Today will go down in Miller Family History as one of the more interesting days of our lives. I was up early this morning and went down to the dining room, set up and wrote for several hours. I have a noon webinar today so I need to be ready for that. It’s not much so I don’t have a lot of prep work today.
At eleven thirty I got on the webinar that starts at noon and did my sound check. Everything was well and at noon we got started. Dominica had the girls doing quiet activities and they were all set and she was sitting in the lounge chairs by the pool so that she was ready if anything was needed and we had the front door closed.
It was about ten minutes past noon when disaster struck. We had only learned about mosquito fumigation as something that the city does a few days ago. We have these guys who walk around with leaf blowers and look in our door and we have no idea what they are about so we always wave them off. Apparently they are the city fumigation crew and rather important.
Today, because the front door was closed and because absolutely no one would close their front door in Nicaragua if they were home, the crew assumed that we were not home. I was doing the webinar and suddenly, with no warning, the volume of the leaf blowers outside went from “so loud that you cannot talk” which is the normal volume as they go down the street to “so loud you couldn’t think and had to cover your hears.” It was quite deafening. And about two seconds later, the reason for the crazy noise was clear – they were fumigating our house with us in it!
They hooked up the leaf blower to the to our drain pipe and the poise poured out, in a thick smoke, from all of the house drains – the main one being the big open pipe that handles the overflow from the pool and the roof that drains out into the street! In only took seconds before the house, bright and sunny on a clear day, to be totally dark and filled.
Dominica grabbed the girls and ran upstairs with them to shut themselves into a bedroom with the door closed and the front, street-facing windows open. I had to keep on the webinar so ran with the laptop and head set, opened the front door and sat on the steps leading down to the street with the air from the street being all that I could breath.
After maybe ten minutes the air had cleared (thanks to not having a roof) and I was able to return to the dining room. That was really surprising and scary! Dominica and the girls remained upstairs.
A little bit later one of the water boys came to the front door, found it closed but apparently not securely latched and pushed it open and tried to get me to come deal with something. I waived him off, told him that we wanted to water and made it clear that I was working but he would not going away. I called for Dominica but the noise from the street was so loud that she could not hear me. I kept telling this kid to go away and was really upset that he had opened our door without permission but could not get him to leave.
I called for Dominica even louder and this time she heard me and because I had to be so loud it sounded to her like I was dying or something and because of the fumes she assumed that I was poisoned or something. So she came running so fast that she crashed into the edge of the bed so hard that it nearly broke her leg. She was barely able to hobble down the stairs.
She got to the front door and it turned out to be some punk trying to scam up to get money for something we did not buy. (We looked into this later and it turns out he is a well known con artists wanted by the cops for attempting to scam people out of water and petroleum money.) He was not going to go away easily.
Once we chased that kid away Dominica could barely stand from the pain. It was really bad and I was still on my webinar in which I was presenting. I had to hop off several times to help her. We were really worried that it was broken, she was in so much pain. She could not even walk by the time that I was done on my call.
So much of our afternoon was spent dealing with Dominica’s leg. We were pretty sure that it was not broken after an hour or two, but boy was she in a lot of pain.
Since Dominica was hurt I took another trip to Taco Stop and picked up her favourite dinner. That always takes forty minutes at least, they are so busy down there. At least I got there a lot earlier in the day today.
After eating dinner I went to La Colonia to pick up emergency grocery supplies as we are running low.