Anyone who has been to my home knows that Alexa controls my life.  No like literally she turns on my lights, turns on my air, she changes the environment for the time of day, she tells me my agenda for the day, and most importantly she tells me when my Amazon packages arrive (ps. I am 23 days sober from ordering on Amazon). Oh how I have missed her for the simplest of things but mostly for turning on and off the lights.  Our house is amazing,  literally everything about it is great…. except the lights.  Recessed lighting is not a thing here and if it’s not daylight it’s dark.  There are lamps of plenty but honestly once the sun goes down it’s pretty dark in our house.  Which leads me to missing Alexa. Having to manually turn on and off a million lights spread throughout our very large house is a real task. On more than one occasion I had to stop myself from yelling Alexa turn on the lights.  There’s so much we take for granted that just simply make our lives easier;  washing machines, electronics,  solid paved roads, garbage companies, cars,  and hot water.  Though this time around we had hot water. I clearly remember the frigid showers four years ago for 30 days.  So be grateful for the things that make your life simple. Life in other countries just tend to be so much harder in general. It’s true what they say about if you have the right tools the job is easy.  Here there are far less of the right tools for the job and far more hard working, innovative people.  For example the roads in Antigua are the worst things in the world to walk on but they are also sacred here.  The cobblestone roads,  while dreadful to walk on,  help keep the character and history of Antigua intact. There’s road work happening on our route to school and each day we’ve gotten to watch as men dug up by hand huge stone boulders, cleaned them off, set them to the side to preserve them as they reset the road and then carefully placed the boulders back into place.  No machine could do this.  This task wasn’t for the lazy it looked more like a work of love happening on that street.  Things that are easy don’t always bring the most reward or beauty.  Great reminder that sometimes the things that matter most are the hardest (physically or emotionally) to do.