging a picture over the white area (again, I'm dead serious). Finally, they agreed to go buy a can of paint. Patty asked them repeatedly who broke the countertop, and no one out of the four workers would give her a straight answer. So then she asked where the missing chunk was, and again no one would answer her. So she told them she wanted it fixed, and that the tile is 35 years old, so it might be hard to find. They went into the bathroom and ripped up a piece of the tile to take to Mexico to try and match it. BUT THEY TOOK THE TILE NEXT TO THE DAMAGED ONE, INSTEAD OF JUST TAKING THE DAMAGED ONE. So now there's one broken tile and one missing tile. Then she asked why they'd put up the old registers instead of putting up new ones, since they included new registers in their quote, and since they'd told her at the start of the job that new registers would work much better than the old ones. They hemmed and hawed and Patty told them to put in new ones. Then she asked about the hole in the ceiling, and they assured her they'd fix it themselves (God help us all). And then something interesting happened: they got out a shop vac and started sweeping up the messes they'd made on the carpet. This is only interesting because it was the first time all week they'd done it, and I'm not sure it would have happened at all if Patty hadn't been there laying down the law.

At that point, the workers left to go buy registers and paint. They came back a while later and replaced all the registers with new ones (which, I must say, work much better than the old ones). Then they opened up the new can of paint and tested it on the wall. Against all reason and common sense, they tested it on an undamaged part of the wall instead of on the mess they'd made, and it was the wrong color. So now there's a little whitish spot of freshly-painted wall about 2 feet below the big white circle on the living room wall. At least they had the sense to stop at that point and not paint the white circle whitish instead of the yellow it was supposed to be. Patty's plan was to just have Carla (the aforementioned neighbor Jenny was visiting with) doctor up whatever color paint they came back with, and paint the wall herself (Carla is amazing in that way. Bob Vila wishes he could be Carla). But they took the can of paint when they left, without anyone noticing, so now we're back to no paint. Their plan was to come back today and patch the ceiling and finish cleaning up their mess. They may be there now; I don't know. I'm just hoping they're gone for good when we get home tonight.

On Spiritual Solitude

Since I'm apparently using my blog to vent lately, and because I'm presently thinking about Kara's "church family" comment on her blog, and Kelly's "thought you found a church" comment on my blog, I guess I'm going to talk a bit about our present situation. Jen and I have been living in Douglas for very nearly two years now (our two-year anniversary is July 13). In that time I have established one relationship that I would call a good Christian friendship. Just the one. Unfortunately, he's in the Marine reserves, and he got deployed to Djibouti last winter. So he's gone. You might be saying to yourself, "Wow. One Christian friendship in two years? What's Josh doing wrong?" God knows I've asked myself that question more times than is probably healthy. But consider our circumstances out here. We visited the Baptist churches in Douglas and didn't find a single regular attender of any of them that was our age. Plus, the preaching was WEAK. So we moved on to Sierra Vista. We reasoned that churches in a bigger city would be bound to have people our age. And we were right; we found some people our age at First Baptist in Sierra Vista. We even started attending the age-appropriate Sunday school class in order to get to know those long-sought-for people. And they more or less ignored us. One Sunday I even made an emotional little speech about how Christians needed to stop ignoring the people around them, and everyone wholeheartedly agreed. But nothing changed. We eventually stopped going there (between the unfriendliness and the fluff sermons every week, and the fact that we had to drive an hour to get there, there wasn't much to keep us there), and we didn't hear a peep from any of those people. The only e-mails we got from any of them were mass mailings. When I e-mailed them to take us off their mailing list, they finally said, "Yeah, we noticed you stopped coming. What happened?" Keep in mind that this was MONTHS after we stopped going there. So we moved on to First Baptist in Bisbee. It was a bigger church, by southern Arizona standards (maybe 80 people each week), but again there was no one our age. Not even close. A few older people were nice enough to introduce themselves, and every so often would come over and say hi, but it never really went much past that point (though I will say that the pastor and his wife are very nice people). So we found ourselves in the sorry state I described in a comment on my last post: we'd come in, sit down, get ignored, listen to the sermon, and leave. The one big advantage this church had was that the sermons were actually GOOD. But we can sit at home on Sunday mornings and listen to good sermons on the radio. What we need is a church family. We need to feel like we belong somewhere. We tried Valley Bible Church this past Sunday; it's basically our last hope. There aren't really any other church options for us if this one doesn't work out, unless we want to drive all the way to Lordsburg, NM and look there. Valley's a pretty popular church for New Tribes people, but it's also a very small church, and there was only one couple there around our age. We've met the couple once before, and they're nice enough. But they're also missionaries in training, which means they're going to be gone soon. And we'll be back in that same lonely church boat.

So if a guy can't find a friend at church, where else can he look? Campus is full of young people. But a lot of them are fresh out of high school, and I'm going on 28, so our perspectives just aren't the same. Plus, the aviation department is sort of separate from the rest of the school, so the only other students I ever meet are other aviation students. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but this is also a very small department. I know for a fact that the only other Christians here are a 19-year-old girl (not the best person with whom to strike up a friendship) and a twenty-something guy with whom I've unsuccessfully tried to form a friendship.

What this all boils down to is that I'm feeling pretty lonely lately. Like I mentioned in my last post, if I have something I want to talk about with a friend, I'm out of luck. I don't want to sound like I don't appreciate Jen. I appreciate her very much. I wouldn't have been able to last this long out here without her. But a man needs other men to talk with, just like a woman needs other women. I think that really had a lot to do with how I was feeling when I wrote my last post. I'm lonely, and that feeling is aggravated by our utter lack of a church family, of a place where I feel like I belong. Where I feel welcome. Or wanted. I guess all I can really do is look forward to finishing the AMT program 16 months from now, because we'll be able to move on to the next place God has for us. Maybe I'll find a friend there.

"Ghosts appear and fade away..."

Okay, I'm going to admit something. The overwhelming majority of the time, I have no desire at all to ever go back to Michigan, for anything. Ever. That's not what I'm admitting, though, as I already consider it pretty common knowledge. What I am admitting is that, after taking the time to check in on some blogs this morning, I find myself wanting to go back to Michigan. There, I said it. I want to visit Michigan. I want to eat a #18 (whole on white, cold, with everything) from Intermission Deli in Bay City, then grab some Superman ice cream and take a stroll on the Riverwalk. I want service with a smile (or at least not a scowl) from wherever I go. I want to not have to knife-fight with enormous bugs in order to walk through my home. I want to hear english spoken in public by someone other than me or Jenny. I want to get caught out in a nice, warm rain. I want to see water when I'm out and about, without going two hours out of my way to see it. I want to hang out in a mall I can't walk the entire length of in 2 minutes. I want to know for sure where I'm going to church on a Sunday, without having to consider drive-time, sermon quality, or the fact that no one will talk to us while we're there. I want to be excited about telling something to a friend, without immediately afterward realizing I don't have any friends around to tell. I want to see green grass and smell it being cut. I want Bob Barker to host The Price is Right again (okay, that one's not really Michigan related). I just want to get out of here for a while. I think I might even NEED to get out of here for a while.

I know we technically haven't even left the United States yet, but I'm afraid I'm already experiencing the first hints of missionary burn-out. Or maybe it's just a mood.

Update

Here's what's happened in the week since I last posted. I was able to get that night solo out of the way, and it mostly went well, except for a couple small mistakes on my part. I still have 0.8 of an hour of night solo to log, but that'll be easy enough to take care of once the new semester starts. For reasons that haven't been made known, it was decided there will be no summer flights this year, which means all the college planes are grounded until the end of July.

We finished moving into the house on Friday, though we're still a ways from being fully unpacked. Our A/C doesn't work at the house, so some dude is supposed to come today and install a new swamp cooler (and possibly also fix the A/C; I'm a little hazy on this point).

Jenny's wrist is healing up well. She still has to take a painkiller now and then, but I guess it's bothering her far less than it used to.

And that's about all the news that's fit to print.

Jenny

Oh, and for those who don't know (which is probably everyone except possibly Kara) Jenny sprained her wrist over the weekend while we were moving stuff into the new place (not sure exactly how or when). She's on painkillers and wearing a wrist brace. Please pray it heals up quickly, so she'll be out of pain, and so we can finish moving this weekend. Thanks!

Joshua 1:9

It's 4:48 right now. I'm waiting for 5:00, because that's when the new Terminal Aerodrome Forecast (TAF) comes out. Unless something drastic has changed since the last forecast came out at 11:00, I'll be making my night flight to Tucson for 10 stop-and-go's. I think I posted about this before and said I just had to do 10 touch-and-go's, but I found out about 90 minutes ago that I'm required (by the school, not the FAA) to do stop-and-go's instead. They're essentially the same thing, except a stop-and-go has me bringing the airplane to a complete stop on the runway before taking back off. It's really a pretty minor inconvenience, but it's going to add some minutes to my already-considerable (in my opinion) flight time. I don't expect to be back to the college until around 11 PM. Another half-hour will be spent securing my plane and driving home, so I won't be getting in until maybe 11:30. That's not necessarily the end of the world, but it'll be some time after that when my adrenaline rush finally burns out and I can sleep.

All of this kind of makes me sound like I'm bored with the idea and I'm just waiting to get it over with. In actually, I'm finding it hard not to be scared of this flight. I've already made one attempt at it, and my nerves got the best of me so I aborted the flight. This is probably my last chance at it until July, though, because the powers-that-be decided there will be no summer flights this year, and the semester ends on Friday. So I either trust God and just go do it tonight, or else I sit and kick myself for a month. If any of you read this before 10:30 PM Michigan time, I sure could use some prayer.