Wednesday. The dogs got me up at the normal time and I took them for a walk. Mia did not seem to be in the mood to walk, even though it was overcast and relatively cool, so we did maybe a mile and a half at maximum. A short walk, but enough. Both dogs were able to do their business.
It was a good morning for a shorter walk since I have my Spanish class at nine this morning and it is a double length session, so a full hour, as my class for tomorrow had to be moved to today. This is week four, I believe, of doing Spanish lessons. I do ninety minutes a week of the Spanish lessons themselves, typically three days of one thirty minute lesson each. Then I have homework. And once a week I have a class on “how to learn” that I take with a neuro-scientist who works with me on techniques for how to learn things. I then have one thirty minute brain training session (homework) to do every day for that. Plus I do DuoLingo and Drops daily (both on roughly 540 day streaks) and Memrise as well (only about three weeks of that.)
I got to working on my Spanish at seven. I would have started much earlier but as soon as I returned from walking the dogs this morning I had missed a few support calls and I spent at least half an hour on the phone dealing with a customer.
I’ve been getting way too much breakfast the last few days with these amazing breakfast burritos. So today I told Dominica to just get herself one and I would just have her leftovers. Otherwise I get one of my own and her leftovers! If I am still hungry after half (or more) of her burrito, I can just order some fruit or something else easy and healthy. A burrito and a half is way too much.
Spanish class was exhausting. A full hour of being grilled continuously in Spanish is a lot for my brain to handle. Especially as it is no longer simple conversations, but rather it is specific verb conjugation discussions.
Today’s hotel excitement is that our septic tank is dramatically past capacity. This is not exactly news, but something today, or probably yesterday, caused it to back up so our laundry and kitchen waste water is sitting above ground filling the laundry area and covering the walkway! This is a major problem. Since we do not actually own the hotel fully yet, it is that much more of a problem. So we have to coordinate with everyone and agree on how we are going to handle it.
We already have one quote for the new tanks and filtration system. Just waiting on a second quote before pulling the trigger. We have everyone that is involved agreeing to a plan of action at this point, which is the bigger deal. We are ready to make it happen and hopefully it is something that can be done tonight or tomorrow.
For lunch today Dominica and I had fried tofu bites and house salads. Liesl had pancakes. Luciana had her regular bagel with cream cheese. That has been her favourite for quite a while now.
I had a busy afternoon of working on many small projects. It was not horrible but it kept me from getting to a lot of things that I would have preferred to have been working on.
This evening we had shrimp and fish fried rice for dinner. Our kitchen makes the most amazing fried rice ever. We can never move away from the hotel because we get the best food imaginable here and we are so spoiled. We will never be able to live any other way ever again after this.
Just for fun, our power went out this evening around seven, maybe just a little after. At eight we decided to go to generator power. We cannot run the air conditioning when on generator, but it is dropping down to much cooler outside tonight than we set the air conditioning to normally, so it is not a big deal overall.
So the entire hotel staff wants to go to Leon to the ZonaRosa to go dancing on Friday night. Dominica thinks that this is because I dance around the hotel so much than it is infectious. So we are bringing in a van to take everyone out. That will be a fun hotel outing.
I took the dogs for a late night walk in the dark. Only three of us with real power from our generators… The Simple, Suyapa, and Sua. All three of us are fully open for business. Roca has a generator but it powers their sign and not the hotel so you can see them, but they aren’t lighting up the street or offering powered services to customers. So I walked the dogs only as far as Sua and then back home. That should be enough, but it is not very far.
With everything going on today and no street lights, I only did about 8,200 steps today. That’s half a normal day for me! One of my absolute top “dislikes” about this area of Nicaragua is that the street lights are on regular power without any backups. So if the power is out, the streets are dark.
The problem with the power being out in Nicaragua is that everything just slowly gets warmer and warmer as time wears on. And the more you do anything, like run fans, the faster the air temperature rises.
A funny thing, to me, is that in Spanish we do not say that we have lost power. Instead we say that we have no light. Which is confusing since you can have light that isn’t from the electric. So you can have lights on but no lights. But that is what they say.
Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.