Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica was still in a lot of pain this morning.  Her bruise is far, far worse than it was yesterday and it is clearly still growing.  It is a huge black area on her leg.  It must be at least nine square inches!

There was a nice rain this morning lingering on from last night.  It made for a very nice morning to be downstairs.

It was a slow day today.  Fairly relaxing.

I did a download of Fedora 23 today so start playing with it.

This evening I picked up tacos for us all, again, from Taco Stop.  Dominica is completely and totally addicted to Taco Stop tacos and Luciana has come to really love their quesadillas.  I am happy that we have found new food that Luciana really likes.  It is very different from anything that she typically eats.

I don’t know how much more I can take of eating tacos every day.  They are really getting to know me there, now!

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.

Today is Wednesday.  Got up and had a busy morning of writing.  But overall today was a slow day.  We had so much going on recently that we are all feeling the need for “nothing” to be going on right now.

On Wednesdays we have both maid service and fruit delivery.  Boy do we get a lot of fruit.

Early this afternoon I had a webinar prep to get ready for the webinar that I am going to be doing tomorrow with Scale and Spiceworks.  We are doing the same Waffle House backup and recovery talk that we did at SpiceWorld back in Austin.

I built a hosted Spiceworks Helpdesk today and did some playing around with that.  Have not seen their helpdesk product in over a year so got to see the latest design changes.

The GOG Big Fall Sale started today.  That is going to be hard to resist.

 

Today is our back to normal day now that we are done with our long weekend of travel and our weekend of hanging out with Ryan.  We slept in a little more than usual this morning, it was around six thirty when I got up.  Late for me but since everyone went off of DST back in the US I was still up early for them compared to when I am normally up.

I am still feeling a bit behind after being away for the weekend and from the weekend before that too, so I have been working to get caught up.  SGL is about halfway caught up at this point.

We had a relatively quiet day at home today.  The girls both did school and we really did not go anywhere.  I had to deal with a server outage for a bit of the day which kept me tied to the house more than I normally would have been.

Once things had quieted down I returned to the Taco Stop again to get dinner as Dominica is now addicted to it.  It really is some of the best Tex Mex ever.  We got all taco duros this time along with some chips and guacamole and a quesadilla de queso.

So a note about chips in Nicaragua.  They are not like tortilla chips from anywhere else that I know and they are not good.  They are hard, so hard that they actually hurt to eat.  I’ve never had tortilla chips like these.  Even from the best restaurants they are not good.  It is just the style here.

We put on one episode of The Nanny to watch while we ate our dinner.  Then, as I had promised Liesl yesterday, we had a “family game night” where she played one of her Nintendo 3DS games in bed while Luciana and I watched. Dominica did her own thing.

Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day for me.  So getting caught up on SGL as much as I can tonight.

Today is Dia de los Muertes, so a holiday around Nicaragua.  I had to be up very early this morning because I needed to get Ryan off to the airport in Managua.  We needed to leave the house by six this morning.  I was up at five thirty and ready by six.  It was a nice cool morning, very nice for a drive up to the capital.

It takes just over an hour to drive from Granada through Masaya and up to the airport in Managua.  We had a little traffic this morning but not very much.  Being a holiday probably kept it to a minimum.  The airport is tiny and in daylight is super easy to deal with.  Not much different than dealing with Westchester, really.

Dropped Ryan off around seven and was on my way back.  It was so nice that I had the windows down for the whole drive and it was nice and cool.  The air temperature is really great today.

It was just after eight when I got back to the Granada house.  Our housekeeper did not come today.  We figured out that it was probably because it was a holiday.  Luciana was up when I got home and had a nice, quiet morning playing in the living room.  I posted for a bit and did some catching up.  Then Luciana and I took a walk together to the corner store and picked up some supplies.

On our way to the corner store, Luciana and I stopped Cafe Isabella’s and ordered breakfast for everyone.  Big plates of gallo pinto for Dominica and me and an order of pancakes for the girls to split.  We were able to pick it up on the way back home.

In the late morning we took the car while we still had it up to La Colonia and did our biggest grocery shopping trip to date, loading up with more than $120 worth of groceries.  We’ve had nothing remotely close to that yet.  Having a car is nice.

I dropped Dominica and the girls off at the house with the groceries and drove straight on to the Hotel Plaza Colon to drop off the car.  That ended up taking quite a while because they were unsure how to use the computer.  It took so long that they had be go home and brought me the paperwork later in the afternoon to sign at home.  On the walk home I tried taking a time lapse video of the walk from the main park to our house.  It was so shaky though.  It is painful to watch.

I spent the afternoon posting and writing.  Kept myself pretty busy.  Luciana had a rough evening and ended up getting in a lot of trouble and lost her iPad for two days, lost some toys, had a strict dinner assigned.

Around six I walked down to the new Taco Stop and got take out for Dominica and me.  She has not had a chance to try the Taco Stop at all.  I got tacos, burritos, quesadilla…..

Dominica really liked all of the food.  It was all very well prepared and delicious.  We loved it and Dominica insists that we add it to our regular food rotation now.

Quiet evening.  Dominica watched Game of Thrones on her laptop and I was writing most of the evening.  Moved upstairs around ten but never put on a show or anything.  The girls played in our room until ten thirty or so when we sent them off to bed in their own room.  They actually did not want to go to their own room but wanted to snuggle in our room.  That was unexpected.