A Series of Events-Fortunate and Unfortunate

*The Steamboat moms (and me), *Tori, Clark, and Me, *Tori after a day of Kiteboarding, *the famous booties...LOL!!!

I know, it has been FOREVER since I posted an update. Basically, things have been marching along following the status quo without much to note-teaching, tutoring, sponsoring cheerleading and yearbook, planning units, swimming, scuba diving, enjoying weekly family dinners with close friends, a little Spanish learning, and generally enjoying life in my current home on the Caribbean Coast of Venezuela.

But, the month of December brought about a few "events" that stand out. As is true for all my adventures-some of these events were odd, challenging and unfortunate (yet surmountable, nonetheless), while other events were outstanding, amazing and absolutely fortunate in their tenor.

Some unfortunate events included:

-the loss of 16 teacher's passports (including mine)...apparently the Venezuelan government Visa office had them but, for some reason, they could not "access" them to return them to us. It was a long week of planning "what ifs" such as applying for replacement passports and contemplating what would happen to holiday travel plans (just 10 days away from said "loss") if the passports were not found.

-my water heater catching on fire and filling my condo with black smoke and soot. The result was no hot water and no upstairs electricity due to a faulty breaker that had to be shut down completely for a good week.

-water outages during the Christmas season including the day I was to begin a 36 hour airplane journey to Colorado.

-my clothes dryer deciding that it was only going to use COLD air from now on-which is not an effective manner of drying clothes.

-my car battery dying unexpectedly in the airport parking lot. I had to use my amazing charades skills and not so amazing spanish vocabulary to get someone to help me jump it. Still don't know what is wrong....hhmmm...

-and a series of promising conversations by email and skype followed by a "date" that turned into a VERY bad merging of the Brad Paisley song "Online" and the bad date scene from the movie "My Best Friend's Girl" (To get a mental image of exactly how "unfortunate" this event was, click on the underlined/highlighted words and watch the videos that come up. WARNING-the movie clip is rated R so watch with that in mind, please, it is quite raunchy...but is not far from what my experience was.) I seriously kept looking for someone to jump out and yell PUNKED or reveal a hidden camera and give me a prize for not losing my temper=). The second date was cancelled by him in a text message (whew)-the reason he gave for calling it off was that, apparently, I have too big of a bootie and therefore I am not dating material. HAHAHAHA...priceless, I could not make this stuff up!!! really!

Now, hopefully you are still laughing imagining the look on my face during that final unfortunate "event"....and are ready for my list of Fortunate events=)!!

-a touching school-wide Thanksgiving dinner-every parent in my class showed up and some even had relatives in tow. This was followed, two days later, by an all staff progressive Thanksgiving dinner complete with too much tasty food and lots of laughs and dancing.

-my daughter's graduation from Florida State University which she celebrated with a 12 day visit to me in Venezuela. We did everything from Scuba diving, to caroling on a boat through the canals, to visiting a mountain artisan village (where we ate lunch with monkeys)....and so much more.

-success in learning to kiteboard, along with Tori, during our 6 day stay at El Yaque Beach on Margarita Island. We literally didn't wear shoes for 6 full days!!!! And we hung out with VZ world champion windsurfers, Dioni and RIcardo as well as a famous VZ reggae/rap singer, Baroni and his band, One Time. (click underlined words to see short videos of these guys)

-a wonderful evening with a Venezuelan family who lives near me, to celebrate Christmas eve. It was 6 hours of eating and singing and gift exchanging-and they included me in every moment!

-a surprise Christmas visit to Steamboat Spring, CO to see my aunts, uncles, cousins, dad, stepmom, sister, bro-in-law, nieces, and BOTH MY KIDS. Steamboat cooperated by delivering several beautiful snowfalls.

-a day of skiing and several nights out with the Moms of Steamboat who have adopted me into their group. I skied black diamonds (Judy "said" I could) and the nights out did not fail to deliver on new memorable moments to add to our collection from Mexico trips and my other visits to the Boat.

I am currently about to board my plane back to Caracas....it has been a perfect month! I start school again Monday. I am happy and at peace. I love my life.....and I love my family and friends both for giving me the chance to do this and for supporting me along the way!!! Thank you...and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!