Living in Belmopan is just so civilized. We have cable television, DSL Internet, shops that are open till 8 o’clock in the evening and there are tennis and basketball courts around the corner. As it’s a concrete house, it’s nice and cool. There are no creepy crawlies, very few mosquitoes (the town sprays against them), no snakes and (best of all) bin men to collect your garbage!

Living at the Dome is more like being in the Wild West in comparison. You have to rely on yourself and your neighbors for so many things. Finding your own solutions to waste disposal, catching snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, putting out your own fires (we once waited all night for the fire brigade…they never showed up) & now the police asked us for a ‘contribution’ to buy a car and supply it with gas, to patrol our area more.

So again, we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re better off relying on ourselves and on our direct neighbors, even for something like security. It seems to be the best system when you live ‘out in the sticks’ like us.

So that makes our list of what we’re up to at the moment look like this:

• Take care of a toddler and a newborn
• Expand our resort with 2 extra rooms (in what used to be our living space)
• Build our own house
• Look after our guests every day (we’re fully booked most of the time)
• Buy back our old store in San Ignacio (The Green Dragon)
• Revamp our http://www.greendragonbelize.com/ website. Making it a separate entity from the Belize Jungle Dome, as the travel agency ‘Green Dragon Adventure Travel’
• Sort out the deal with our future business partners Tom & Marge
• Set up security systems for the local area with our neighbors

Building work at the Dome. Hard to believe that in this space there will be a bautiful suite soon.

Can you believe that this used to be our kitchen? What a mess...

One of the nice things of living inland is that whenever you go to the beach, it's a treat. I would get so bored living on a beach all the time, but I love these little breaks that we take to the islands.

read more:

Take the Online Dating Personality Quiz at Dating Diversions

'Create in me a clean heart, O God.' (Psalm 51:10).

Today's Lloyd-Jones quote is the December 30th entry of 365 daily selections from a devotional book featuring words from the Doctor and edited by Robert Backhouse. It was originally taken from the Lloyd-Jones' book, Out of the Depths, and can be found on pages 71-72 of that book. Once again, although written years ago, the Doctor writes as if he were speaking today. This is no less true now than when he wrote it.

Nothing, it seems to me, is quite so strange as the way in which man by nature always objects to the doctrine of regeneration. There is nothing also, I sometimes think, that so demonstrates the depth of sin in the human heart as this objection to the doctrine of the rebirth or being born again. Read the New Testament Scriptures, and you will find that men objected to it in those days. When our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ spoke about it, He was always persecuted. People disliked Him for mentioning it. When He began to expose the depth of iniquity in the human heart and to talk about a rebirth, they invariably misunderstood Him. They disliked it then, and it has always been the same ever since.

When John Wesley was truly converted, he went back to his university at Oxford and preached a sermon on this very subject; and he was hated for it. Those respectable religious people in Oxford disliked this doctrine, and they made it impossible for him to continue preaching there. The natural man, the unregenerate human heart, objected to this great and wondrous biblical doctrine of rebirth and regeneration. And it is equally true today. People sit and listen to an address or sermon on what is called the fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of man and they never object to it. When they are exhorted to live a better life, they never express any objection at all. They say that it is perfectly right, and even though they are reprimanded for not living better lives, they say that it is perfectly true and quite fair and that they could do better. But if a preacher stands before the natural man and says, 'You must be born again—you must have a new life from God,' they ask, 'What is this strange doctrine?'

In the summer of 2001, commercial air travel was incredibly painful. Lots of delays, passengers were treated like cattle, every plane was packed, schedules sucked -- it was just plain a rotten way to spend any significant amount of time at all. Then 9/11 happened and lots of people stopped flying.

Well, we're back to the way things were pre- 9/11. Air travel is just miserable. All the old complaints are once again true, with new additions.

1. Food, or lack thereof. A bag of peanuts is a luxury. Airlines want you to bring your own food on board, or to pay them extraordinary amounts for things disguising themselves as food.

2. Code-shares. You no longer know what airline you're flying when you buy a ticket, or whether you're getting the best price. Code-sharing is a huge scam, and the customers are the suckers. How this officially works is that one airline buys a set of seats on another airline then re-sells them under their own brand at whatever price they want. Go do a search on Expedia, and more likely than not you'll see the exact smae flight offered by two different airlines are radically different prices. What's worse, in most cases when you get to the airport the airlines won't have anything to do with each other -- you get a rude awakening when they send you down to another ticket counter to chek in. Here's what happened to me Friday:  I was originally booked on an Alaska Airlines flight to Chicago, connecting to an Alaska code-share flight to Montreal that was really run by American Airlines. But between the time that I booked the flight and Friday, my connecting flight was removed from the schedule and replaced by another one that was NOT a code-share flight. So my reservation went into airline purgatory and my travel agent wasn't notified. Neither Alaska nor American took responsibility for re-booking me on another flight, and when I tried to check in Alaska no longer had a record of a connecting flight for me. In fact, it's worse: the Alaska agent checked me in for the Chicago flight and told me I needed to go to the American ticket counter to check in for the connecting flight in Chicago, but neglected to tell me that she had only checked my bag through to Chicago. I caught this as I walked away fromt he counter and my bag was disappearing into the back on the converyor belt. I grabbed the attention of the supervisor, who was very nice and called down to the baggage handlers to grab my bag off the belt while she called over to American Airlines to sort out my conencting flight. Fifteen minutes later, I had a reservation on a connecting American flight and a promise that the Alaska baggage handlers would re-tag my bag to get it to Montreal. The good news is that my bag did in fact show up in Montreal, but I had to spend all day wondering if that particular miracle would happen.

3. Airline staff who care, or lack thereof. The supervisor at the Alaska counter was the rare exception. My best guess is that airline personnel are so worried about their company going bankrupt and being out of a job, or the courts invalidating their union contract, that their thoughts are just elsewhere. I'm sure they're well-meaning, and that they have their own struggles with the state of air travel today, but they sure do seem checked out.

4. Security checkpoints. As if everything else wasn't enough of a pain in the butt, you literally have to run the gauntlet. Jacket off. Zip-up sweatshirt off. Shoes off. Belt off. Watch off. Cell phone, keys, change out of pockets. Laptop out of carry-on bag. Fight other harried passengers for enough grey buckets to put all this stuff in. Remember to keep boarding pass with you. Hope you don't get randomly spot-checked. Then on the other side, as carryons and buckets accumulate and run into each other, struggle to put your shoes back on, sweater and jacket, belt, watch, put the laptop back in the carryon, make sure you didn't forget your boarding pass (which you had to set down to re-dress and pack up everything again). Then get out of the way fast. On days I'm travelling, I find myself dressing for the sole purpose of speeding my trip through the security line.

Whil in general I'm not living my life to accumulate large quantities of money, I find myself increasingly wanting to get rich just so I can afford to buy a private plane and get a pilot's license, and/or fly executive jets, just to avoid commercial air travel whenever possible. It would be money well spent.