26

That's how many pair of shoes I have.  I'm fairly certain that I have all of my shoes with me.  At least right now.  As I pack the Gorilla boxes to send back I'm going through things and attempting to empty containers so that I don't ship back things I don't need to spend that money shipping.  Did that sentence make sense?  I have things that made the trip here because they might be difficult to obtain in Honduras that I can easily replace once I get back to the States.  I am attempting to purge and get rid of those things that I don't plan on shipping back, and that I'm not using now.  Last weekend it was belts.  That is still on-going.  I haven't counted those, but I'm guessing I have at least 40-50.  Not changing sizes for 40 years (from age 12 to 50-something) meant that I had no reason to get rid of clothes and such.  In the past 4 years I have, ummm, changed sizes.  I'm working on getting back down to a middle ground.  When I tried several of my belts, they didn't meet in the middle by several inches.  Even the stretchy ones.  So, I am slowly making my way through the belts to get rid of the majority of them.  It's depressing to me.  So, to cheer myself up on this journey, I pulled out all of my shoes.  Yeah...

I have a couple of pair of shoes I wear to work and a pair of tennis shoes and a pair of water sandals I wear on the weekends.  Mostly I wear these shoes to work because I can here.  It was a major issue in a previous job that I never seemed to meet the dress code no matter how hard I tried, especially with shoes.  Finding ones that met my boss's approval that I could actually walk in was not in the cards.  That's one reason I have so many.  It wasn't for lack of trying.  So, here the boss is just happy when I show up in clothes that cover important parts of my body and aren't ripped up (some folks can't do this much) that he really doesn't care about my shoes.  So, hiking boots it's been.  Today I looked at my 26 pairs of shoes and thought about how I really do have some nice ones I want to start wearing.  I'll weed out the ones that don't fit as I go along.  Who knew that when one gains weight their shoe size changes too?

The co-worker who was accosted is now in the catch-22 of worrying about the guy he tackled (and who is now out of jail) coming after him with his amigos for backup.  There have been talks among the guys about weaponry.  We are not allowed firearms unless we have a residency card (I do, but have no plans to get any guns) and register them,  which tells the locals what gringos have what guns..  It's all a lot of drama I really don't choose to participate in.

Weather is dry and hazy and hot.  Not sure if the haze is a weather inversion, dust, or smoke.  I can't see the mountains on either side of the valley a lot of the time because of it.  Since I live and work in air conditioning I'm not feeling the heat as much.  It does put any plans to walk/run/workout at the  post on hold since the gym there is not air conditioned.  Always an excuse.