Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Monday, back to “work” today.  Today our house was overrun with kids from the neighbourhood.  They came early, much earlier than they normally do.  We have no idea what was going on with the school today but it seems like maybe there was no school or it was a half day or something.  But we ended up having the kids from around town coming to the house for more than seven hours today!

It is starting to be a bit of a problem.  We cannot exactly schedule kids to be here when it is convenient and we do not have a good idea of the factors involved so that we do not know when they are likely to come or when they are going to leave and which ones are probably going to show up. There is a core group of girls that normally comes no matter what and we have learned to expect them.  But if they show up for an hour or for the entire day, we have no way to know.

So today was nearly a full interruption for the entire day and Liesl had almost no way to do any school today.  Both girls were very exhausted and wishing that kids would just go home as they had their own things that they wanted to do for much of the day.  Having no control over when people come to visit you is a bit tough for them.  But they did have a lot of fun getting to play most of the day.  Dominica does not handle the visitors well and was really exhausted by the end of the day.

Because it continued to rain for basically the entire day all of the kids were indoors for pretty much the whole day, too, which did little to help matters.  We have not seen too many kids for days because of the rain but apparently they have gotten to the point that they are going to go out regardless of all of the rain coming down.

This has been a lot of rain.  Hard to believe that it has been most of a week with little to no real break in the rain.  It is causing problems with Dominica’s laundry schedule as there is no way to dry anything.

Today is Sunday and Mother’s Day.  Dominica was up first, her internal clock rarely lets her schedule shift at all.  The girls had stayed up to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day at midnight before going to bed and then had stayed up to work on Mother’s Day cards for her.  So they, and I, slept in this morning.

It is another raining day here in Transylvania.  Our time of sun appears to be over.  Suddenly we have gone from never seeing rain to seeing nothing but rain.  Three whole days of rain!

Just a lazy day around the house for us.  I did some work in the kitchen.  Dominica attempted to have the day off as much as possible.

This evening, at eight, I went over to buy milk as we do about every other day.  This time neither of the girls wanted to go over with me, which is unusual.  Because I was alone I got roped in to drinking with the farmer. He started pouring wine and put on the television then some locals showed up and it turned into several hours of drinking with the locals from around the village.  There is no cell service in the village because of the hills so that is always a bit of a challenge because there is no way to communicate back to home when I am out.  I had run the milk back to the house to let Dominica know where I was but was unable to talk with her while I was out.

I was pretty exhausted by the time that I got home, even though it was before eleven.

We had another day of rain today.  Thankfully, this time there was no loss of power or Internet all day.  There was no storm, just a steady rain for the most of the day.  There does not appear to be any shortage of water in this part of the world.  Even when we had been here with warm weather and no sign of rain for some time things were lush and green and the water was always flowing.  Now things are downright wet.

It is Saturday today and we are taking the day as one to relax.  Dominica spent most of the day reading.  Liesl and Luciana spent most of the day watching videos or playing video games.  I discovered a few new YouTube shows that I really like, one on science and one on being British, and watched a bit of both of those.

In the late afternoon the sun finally came out, but it was a little chilly and wet and the village kids were not out playing so the girls stayed home all day.

This evening with dinner we started watched Full House and managed to make it for a few episodes.  We are getting close to wrapping up the first season now, I think.

The girls really wanted to bake a cake and talked Dominica and me into letting them do that late in the evening.  So we all went out to the kitchen and made a cake Texas Sheet Cake, but it would be too hot to eat tonight and would have to sit until the morning.

After that the girls and I watched Bits & Bytes which Luciana had been asking to watch all day.  We have only two episodes left of the entire series!  So we watched those and finished it up tonight.

After watching the show, the girls played for just a little bit until it was midnight.  Then they ran out and wished their mother a happy mother’s day and set about working on Mother’s Day cards for her.  I tried to go to bed at this point, I was feeling tired.  But, as always, I never get to actually go to bed until everyone else in the house is asleep.  The lights never got shut off, people never stopped talking and I was constantly called from bed to kill a bug, fetch something from the car, get water, or whatever.  By the time that I actually was allowed to go to bed, it was two in the morning!

It is Friday and our storm from yesterday has continued into today.  We had a little sun in the morning but the rain and thunder rolled in fairly quickly and we had a chilly, rainy day all day long.  We did lose power but for less than five minutes today and we had only a trivial Internet disruption.

This morning Liesl was doing school and then decided to do computer class, which is watching the amazing Canadian show from 1983 Bits & Bytes, with me.  We started with one episode but Liesl was so enamoured with the series and so into it that we ended up watching eight episodes together today!  This is where taking a page from the unschooling book worked out and since Liesl was showing an interest in learning about computers today, that’s what we did.  She loves this series and seems to be learning a lot about computer basics.

I had a busy afternoon created from spending so much time with the girls doing school today.  Lots to catch up on.

Everyone did their own thing this evening.  I stayed at the computer worked until very late.  Luciana fell asleep early.  Liesl and Dominica stayed up for quite a while watching shows on their own.

We are staying in the village this weekend, no trips or plans for us.

Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the Waste Watcher going into production.  A rather large life milestone for me.

Spent the morning writing and posting.  Pretty normal.  But it was a short morning as we had errands to run.

We finally made it out to do shopping today.  We drove out to Reghin late in the morning and managed to get to Kaufland which was actually open today.  This was glorious as we managed to actually get groceries and stock up on things that we need.    We were so happy that this finally worked today.

When we got to the grocery store the girls spotted a playground near the grocery store so after we were done shopping we headed over there to let them play for a while.  When we got there it was warm and sunny.  We were at the playground for probably about half an hour.  Towards the end the sun went away suddenly and the temperature dropped a lot and a few drops of rain fell, but Dominica and I were sitting under a tree so really only felt a drop or two in total.

We were going to leave the Luciana spotted another playground in the same park and the girls had to test it out so we went over for them to explore that as well.  We got a few minutes there when I felt the air change and said that we needed to go.  Luciana stalled a few seconds  instead of coming immediately and it caused just enough of a delay that we went from slightly chilly to running for cover of a large tree and the sky opened up and it began to pour and, a few seconds later, to hail.

We were close to our car, close enough that the seconds that Luciana had stalled would have allowed us to have gotten to it.  Now we were stuck in the cold, windy, wet and hail under a big tree with a few other people who had gotten trapped.  We did not even have jackets as it had been a warm summer-like day when we had gone to the playground!

Eventually we were getting so cold and wet from the storm that we decided that we just had to make a dash for the car leave our cover of the tree.  This made for us all getting totally trenched and our shoes getting wet as the parking lot was under water.  But we got to the car and got the heater running and soon headed home.

On the way home, as we neared the village, we noticed that it had not rained there, only in Reghin.  Once home, it still felt like the almost summer day that it had been all morning leading up to the storm.

Today ended being an adventure in lost power and Internet access.  Our first real storm since we have been in Romania at the house rolled in early this afternoon.  We were not surprised so much when it descended on us quickly as this had already happened today in Reghin.  We all stood out on the back porch watching the sky turn to a super dark grey while the house remained bathed in sunlight.

While we were outside watching the storm approaching, the power went out.  At least this time, seeing the force of the storm, we were confident that it was not just us who had lost power.

We were without power until pretty late.  We packed up the car and were ready to go in case we did not get power back tonight.  I had seen Iocab, the priest, outside in the rain and had asked him about the power and he said that the village was without power and that this just happens in storms.  He told us that it should be back in two hours.

We gave it two hours and were sitting in the cold, dark house when the two hour mark rolled around.  It was nine twenty at night and thankfully we had already packed the car as we would not have been able to see had we tried to pack now.

The power came back on, literally as we were pulling out of the driveway, but as the lights in the house had been turned off we did not figure this out until we were halfway through town.  We turned around, went home, checked the house and went back inside.

Unlike the power, though, the Internet stayed off for the evening only coming back on very late, around midnight.  The power stayed on most of the evening but went off again later on, but not for so long that we tried to leave again.

Eventually we went to bed with power and Internet restored and were hoping that they would last through the night.