First, the water problems. It doesn't affect us at the apartment, but the area around Global is on a boil water alert until October 20. The shipment of chlorine didn't come from Guam as it was supposed to and with all the rain and run off lately, they found E. Coli in the water supply from a particular well. Just an example of how things go wrong here sometimes.

The election is coming up. They have elections every two years, I believe. You have signs up all over the place, most just advertising a face and a name. Only the locals are allowed to hold office and to vote. I don't know if we haole's are or not, but we wouldn't have a chance from what I've seen, heard, and read. Definitely the guest workers have no voice even though the latest redistricting and addition of two new districts was justified against the population including them. Does that make sense? If you want a seemingly truth-filled, but unbalanced view of Saipan politics, check out the Saipan Sucks web site.

Anyway, it rained Monday morning, but cleared up so I could go biking in the afternoon. I know for certain that I can do the final 25k of the race, since I went almost there and back. Monday evening we stayed pretty quiet.

Tuesday it rained much of the day, and I just worked all day. I also got a more detailed understanding of the bike race route from the organizer. I'm going to drive it this weekend. In the afternoon, I took the car to Global and Dave picked me up to babysit the kids. Tita has a week of class for her Masters after work. She didn't start until later on Tuesday and Thursday, which Dave didn't realize, so we arranged for me to watch them. Suka came out to pick me up when she got off work. Until then I hung out with the kids while Tita prepared for her classes. We talked and played bamboo sword fighting and Parcheesi. Suka and I had dinner at one our favorite restaurants, the site of our second date, and then went to the public gym to play badminton. It's definitely most popular with the Filipinos. We may have been the only non-Filipinos there. And some of them are very hard-core about their badminton. We were paired with a couple of nurses from the hospital. Since they were much better, we split up our teams. It was a lot of fun.

Today was really hot in the morning. I took the clear weather for another bike ride. I climbed much better than I have previously. I went along the race route and went much farther into the climbs than I was able to last week. I think part of that is simply that I've gotten over jet lag. I'm still not topping any mountains, but it's an improvement. In the afternoon I just worked and did laundry. The rain hit us again, also, so it was a good time to stay in. Tonight I'm going to a Marianas Dive meeting and otherwise, we're just planning to stay in.