Saturday. July is already over. Our time is Las Peñitas is going fast. We are now on two and a half months here. It feels like we just arrived. But, it also feels like we have been here for forever. It’s got quite a lot of “home” feel to it.
Today Liesl asked to start Unity (the game development platform) classes. She spent a few hours watching training videos on YouTube about it. I spent a few hours trying to get it installed on her gaming machine.
I had no real work today. It was great. Now that we have a weekend guy on staff it is making our lives so much easier. Not only do we have greatly improved overall company capacity, but we have coverage specifically over the weekends when traditionally I was stuck being on call and while things were generally not very hard on the weekends, getting suddenly interrupted so that I could never enjoy doing anything relaxing really wears you down.
This afternoon Liesl and I went out on our first photowalk together. I just used my OnePlus 8 phone with Ektacam to do more traditional street photography while she took the Nikon D90 with the 35mm f/1.8 prime (50mm equivalent) so that she could learn more about that. That’s the camera that she has been learning to use so that she gets the full control experience. She did colour work and I mostly did black and white. We had a lot of fun and walked rather a bit. We walked quite a bit through the barrio and to the south end of town past Barca de Oro where she has never been.
Liesl wants to go out and do photography a lot more often. She enjoys using the camera and going on the walks. It is a good way to get her out and walking, if nothing else. She is one that likes to just stay at home if at all possible. She’s pretty happy just hanging out in her room most of the time. So any voluntary outdoor activity is a big deal. Luciana wants to swim almost daily and wants to go to Carla’s pulperia at least a few times a week; and once in a while she will even walk the dogs with me at night when it is cooler. No one but me can handle their midday walk as it is just too hot.
It is amazing but I appear to be the only person here, Nicaraguan or otherwise, that does not instantly burn when going outside. Even all of the locals are amazed that I get no effect from the sun. I get hot, but not burnt at all. I really do not notice the sun in any way and I am outside more than almost anyone (because of the demands of the dogs.) I wonder if the insane amount of sweat that I generate from the top of my head acts like a sun barrier because it is always there and must impact the light passing through it.
This evening was some Genshin Impact with the girls. The three of us played for maybe an hour. We never get a lot of time to play. But I am steadily making just a little bit of progress. The girls did not have anyone come over tonight so it was a good night for us to hang out together. I have seen very little of them in the evenings this week because Michellez has been over so much and they are all so excited to have access to their big Steam gaming rig again and the Oculus VR system. Ivonne is really enjoying that, too.
I got to bed at a semi-decent time. My late night walk with the dogs went pretty long. We did about two miles before calling it a night. My watch has measured my month of July as coming it at just a hair over one hundred miles of walking! That’s a lot to keep up for a whole month. And I am not sure if that is tracking all of my walking or if it is only the time that I am running the GPS tracker, which is just a fraction of my overall walking time.
It is amazing how much I can just feel myself getting healthier being here. And we are making absolutely no effort to eat healthy food. Everything is just naturally healthier and there is almost no snacking or dessert. Having our own chefs means that we can order real food, including healthy food, and do not have to worry about how long it takes or the effort. Instead of going for chips because they are ready and I can just grab them quickly, I can text the kitchen and ask for a real meal, and ask for it to be delivered to my office. So I do not have to think about it again until it arrives and ready to be eaten. So I can just keep on working without having to involve myself in the food process.