Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

We all got up quite early at Casa Bahia in San Juan del Sur this morning.  We need to drive up to San Jorge and catch the ferry to get over to Isla Ometepe and if we do not get there early we will have a very short day over on the island.

We were not up as early as we should have been.  We really should have gotten up at five but no one wanted to do that.  We were up close to seven and made good time packing the car and getting underway.  We did not have time to get breakfast at the resort but did get to see our new friends eating theirs and said goodbye to them before taking off.

The drive up to San Jorge was quick and easy.  We stopped for gas in Rivas before heading down into San Jorge.

At San Jorge we just missed the nine thirty ferry and were going to have to wait for the ten thirty.  Because we are trying to take the car with us there are many fewer ferry choices.  Thankfully because we are at San Jorge there is a lot of ferry traffic and they run pretty often.  This is the main ferry terminal for the island coming to the mainland as both the big settlement on the island is more or less facing this direction and it is the closest point for departing for it.

We got to the terminal and, of course, being a tourist area were immediately grabbed by tourist wranglers who hustled us away from the ferry itself to a tour office where they talked everyone into leaving the car at the ferry terminal in a guarded and gated lot and getting a tour guide and a private van to drive us around the island.  It did seem nice to not have to deal with the car on the ferry or on the island and having a tour guide was a nice feature.  So we decided to do that and took the ten thirty ferry over.  We only have one day on the island so we really have to cram everything in.

The ferry was supposed to leave at ten thirty but it was nearly eleven when it finally did.  The ferry was small, full and very, very hot.  We were all sweating like terrible.  Even the girls were drenched from the sweat.  The boat was completely full of flies or some kind of mosquito too.  So many that they were going up your nose, getting in your mouth, covering your clothes.  It was pretty gross.

The ride over is about an hour.  It gets a bit better once the ferry is underway but it is still ridiculously hot and humid.  Not pleasant at all.  Ryan spent most of the ride up on top of the boat which required climbing a ladder to get there.  I went up there for a while but since Dominica and the girls could not follow me I came back down.  This felt like a lot more than an hour, too hot and muggy.

Once off of the boat our guide met us on the dock and we were immediately into a van and off for an afternoon tour of the island.  Our first stop was supposed to be to a BBQ fish place that the guy who sold us the tour had been raving about so that we could order, go on to our destination and have the food ready when we returned.  There was bad, or no, communications though and this was skipped entirely.

We ended up starting off with the famous petroglyphs, ancient carved rocks that are out on the island.  Super fascinating that people have been living on these islands since ancient times.  This was not a long stop, there are only a few exhibits, but really cool and we are very glad that we went.  We had to be quick as there were a lot of mosquitoes and mosquitoes can mean any number of really awful tropical diseases so it is very good to avoid them whenever possible.

From there we back tracked and found this little, out of the way restaurant down by the water.  The van thing barely made it down there.  Very out of the way.  We ordered and the food was awesome.  We all loved it.  While we were there we got to see a herd of cattle go into the lake to drink.  Pretty weird.

A group of Nicas from the ferry came and ate at the restaurant while we were there too.  We recognized them and said hello. They remembered us as well.

From lunch we went to a mineral springs that Ryan was interested in.  It was a very popular destination for families and the place was packed.  Everyone but Dominica swam for a while.  Our timing was such that either we could swim or we could go on to other things and since Ryan had wanted to come here and the girls had been promised swimming this worked out and we gave up on doing other things.  It was the right choice.  The water was cold enough to be actually chilly but it was nice swimming in the fresh, flowing water.  The girls had fun playing with rocks that I would pick up for them from the bottom of the spring.

We had just a little extra time so our driver took us around to see as much of the island as we could see and even went out to a point to get the sunset a little bit.  It was gorgeous.  The island is really nice.  We got so many great views of the two volcanoes there, too.

We took some beach pics and then had to rush for the dock to make it to the ferry.  The trip back, which was on the Ferry Che Guaverra, was so much nicer than the one this morning.  It was dark, there was more breeze, the temperature had dropped, there was lots of room to move around and the bugs were not so crazy.  They even turned on the televisions for people to watch terrible, two decade of American films while taking the trip.  There was even a gecko that lived on the TV and would come out to eat the bugs that would collect on it.

On the boat we had a great view of the blinking lights from the fields of windmills lining the lake shore.  That was really cool to see.  There was a nice storm over the lake, too.

Once back we stopped at the little restaurant located in the same building where we bought our tour tickets this morning.  Dinner was nice, the food was quite good.

After dinner, back in the car and a drive north in the darkness back to Granada.  Ryan and I went out, as this was his last night in town, to the giant bar down on the main drag.  It’s a neat, multi-floor place more like you would expect in an American city – that is until you realize that they only have the making of two drinks so pretty much our only cocktail option was macuas which is the national cocktail of Nicaragua.  Good thing that I like drinking them!

After that it was back and off to bed.  Ryan and I have to be up early tomorrow so that I can drive him to the airport in Managua.