The kittens ended up staying all day. They mostly sleep in the daytime so it was easy for them to just nap away in the extreme comfort of Liesl’s room with giant cat tree, comfy bed, extra dog bed on the floor, and air conditioning. They’ve never had it so good.

I worked most of the day, there is a lot to be done. I drove Marcela to her church to pick up a care package, and then we stopped by La Colonia and I got the cheese that Luciana and I need to make our homemade mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner tonight.

The girls came out to run errands tonight. We stopped by Marcela’s house and they played with Happy (her kitten.) Then we went over to April and Ava’s house and hung out for most of an hour. We talked D&D, Mothership, and played a little Family Feud. Then we stopped by the pharmacy and I stocked up on expectorant (Luciana and I are both still quite sick.) Then we swung back to Marcela’s and dropped off some medicine for her.

Back home, Luciana and I cooked up mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner. It turned out pretty well. Then the girls and I settled in to watch Disney’s Zootopia and Zootopia 2 back to back. Not my favourate movies, but they are watchable.

It was a full day of the little kittens living in the house and it went well. They seem to be happy and have no interest in leaving. They are safe in there and we are planning on installing catios for them, there are spaces where the old air conditioning units were (before we installed the modern ones) so those old rebar cages should work just fine.

It’s going to be a challenge, but these are awesome cats. We are hopeful that they will work out.

It was a decently quiet day, but we are so concerned about the safety of the kittens that we basically have the dogs on continuous lockdown and we are scouting the yard all of the time to make sure the cats aren’t out there.

It was a very hard day. Not only is everyone still super sad, of course, and Luciana and I are still quite sick, but trying to keep the dogs and cats apart is exhausting and clearly isn’t a solution. The cats show zero fear of Clive, even after what happened, and freely came into the yard seemingly to see him! Thank goodness I had him on a leash, they came right up to him. He was terrified, as he had been every time that they were in the yard. I’m convinced he sees them as a threat that he doesn’t understand and only killed Chocolate Milk to “protect the perimeter and the family.” Because that’s what he does. Not because he’s hunting them or anything.

So we have a major issue trying to keep the yard free of kittens. By late evening, we had to lock the dogs up completely as the kittens not only invaded the yard for an hour or two before sunset, but once it was dark they just came into the house and took it over. They went all over the house all evening playing all over and having a great time. We couldn’t let the dogs out in their own house all night!

We didn’t play with the kittens in the house, but they wanted to be there. Even when we’d leave and go into a room with the dogs for hours, when we’d come out they’d be lurking somewhere. They have declared it their new home.

Knowing that there was zero possibility now of keeping the dogs and kittens apart, we took to drastic measures and moved the kittens into Liesl’s room. We made a make-shift cat litter box out of a cardboard box and we set them up with food, water, and toys. They are super happy and played and played until exhausted. Then they climbed into bed with Liesl and spent the night near her feet in a little kitten pile. It’s so good to see them happy and together as siblings, but also a heart breaking reminder that the third is gone and they will always seem to be incomplete to us.

It looks like we have more housecats now. These cats took to being in the house with zero prompting. It’s wild how much they just wanted to live indoors.

And they have been such a part of planning. The three buñuelos are so close we were struggling with the idea of separating them and were trying to figure out how to move them with us in the future. The girls were dreaming of future two decades with these three siblings living with them. We’ve been watching over them since they were so tiny and we failed this one. This is one we saved from drowning in such a panic.

Now it is going to be so hard to look at Orange Juice and ‘Mæra without seeing the ghost missing between them. Calling them the buñuelos will always remind us that the other little buñuela isn’t there. Chocolate Milk was the mirror image of her dad, who sits in the garage watching over them at night from afar. She had one white leg and one sleeved tabby leg reversing his own markings. He went to her when she was hurt and we think she was with him when she collapsed; he likely only left when we gathered around her. He called for her long into the night last night, it’s heartbreaking. He did come into the kitchen at one point, something we’ve not seen him do in many months.

Liesl was up early and still crying. She sat out on the veranda with Dominica and played Animal Crossing on her Nintendo Switch to try to keep occupied.

Luciana didn’t get up until the afternoon. She was feeling a little less sad than last night. But she was sad enough that it seemed to have induced an anxiety attack or something akin to it and she was unable to eat for most of the day.

I was mostly able to stay busy today and not have to think about it too much. This morning I was very sad. I went out several times and spent some time with the remaining kittens. I’ve not seen either of the parents today.

She fled and went to the neighbors. We searched for a while and finally found her. She seemed okay, scared for sure, but moving okay. Her dad came to watch over her, but she kept disappearing. After an hour Liesl came running to get me, they had found her laying in the grass behind the garage. She was barely able to move. Barely able to breath. It was clear he had punctured internal organs. We had already scheduled a vet for the morning, thinking that she seemed just fine or maybe a little limp. We weren’t able to catch her and she didn’t seem injured at first. But once Luciana had found her out back, it was bad.

We called every emergency vet that we could find and got one that started heading towards us, but it was too late. We got Dr. Jorge on the phone eventually too, but he mostly just was able to tell us how to check for vitals. We spent probably thirty minutes all standing around her crying watching her shallow breathes, the occasional cough or gasp, but there was no hope. Long before the vet arrived, her heart and breathing stopped. It was heart-wrenching. Not just losing such a sweet little baby, but also the timing. Just last night she had gone from timid and always avoiding us to playing with the girls like a comfortable house cat. She had totally changed and loved playing with us. Liesl had been sending me so many videos of her playing in the house last night. Exactly twenty four hours before she died. She had come into our yard tonight to get to the girls in the house to play like last night, but last night the dogs had been locked up. Tonight they were loose and found the kitten in the yard.

The girls were petting her and talking to her as she passed. Dominica and I stood with them in the darkness with flashlights as she passed away. This is so hard, the girls don’t remember Oreo dying. We weren’t with him at the time. We were in Italy, having been away for months and he was with my dad. He was old and died of heart failure that we knew would take him one day. And the girls were very little, Luciana barely over a year! Luciana has no memory of Oreo, Liesl only a tiny bit. He was old and blind for them and they had been away from him for so long when he died that it wasn’t so painful. But it kept Dominica and I from having another pet for much of the girls’ childhoods.

But this, this is the first death of a pet for both of the girls. This is going to be hard. This is going to be a searing memory for the rest of their lives. I remember so many cats that died back on the farm. This is so much easier to remember. They are older, and they spent so much time with Chocolate Milk. They are really struggling with processing this. They’ve been shielded from this kind of pain for so long. It’s so awful.

Luis, the night guard, and I (but almost entirely Luis) buried Chocolate Milk in a grave on the north side of the bitter orange tree that provided shade on the garage where Chocolate Milk spent her life. She’s buried just two meters from where she spent her life, just on the other side of the garage wall where she will likely never be disturbed. Right by the French drain where we first discovered the three little kittens huddled together for safety.

This will be one of the hardest days in my daughters’ memories. Sixty years from now, they will remember this clearly. This is going to be a pain they never lose. It’s so hard seeing them feel that pain that I remember from so long ago, and feel again today. It’s never easier losing a pet, a life you loved and cared for and tried to protect.

Marcela is very sad too. She was so excited to be getting Chocolate Milk. She loves cats and she had this one picked out for many months and had just played with her yesterday and was ready to take her home.

Tonight, all three kittens, Orange Juice, Chocolate Milk, and Chemæra came into the yard and made their way into the house and spent HOURS playing with Liesl and Luciana in the house. They had so much fun: both the girls and the kittens. It was a huge breakthrough. We are hoping to be able to make them house cats. They really want to be with us. They come running to us anytime we go outside. And the three of them are inseparable. We have decided to try to keep all three, they are such a team and all want to be with us all of the time.

We check on them all day long. We see them first thing in the morning, check on them throughout the day, often sit in the garage and play with them, and we always see them just before going to bed. Sometimes their mother, Fritter, is around, especially in the morning. And their dad normally sits at the far end of the garage and watches them from afar (mostly to avoid us, he is very skittish.)

The girls were so excited to have the night with the kittens tonight. They’ve never had cats that would play like this and they’ve been taking care of these kittens for so long now. To have them suddenly leap from stand-offish to full on snuggly, pettable, playing in the house was a really big deal.

As always, ended up being a decently busy day, but not terribly. But due to lots of problems with my tooling today, it was not very productive.

I continue to be really happy with my as-of-yet unnamed Chat application. We’ve had it in production for an entire week now and it is really getting smooth. Having it installed on mobile is making all of the difference, we really are back to parity with RocketChat which we were generally happy with previously. That’s very excited to have one of my software platforms get put into production so quickly and to be working so well.

This afternoon after some toxic troll got a little too much community sympathy I decided that my time spent on the Expat forum on WhatsApp just wasn’t good for my mental health and while I definitely feel that a lot of people appreciate my time on there, the amount of time and work that it takes to keep the group moderated and to deal with the inevitable, and often paid, trolls who are sent to make it unpleasant just isn’t worth it. I hate that I can’t be there to assist people, but they can post on my YouTube channel and there are other people to help them. It’s unfortunate that a tiny few had to ruin it for everyone, but the other option is heavy moderation and that would make me feel bad and people to be upset with me. So the only good answer was to recuse myself. And much like leaving Facebook and Twitter, it’s a weight lifted.

Tonight Luciana and I finished making the peanut butter ice cream and jelly custard that we prepped last night. This is definitely our best success yet. We’ve made ice cream before but we weren’t too impressed. And we’ve gotten making frozen yoghurt (froyo) down pretty well and make that regularly. But the peanut butter ice cream was very good, better than any ice cream we’ve managed to buy in the country thus far. And the jelly custard was, acceptable but weird. Jelly is just a bizarre concept for ice cream and it didn’t work that well. When mixed with the peanut butter, it was okay. But I feel that the custard aspect of it was very good. The texture was excellent. I want to try that with vanilla.

The girls played Hades (Liesl) and Animal Crossing (Luciana) while I did some work late night on Freehold before finally going to bed around one in the morning.

Unfortunately Luciana got to be the one that was sick today. She thinks that it came from eating too much pizza yesterday because she was so excited about having made her own pizza that she had five pieces and focaccia pizza is quite big.

It was a very busy day for me today. Since I got sick while working yesterday I was extra backed up on work today. Plus I slept through all of the morning. So today was focused on trying to get caught up on work since I lost so much time yesterday and this morning.

I did get to eat some more of Luciana’s pizza from yesterday today.

This evening the girls and I got a little time to watch The Expanse and they are loving it. We are well into the second season now.

My morning started with a power outage at the office in Belize City, so I had to hop out of bed to deal with that a little early in the morning.

Most of my day was spent in my office working away on the new chat application that we are building this week. I’m feeling so good about this one, it is amazing that we’ve gotten so far, so fast.

In the early afternoon Luciana and I spent an hour or so together in the kitchen prepping our dough for our pizza plans tonight. We are making focaccia pizza

All day I was feeling a little under the weather. This morning it was a little cough and phlegm. But in the evening, probably around five, I was in a meeting and it turned into a serious migraine (there was never a fever so it seems that that was all that it was) and it was so bad by six that I couldn’t continue the meeting and was getting nauseous from the pain. So I had to jump out of the meeting, took the dogs, cranked the air conditioning and went to bed.

I slept for two hours before Luciana woke me up to have some of the pizza. It turned out really well. I had two pieces and then returned right to bed. Luciana ate five pieces, which will be a bit much for her by tomorrow.

I slept the rest of the night in quite a bit of pain. We were unable to find any Ibuprofen around the house so I had to endure without any medication.

The search went very quickly. After looking at a few houses today, there was a clear winner that should have enough space for us. We hope to have things locked up by tomorrow and in no time we should have a new place to be living near the center of Leon, Nicaragua.

And we like being able to go out in Leon. Going from the beach is expensive and tiring. So we have started to look at having a place in Leon to use part of the time.

Saturday. We went into Leon today for food. Did some testing with Filmic DoubleTake and a neat idea but ultimately, useless.

Today was Sasha’s 12th birthday party and my first ever time going to Coco Calala the vegetarian restaurant in Leon, Nicaragua. The kids went swimming today, they don’t get to a swimming pool very often.

Tonight was our big night out with Allen, Ana, Ivonne, Paul, Dominica and I at Jalisco in Reparto Fatima north of downtown Leon. We like the food from there, but they had slow service, all food was wrong, they were out of nearly everything. A very disappointing experience.

We tried going out dancing tonight for a rumored 80s night, but it was not.

Puesta del Sol opens a new restaurant and cocktail bar today, and a pool just for guests. Looks interesting.

Our “new” security gate has been installed at the Simple Beach Lodge. The old one just fell down. Not very secure.

Dominica made advent calendars for the girls. Ciana is enjoying opening hers.

Allen is back from his trip abroad. He’s been in Costa Rica and came up by bus.

Big work day for me overall.

I’m really wanting a Fuji XT-4, but an Olympus EM1 MK2 would make more financial sense. Trying to decide what professional camera to get for the future of my filming.

Liesl and I have been binging Brooklyn Nine Nine.

Really starting to love using Final Cut Pro X. I’m learning it quickly and it runs so well on my M1 Mac desktop in the office at the hotel. It really makes my editing life so easy.

I’m taking a break from GoPro videos to play with my iPhone 13 with the DJI Osmo Mobile 3 gimbal, which is awesome. But I am not thinking that it is great as a vlogging solution so much as for filming more generally.

Dominica is out Christmas shopping in Leon, Nicaragua.

Today we had to make the really tough decision to forego returning to the United States for Christmas. If we were going to go we would have to have our tickets already and the cost and risk of doing it is just not plausible. This is going to be really hard on the kids, but with the omicron variant of COVID surging in the USA it is extremely dangerous for us to return. Not only is there the health risk of exposure, of course, which is the first variant that really puts the kids at risk; but the bigger realistic risk to us is the cancellation of flights. There’s so many countries closing borders right now, flights being cancelled and so forth. If we came home we easily would get stuck unable to leave Nicaragua, or stuck partway back, or in the USA unable to get home.

It’s is Sunday and our Internet is out again. A bit frustrating. But lots of dog walking today. Lots of video editing today including a new DriveWarp is done.

Happy thirteenth birthday to Liesl! It is so hard to believe that we have a teenage daughter now. How did we get so old?

The idea of birthday presents is pretty hard in Nicaragua. There is essentially nothing that the kids want and what they do want they get all of the time, like new video games and such. Liesl just got a brand new Asus laptop while we were in the USA and so for her birthday today she got the hand-me-down Nikon D90 DSLR with the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens that she loves so much. She has always wanted that camera and now it is hers.

It is a lot like the Canon SLR of my dad’s that I grew up with. It is the camera that I used as a child and always wished that I could have one of my own. And I did buy my own but not until I was about seventeen and then I bought my first Nikon, the N5005. The D90 is still a super capable camera producing outstanding images and the 18-200 lens, while nothing ground breaking, does an amazing job. That camera and lens have been my workhorse camera since Liesl was born, including my solo trip to Germany and The Netherlands in 2009.

Today is our first real day of just getting out to road trip in our new country of Nicaragua. We drove from Las Peñitas to León to Matagalpa today and visited the mirador, the cathedral, met up with Nohemi, and then drove back. We took the GoPro and recorded a new episode of DriveWarp that will be coming out in a month or so and we did some filming up at the mirador.

We had one of the biggest Thanksgiving parties that I can remember and we weren’t even in the United States this year!

It started off as a casual, simple flight of just two hours from Miami to Managua. What could go wrong? We’ve done all of our paperwork, we are vaccinated, our COVID tests are negative, we have our shuttle scheduled a day ahead, we have left ourselves more than four hours at the airport so that we do not have to worry about anything. Today should be a really easy travel day.

The plan today is to fly early in the afternoon, arrive in Managua, and meet up with Paul and Ivonne who have a van headed to Managua to meet us as we get there and deal with some paperwork with the lawyers when we arrive.

Was about to get in some videos while waiting on the shuttle which forgot to get us today. So we lost about forty five minutes waiting for them to come get us.

We were very lucky that everything fit into the little Nisson Rogue. We were pushing our limits pretty heavily. We used every last inch of the car and if the girls were any bigger they would not have fit with one of the big suitcases between them in the back seat and smaller carry-ons under their feet! As it was, everyone had to hold their backpacks.

The drive from Friendswood to the IAH airport was absolutely insane. We allowed ourselves a lot of time to make the drive and it was not enough. More than two hours of driving just to cross the city and the traffic was very scary the whole way.

We did arrive safely in Miami.

My day started at three in the morning when I had to get up and drive Diane to IAH airport so that she could get her flight back to Syracuse. It was almost five thirty when I got back home, bringing some Whataburger with me for the family knocking off essentially everything on Luciana’s “must eat” list from America.

I managed to catch a quick half hour nap before having to get up to drive the family into Houston to get our COVID test done with Auspicious Labs who were totally fantastic. We will be using them every time from now on. Not only was their price good, but the kids’ insurance covered their testing completely and our insurance partially covered ours. That saved us so much money and worry.

The testing was quick and easy and time for the long drive back to Friendswood. It is amazing how far apart COVID testing centers are. If you live anywhere but right in the city, you have nothing.

Today is our big packing day. Tomorrow we are headed for Miami.

Finally got a sub from Aunt Cookies, my number one food item that I miss when I am away from New York. This is the only food that I got on this entire trip that was not a huge disappointment.

Walking the dogs this morning was hard because of how messy everything was. They were pretty tired and not looking for the longest of walks since they had such a long and stressful night last night. They truly hate storms. Mia shakes and runs around and just cannot sit still. Clive hides and plays dead when he is not shaking like crazy.

After the morning walk I joined everyone for breakfast. Amos comes down early to hang out. Ivonne sleeps several hours longer than he does. She does not normally make an appearance until nine thirty or ten. But he comes down closer to seven. We had our coffee. For breakfast I had fresh fruit like papaya, pineapple, and mango, some yoghurt and a little granola.

Paul and Dominica went into León today to do party shopping. The dogs were more than happy to come into the office and just collapse. They are feeling the stress and need more sleep. They are so funny, their routine is so set in stone. Up at five thirty. Talk two to three miles. Come back and hang out with everyone in the restaurant for two hours. Be restless for a while. Then settle down. Then Clive will bark that it is time for real naps. Then I take them into the office and they both just climb on the bed and totally pass out until about two o’clock unless they get disturbed.

So I actually had a decently productive day it being nice and quiet in the office. I really enjoy the quiet and lack of interruptions. The hardest part is that the dogs need me quite a lot of the time.

It is hard to believe that Dominica’s big party is in just two days. And Allen arrives in Nicaragua in just four.

Tonight we just all hung out in the hotel lobby. We had dinner and visited before calling it an early night. The restaurant was quite busy. It is a Monday night on a post-holiday week and we had a very good turnout. The word has gotten out, we are the place to go.

The hotel was pretty busy even first thing this morning. We had a lot of tables for breakfast. We started out on the edge of the beach instead of at our usual table because some drunk girl had wandered in off of the street and passed out at our table. So we sat on the beach while she was removed. Then we moved to our own table because it is a lower priority table that we use so that we don’t take up the premium spots on the beach when the guests start to file in.

Sua, the giant restaurant just up the street from us, is still closed today, which I really can’t believe. Being closed Monday through Thursday is no big deal, even they probably don’t make any real profits for those days. And Friday is a shoulder day. Being closed on Saturday was bold, it would be seriously scary to be closed on a Saturday. But Sunday, on a holiday weekend. My gosh, that is huge. This is the busiest day for a month or two, at least. Being closed today is the worst possible timing for them.

Saeed came by this morning looking for someone to drink with. So I joined him as he ordered bloody Mary’s and I got mojitos. Eventually Dominica and Paul were drinking too. There were tequila shots, whiskey shots, it was a very relaxing morning. We hung out until nearly noon.

This afternoon I worked on my final DuoLingo achievement. The “Finishing #1 in Diamond League” badge, the hardest one to get. It has taken me about a year of trying to finally get that one. I had to put in about three hours of completely focused work on DuoLingo today to make that possible. It feels great to finally have all of that done and out of the way. Now I just need to finish the stories and lessons without any specific goals.

The hotel is so busy today. Totally sold out, but that is easy with the very few rooms that we have. But the restaurant had over fifty patrons in it for most of the day. That’s insane. That is standing room only around here. I hid in the office as much as I could all day. There is no way not to just be in the way with that amount of stuff going on.

This evening a storm rolled in. And it was a big one. Really bad timing with us having a full restaurant as the roof on the beach side is just awful and useless in a strong rain. It is the first big thing to get replaced once we fully own the hotel. But the challenge there is that we really want to move that to two floors instead of just one because we desperately need the additional seating capacity as the restaurant has just gotten to be crazy. The challenge, though is that it will then mean that there is a restaurant right off of one of the hotel room private balconies. We have not figured out how to deal with that problem, yet.

The storm was really intense and really terrified the dogs. We had to spend about eight hours trying to keep them calm. They really do not handle the intense storms here well.

To make the evening even more exciting, the new septic system failed from the massive onslaught of the biggest rain of the season and we actually had things flowing the wrong direction. So it turned into a plumbing emergency during a huge storm. Not a great situation.

And then, just to make things harder, the power went out. Not surprising as the storm was incredibly intense. So intense that we were afraid to go to generator power for quite a long time before there was so much lightning.

The staff worked so hard today, we got them pizza from Puesta and I got salmon toast for Luciana. Josue and I had to go pick it up in the pouring rain while wading through several inches (up over my ankles) in sludge running down the road. The water on the road was up to our hotel entrance level.

It was a wild night. Our maintenance team, not just Wilbur, was here much of the night figuring out what to do. There is going to be a lot more work going on tomorrow, for sure.

One of the big problems that caught us tonight is that the new roof is not on yet, nor the gutters put in. Because of that all of the water coming down in that space is going straight into the septic system instead of running into the street like it normally would. That is a high priority item for tomorrow.

Dominica was up at three this morning and ended up with insomnia so decided to just get into the kitchen and get to baking since she has cakes that need to be made this morning anyway. Around four she accidentally woke up me and the dogs. So we were all awake after that point.

By one this afternoon our new septic tanks were in and operational! I cannot believe how fast this crew works, and doing everything by hand. It is insane how much labor goes into this process. I took the dogs out for a walk just before one and as I was heading out Wilbur showed me the caps getting ready and the water already going into the new tanks. They had to put in the new drainage pipes this morning.

The hotel was quite busy today. It is great. Overall I would not say that the village is overly busy. But it is not slow. We had a good crowd all day, though. We were easily the busiest place in town (other than Suyapa, they really aren’t in the same league.)

We visited a lot earlier in the day. Then I put in some hours in the office writing and watching the dogs.

A lot of the evening was hanging out with Amos and Anahi. We even sat out on the beach and got to watch the sunset. I almost never actually get to do that.

Late this evening Amos had a big group of friends come in from Managua and we sang happy birthday and did cakes.

At ten this morning a local fisherman came by with a 27.5 lbs yellowfin tuna! We are very excited. Tuna is available from time to time now because the estuary is open now so tuna fishing is happening again. We are so excited. You do not get tuna just every day, and especially not a yellowfin. This is high end tuna. And thankfully Darwin was here and knows how to prep the tuna was starting cutting it up right away outside. So we are having tuna for dinner tonight! It is just under two dollars per pound here. Street price from a fish monger is generally between eight and fifteen dollars per pound for non-sushi grade tuna. So the price for us here is fantastic. And at that price it gets delivered!

It was Grand Central Station in my office this morning. I never had a moment to even think about looking at work stuff until noon. I really need an office that is not also the room in which everything happens. Every bit of people talking, people eating, showering, getting dressed, taking care of the dogs, and on and on happens where I need to be working in absolutely, unbroken silence. I’m not too distracted by the maintenance sounds outside, they are clearly outside and it does not normally interrupt my concentration. But the people in the room, any people in the room, make me unable to focus on my writing and other critical, highly focused activities.

I have been so busy this week that I have been unable to schedule any of my Spanish activities. So instead of having four days of one thing per day I am doing three classes just today! My afternoon is quite busy, and quite stressful.

This evening, after work, we hung out with Amos and his friend that came in from Managua and Ivonne. We did not stay up late, though. We went to bed around eight thirty! Everyone was feeling quite tired.

Dinner was tuna steaks and it was amazing. The lemon sauce was just fantastic. All so good.

I did my regular Spanish stuff (Drops, DuoLingo, MemRise) before falling asleep a little after ten.

Breakfast this morning was breakfast tacos. They are our favourite new item. We miss tacos and burritos from Texas and this really helps to fill that gap. They are going on the menu immediately.

Sadly I learned this morning that we have no choice and the second palm tree that we have on the north side of the property has to come down. And they are already cutting down this morning. First the coconuts all have to be cut off so that they don’t kill anyone standing on the ground. Then they chop down the tree bit by bit with a machete. At least I got a coconut full of tequila out of the deal. But I am so sad to be losing our beautiful trees.

I had a few meetings first thing this morning. So after breakfast it was into my office for high priority customer meetings. I think that they went really well.

While waiting for our ride to Leon I was able to knock out a few SGL videos and get nearly caught up. That was great. I tried to get them uploaded before we left, but only one of the three made it and I will have to save the rest for later.

Once we were on the road to Leon I put the GoPro on the windscreen of Leo’s taxi and recorded the drive from The Simple to Mañana Mañana in the market in downtown Leon which was pretty cool.

We got lunch at Mañana Mañana which I have not been to yet. I got the vegetarian panino which was decent. Immediately after lunch we were off to immigration to attempt to extend our visa.

The visa process actually went really smoothly. It probably took us an hour in a hot, open air office. But they were super helpful and there is no real way that it could have gone more quickly. Dominica had to run out and make some paper copies of things but it was quick and easy. Once we explained everything and they checked on us they actually told us to skip the complicated, and expensive, process of going to Costa Rica every ninety days like most people do and that with the stuff that we have they would extend us right now, on the spot, and that they want us to file for residency right away and then we’ll be able to do all of our paperwork easily right here at this little office in León from here on out! Just amazing.

Luciana and I sat outside getting fresh air for a bit while we were waiting for “Migración” to do the paperwork. I did a little street shooting while we were out there.

After we took care of that paperwork, Dominica, Liesl, Luciana, and I went back to the hotel. Ivonne went to the doctor’s to have her foot looked at and they determined that she had broken it while swimming with Luciana the other day! So she has to come back tomorrow to get a cast.

We got back and since we were gone most of the day I had a lot of work to do. I was on calls all evening, right through dinner. Dominica had paella made tonight, all veggies, that was so good. But I had to eat at my desk while I worked as I was on calls until around nine at night! It was a very long day.

We have someone that has to be fired in the morning. That is stressful for so many reasons. I hate having to deal with that stuff. Not that I had to deal with it, but it is still stressful knowing that it is going on. But it really is a situation that could not be helped.

I never left my office at all this evening. It was that busy. A big thunderstorm rolled in tonight and that made it very hard for Mia. She is off of her Prozac now and, in general, is doing quite well. Big storms are still very scary for her, though. She just gets so anxious.

This week is really proving to be exhausting. Not bad, just tiring. My day started with client meetings today. That took my till the late morning.

We have the team moving forward on the vent hoods for the kitchen. As far as we know, that is the last roadblock to getting the hotel fully operational and licensed. We have all agreed that we need to just keep this moving and get it over the line so that we can get this hotel fully invested and operational. There is just so much waiting on getting all of the paperwork done. We can’t let small financial squabbles slow it down; which, of course, is what they are counting on happening.

We are heading into León tomorrow, Dominica, Luciana, Liesl, Ivonne, and I. We are going to attempt to renew our visa there instead of going to Managua on Friday. Right now the plan is that we have to spend an entire day on Friday doing it in the capital. But maybe we can get León to let us do it. We really hope so because an hour in León that is only thirty minutes away is so much better than losing absolutely the entire day to go to Managua. But the chances that they will do it are not great, so we are taking a big risk that we will lose a good portion of the day tomorrow and then still losing all of Friday.

After work this evening Valentina bought a used Nikon N75 film camera. This is an SLR from 2003. Similar to my old N5005 but so much newer with so much newer technology. Sometimes I miss film photography, but I never forget how much it costs, how long it takes, how few pictures you get to take, and what a huge pain it is. And in the end, you always digitize everything to make it usable anyway which means you are still doing digital photography, just in an insanely slow and expensive way.

The big restaurant down the street is still closed today. When I took the dogs out for their late walk tonight, the bar across the street was closed, too. Very strange. Town felt extraordinarily quiet and empty tonight. Both big bars totally closed.

Going to bed early tonight so that I can have a busy morning of work before going to León in the late morning.

The hotel remains pretty busy today. We found out that the restaurant down the street that is closed is closed because they are quarantining because multiple people have come down with COVID there. So that is a worry not only because those people are sick, but also because our staff naturally has a lot of contact with that staff and there is a very high possibility of cross contamination just because everyone knows everyone else and they all hang out together. We have not seen anyone from that restaurant around town really, but apparently the exposure was some time ago. We are not too thrilled about that, especially that they knew that people were sick (we have been told) and they made them work anyway.

My morning was fine and I was just doing normal work until probably early afternoon. But then I was tasked with doing all of the dealing with a dispute about range hoods for the kitchen and it ended up turning into a very stressful and drawn out evening of people yelling about that from early afternoon until quite late at night. I ended up losing my entire night to dealing with that and even when it was done it was all very stressful and there was no way for me to work on my book or on Spanish or whatever. I was not too happy about that.

Leo picked everyone up a little after nine and they were off to Managua. They are going to be gone all day, there is a lot of shopping that needs to be done. We are replacing the Whirlpool washing machine that does not work at all and getting a new washing machine to back it up. Something quality this time.

I am watching the dogs all day today, which they are okay with. They want more time with me anyway.

Getting any work done today was really hard. When no one else is around to watch the dogs, my time gets taken up by how needy they are all of the time. So I mostly gave up on doing real work and did what little things that I could fit in. Liesl and Luciana came down and played video games in the office for a few hours, too.

We got a good rain this afternoon which meant that the dogs were scared and needed a lot of attention, too. I did manage to get some videos done for YouTube, at least.

The shopping in Managua was successful. A replacement Whirlpool was obtained as well as a new LG (which is a vastly superior washing machine, anyway!) And loads of food. And a new razor for me so that I can actually shave my head quickly and easily and not miss loads of hairs as I do it.

It was late, maybe eight, when they returned from Managua. I had already fed the kids. Dominica had ordered ahead from the kitchen and brought me a leftover burrito that she had from a Mexican restaurant in Managua.

Michellez came over for homework help tonight. She takes an English class but they have no teacher so they get assigned random homework that they have to do but there is no one to tell them if they are doing it right or to teach them what to do. It is a mess. To make matters worse, there are no Nicaraguan to English translation apps and in many cases Nicaragua does not speak traditional Spanish. So many common things like a belt or a tuxedo or some common foods have different words here. And it is not uncommon for Nicaraguans to not even be aware of the standard Spanish words for things. So even looking up translations can be really difficult, if not impossible. There are nearly zero English speakers in this village so it is all extremely challenging.

Edit: I wrote that when we were told that they were closed for maintenance. We found out on Tuesday that they were actually just covering and they were really closed because they had a continued COVID exposure after having made someone keep working while sick and now it was spreading and they had no choice by to close. So it is pretty crappy.

Walked the dogs this morning. Only about two miles. A pretty light walking morning.

The big event this morning is that one of our guests was out in the ocean and came into contact with a manta ray which stung her foot. Thank goodness it was her foot. Rays are super dangerous and can be lethal at times as they can cause you to go fully into shock. It is very painful. It took a few hours of care at the hotel to get her to be okay. You have to “cook” the stung area to deactivate the poison as heat breaks it down. It is a careful balance between stopping the poison and burning the person who has been stung. And you have to pull out the stinger, as if it was from a giant bee.

No one is traveling to Managua today. But there is another trip on Wednesday to do some shopping for things that are less critical. And then Dominica, the kids, and I are all going to Managua on Friday to go to deal with our visa renewals. In theory that will be easy, just requesting thirty more days. Then we will go to Costa Rica the following month to do our ninety day renewal. Luciana is looking forward to spending time in the big city. She likes cities and city amenities. There is a food park that she wants to explore, so our plan is to check that out while we are there since we have nothing except the visa renewal to do on this trip into the city.

Ivonne went into León to go shopping today, some for groceries, but also to get a bike. She got an aluminum frame Trek! Talk about a nice bike! I am jealous. I’ve always been an aluminum bike guy ever since I bought my Schwinn in 1992. That’s always what I rode.

Work on the new septic system continued in earnest today. There is so much digging to do, it is crazy. They have to go down so far. The guys digging are below the ground level while doing it. They hit big rocks today and discovered that this used to be a leech bed. Not a good one, a poorly constructed one. Probably long ago. So they are digging all of the big lava rocks out now to make room for the new system.

I went out for a walk today with the Nikon D90 and the 18-200mm zoom and did about a hundred and fifty pictures around town. I got a few good ones. The sun was already a bit lower than I would have liked so I did not get nearly as much as I would have wanted.

Just a normal night in at the hotel tonight. There is a crew here working all through the night so it is pretty loud.

So it was really a “dog day” for me. I pretty much got stuck in my room with the dogs for the entire day. If I did anything else Mia would be mostly okay, but Clive would just whine and look at me sadly until I returned and snuggled him. So I was napping and on my phone for a lot of the day. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

Dominica had to bake this morning as there is a birthday at the hotel today and she is making the cakes. That took nearly all of her morning. The kitchen teams wants her to teach them how to bake. Apparently not many people here know how to bake things like cakes.

I did try to go out for a nice walk today to get some exercise and as soon as I made the attempt the dogs demanded that they come with me. So no luck on my plans. I did already have the GoPro set up to take with me, however, so I strapped it on anyway and did a time lapse of walking the dogs. Not a long walk because there were just too many cars and it was exhausting to manage the dogs, traffic, and the camera all in the middle of the day. Not the best footage, but it is interesting and gives something of a view of the area around the hotel.

The caterer for Dominica’s upcoming birthday party gala at the hotel stopped by today. Yes, we are catering an event at our own hotel and restaurant because we are shutting it all down so that all of the staff can attend, along with all of our staff from Managua and Matagalpa. So we are expecting quite a lot of people as most everyone will be bringing spouses and kids. We are setting up the parilla on the beach and Paul will be BBQing. That event is in eleven days, just two days before Allen gets here. Next week is going to be super busy around Las Peñitas.

Luciana and I were talking today and she is really feeling the itch to get traveling again. It was such a big part of her developmental years, the lack of traveling now is really noticeable to her. This is a little weird, of course, because we just traveled all over the US from Dallas to New York to Orlando to Miami and then flew down to Nicaragua and now we are here in Central America where in some ways every day feels like traveling, of course. But we have been here for three months now, and we rarely leave the village and when we do it is only to go to León so Luciana has already developed a very strong feeling of Las Peñitas just being “home” and not qualifying as travel in any sense.

The two places that Luciana has expressed really wanting to go are to Guatemala where she wants to visit some amusement parks (they have big water parks and a big dinosaur park up north) and to return to Spain and Greece both of which we lived in so long ago that she does not remember that much about them.

There is a small waterpark in León that we hope to be able to take the girls to soon. And there is a small dinosaur park near Managua that we need to try out. Luciana is very interested in spending more time back in Managua. In her words she really enjoys “modern cities”. She things that San Salvador, San Jose, and Tegucigalpa look interesting. She is hopeful that for our visa renewal that we will go spend some time in San Jose so that she can explore the city. I am as well, I think that we would enjoy a city break and there should be a number of museums to hit, too.

Right now, our plan is that we will be down there in mid-September.

Tonight we had a mini birthday party for our new head chef. We waited until the restaurant had closed and did singing and cake around nine. Everyone really liked the cake, it is not the kind of thing that you really find here very much.

We went to bed relatively early tonight. Tomorrow Paul, Dominica, Ivonne, and Leo have to go to Managua. We are exchanging the broken washing machine (we have owned it only three months) for one that works (Dominica is pretty annoyed that no one listened to her about not buying a Whirlpool and it broke in weeks and Whirlpool has absolutely no idea how to fix it already) and buying a second (non-Whirlpool) washing machine so that we have extra capacity and a backup unit for when the main one inevitably fails again (in a few weeks, probably.) They will leave around nine in the morning. Tomorrow is Sunday so our busiest day of the week and the hardest day for us to use the restaurant ourselves so a good day for everyone to be gone. I’ll be staying home with the kids and the dogs and getting some writing done.

My first meeting of the morning was with a customer at seven thirty. Yes, getting the day started for real. That one went super awesome and was my cause for concern yesterday because I did not know what they wanted but rather than being bad news, it was exceptionally good news. And it took up most of my early morning.

Then I had my Spanish language memory training lesson at nine. After than the marketing team had a meeting at ten thirty. Then a sales meeting at eleven. It was getting close to noon before I had more than a few minutes to get away from all of the meetings. In between some of the meetings this morning I did manage to get breakfast tacos in the restaurant, at least.

We had our second person, thousands of miles away from the first one, get diagnosed with dengue fever this morning! He’s been sick for several days already, so he might be a week into it at this point.

Major construction going on at the hotel today. We have to replace the septic system or, more accurately, we have to add another one. So today the “trash area” as we call it is being torn out and very sadly, the palm tree that lives there is being cut down. Then a new septic tank is being installed. And a new ground floor put in on top of that. A pad for our two generators (we only own one so far) is going in there so that they will have a permanent home someplace safe and quiet away from most of the hotel. Then a roof is being built over it all so that when it rains the water does not just go directly into the septic system causing it to overflow. It is a major project.

For lunch today the new head chef made chicken cordon bleu for the staff (and Paul.) She is stepping up the game around here.

With the tree being removed, I am now very, very inclined to build up over top of the laundry and trash area and extend at least partially over the entrance walkway and make a room back there. Whether it is a hotel room or just one of our private rooms, I am not sure. But the street is very interesting where we are and having a room back there with a view of the hotels, a little view of the ocean, and all the visibility into the late night bar and street scene. Would certainly make me a lot more connected to the village.

Tonight is our team night out. It turns out that we are going out to celebrate everyone being so happy because the one mean team member who was making everyones’ lives awful got herself fired and everyone is just so relieved.

Around six Paul had some friends over and I hung out with them until about seven. We just sat out on the beach having beers and tequila. Our staff started straggling in around six thirty to be at the hotel ready to go out tonight. I skipped dinner because there was no time to play host and to get to the showers before it was time to go.

I showered at seven thirty and got actually dressed up for only like the third time in three months. Since I wrapped up all of my customs stuff in Managua nearly three months ago I have only left Las Peñitas once in all of this time and that was to go to León to deal with the bank and that was just for one to two hours and I did not even manage to eat anywhere. So this is my actual first time getting to go out and actually do something since moving to Nicaragua!

Leo and one of his driver friends were at the hotel at eight and we were ten of us heading out: Paul, Dominica, Ivonne, Juan Carlos, Ingrid, Jaho, Hernan, Erika, Wilbur, and, of course, me. We went into León downtown and started the night at the Gecko Bar. We were there for quite a while. We got several rounds of drinks (that were not very good) and an order of variados which is basically a big tray of typical Nicaragua bar food samplers. A very popular thing here.

Food and drinks took forever. We moved on to 23 Bar which was the originally planned destination. There it was more drinks but nearly everyone went dancing. Paul, Wilbur, and Ivonne had all already gone back to Las Peñitas making it an early night. We stayed out until after midnight but could not be out super late as some of the staff have to work tomorrow and some have classes. Leo came and got us and we were on our way back and were home before one in the morning. Ingrid was the only one to stay behind and checked in that she was home safe at two thirty.

Overall today was pretty great. Really positive news from work on all sides with several fully confirmed new customers and a couple of “not completely official” but rapidly moving forward “final stage” customer components. Super productive overall just getting loads of stuff done which makes me feel great in general. Then a nice evening of hanging out with the locals before an awesome night out with about half of the team on the town for my first time out dancing since I last went with Rachel in the first weeks of 2020!