I am walking on clouds... I was asked to do my first photo job ever! Needless to say how exciting this is. The job will take the whole of February and it is for our church's web site and directory. My mother has always told her five children not to try something new when you have visitors and this goes for new recipes, new route, new software or whatever is new for you on a day when you have spectators. But, maybe with age or may be because of hormones, I don't know, I've decided to be a tiny little bit rebellious and use a brand new photo editing software with the church's pictures and madre mia madre santa... it has so many possibilities on how to change a photo that my "photo purism" has been quite shaken. I still think that at least 80% of the photo has to be ready as you shoot it and leave at the most 20% to be repaired in the computer. I've always thought our church was nice and cozy and had a wonderful atmosphere for worshiping but my friend, I have just found out that for photo taking it's too dark, LOL!! Therefore, keeping my "photo purism" has been a real challenge. Oh well, guess my learning curve just received a huge load!
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Joel saw a possibility to quickly go away for a week. For that he came to me with the idea of a mini road trip around South of Florida. He quickly put it together and off we went. We landed in Miami to what we thought, to what we intended, would be a nice romantic quick get away, ha ha ha... in reality it was not fun at all. Everything or better saying, almost everything you could think of, went wrong; bad hotel service, I broke my brand new camera, a sun-set cruise that had all ingredients to be beautiful and fun was as boring as nothing else in my life has ever been and... Joel had gall bladder crises, ended up in ER, managed to fly back to Panama pain free and had a surgery two days after landing. In actual fact, all the above was happy ending, nothing terrible, but honestly... not on a road trip, right? Surprises surprises life brings us which reminds me that we have to enjoy life at ALL TIMES.
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A week after Joel's surgery, he took off to Bangkok on a 4 flight trip and one of the flights lasted 17:50 hours. Really, after we left Asia, both os us quickly got used to the wonderful short flights, even when going to Europe we have short flights, so going back to a 18 hour flight takes a lot of breath in breath out, no? I mean, what do you do for 18 hours, even in business class? You sleep, you eat, you read, you watch movies and after checking how long you still have, you find out that although you have done loads, you still have another 8 hours to go! Ai ai ai ui ui ui. His flight took off at 10 AM Panama time and at 6:15 AM he wakes me up to ask for some help; he was not finding his Brazilian passport, the one he used to come in the Country. Ouch, that was not a cozy wake up call! We both turned this flat upside down and no passports were found. The time to leave the flat to go to the airport was long gone, we were late and still no passport. He then decided to try leaving the country with his other passport, the French one. Although he has a Panamanian ID proving he is legal in the country, he didn't have the Brazilian passport with the entry stamp and they usually like to see that too when foreigners go through immigration. I drove him to Tocumen Airport, and waited outside until he went through security. Sent Alice a bbm and together we went on a praying chain for him to go through immigration smoothly. Amen amen, it was all fine. As I was driving back home, he gives me a call to suggest it could be in XYZ place. I got home and went straight there and it wasn't right there, but next to it, so once again, happy ending, yeaahhyy!
While he was flying, I went to a concert here in Panama City that was just awesome for words. It was Yanni playing and the producer had set the stage nothing else but right among the ruins of Old Panama. So us, the spectators, were sitting around 500 something year old ruins. Just spectacular!!
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It was my birthday this past week and I invited some friends for lunch in order to help me welcome my new age. I loved having them around because, as we very well know, when we live this life outside our original comfort zone, away from family, these friends are out new family, they are the ones we run to in times of emergency or in times of fun, so many thanks for coming and for being there for me.
The bird with a polka dot tail
I sometimes call Joel " Jacare" which is Portuguese for "alligator".
Cuba through a hole
A wall with an opened and a closed window
Reading through a V
Joel looking at Cuba
