Sheep Guarding Llama

I woke up early this morning but felt lazy and went back to bed until seven.  Got up later and moved down to the kitchen and got to work standing between the kitchen and the pool.

For breakfast, Dominica made fried rice.  We have a fruit and vegetable lady who delivers us fresh produce daily now, which means that we are heavily stocked on that stuff and need to consume it as we are running out of space.

Mostly just a standard day here in Granada.  Dominica and the girls did school with a long art class today – the girls are painting suns.  And I did a ton of writing and had a long conference call today.

This evening I talked the family into going out to dinner.  I was feeling like something a little more fancy but Dominica was feeling like something close so we just went to Cafe Isabella.  I just got the tuna melt, which I had been craving a little.  Dominica got the shrimp curry which she really liked.  The girls split an order of fish fingers and they were very happy.

While we were eating dinner it started to rain, very hard.  We were drenched by the time that we were back to the house.  Actually drenched to the point where I had to wring out my shirt to keep from dripping everywhere!

I dropped off the family and then went out again to the El Carmen Panaderia to pick up cake for dessert.  Dominica and I had tres leche while Luciana had a birthday cake slice.  Liesl did not want anything.

We watched The Nanny as a family for a while at Luciana’s request.  After a few episodes the girls decided to retire to their own room to do their own thing.  I played Back to the Future: The Game to catch up to where we had had the issue last night and managed to get past it which actually meant that the first episode of the game was completed and we are ready to start Episode Two now.

What a gorgeous morning in Granada, Nicaragua.  I woke up at five forty and hopped out of bed, took the laptop downstairs and set up on the kitchen “bar” counter standing by the pool.  There was a light but solid rain going when I got up which made it just perfect for being up so early.  Now I wished that I had gotten up even earlier so that I would not have missed any of it.  Granada is just so perfect when it is raining and this house being wide open with the central pool is just so amazing in the rain.

It rained until nearly ten o’clock this morning.  It was just awesome.  I need to get myself up early like this morning often.

Instead of sitting at the table like I have been, yesterday I started experimenting with standing on the back side of the breakfast bar with my back to the pool – where I have to be careful because if I back up I will fall right in – to see if I will feel better if I am spending my time upright, which mostly seems to be working but my feet are getting pretty soar.

By afternoon the rain was gone, the sun was out and it was quite hot.

This evening, after I was done writing for the day, I went out for a little walk around the city.  I was out for nearly two hours.  I got stopped several times by people asking me for money which made it much harder to do a good walk.  I need to avoid anything south of the cathedral, it would seem, of I am just not free to walk there, which sucks.

After I got home it started to rain, almost immediately after I got back.  I showered and then we set up the laptop up in our bedroom.  Luciana had fallen asleep while I was out for the walk.  She had been visibly quite tired today so this was good.  Liesl came over to our bedroom and we played about an hour of Back to the Future: The Game.  Sadly the game got glitchy on us and we got stuck at one point and then the game crashed!  That sucked quite a bit. We were unable to save our progress.  I am going to have to play it on my own tomorrow and see if I can’t make up the time so that we are ready for family game night again.  The game remains a lot of fun.  This is another one that I think that my dad would enjoy.  Good story, just good fun.

Liesl ended up sleeping in our room because she is snuggly and good at convincing us to just let her stay.

I talked to AJ tonight.  He is settled into Las Vegas and has a short term job lined up to start this weekend, just three days away.

We are becoming morning people here in Central America.  Up around six this morning and right down to the dining room to do some writing.

For breakfast this morning Dominica made fried rice (with eggs in it) as we have a kitchen full of produce that needs to be eaten.  We had some interesting new vegetables, some of which we did not even know what they were but they were tasty in the dish.  Our fruit and vegetable lady that comes by every morning has been introducing us to all kinds of new things.  We are slowly getting to know the local Central American produce. It is so interesting how much of what is eaten regularly down here is different than even what is eaten in Texas, let alone the rest of the US.

It was a hot one today, very little air movement and very sunny.  For much of the day I had to lower the big blinds in the middle of the dining room to block out some of the light so that I was able to keep sitting at the computer.

For dinner this evening Dominica made a pasta primavera at home which was delicious.  Our fridge is just so full of fruits and veggies, we have to use them somewhere.  We are having a big of a complication as we need a cutting board and Dominica asked the house owner where to get one and they sent someone to get one for us in Managua, which seems crazy as that is an hour away, but they did not bring it today so we are just kind of waiting on that.

After dinner I walked up to La Colonia to do grocery shopping.  I got a pretty good haul of groceries that we needed and walked back home.  Luciana really wanted jelly beans from the corner store which is the exact opposite direction from La Colonia so I walked down there and got jelly beans for her as well.

Once I was back home we set up in our bedroom for family game night.  There was an argument over what game to play but we finally settled on Liesl and Luciana playing Ankh.  But Luciana ended up being too tired and threw and temper tantrum and we had to cancel game time with the girls and sent them off to bed.

Dominica and I looked through our gaming library of stuff that we already had downloaded and found the Blue Toad Murder Files which Dominica had never even heard of before.  We thought that there was going to be no chance that it would work with a gamepad but we were surprised when it just worked and worked really well.  How exciting.

Since it worked, Dominica and I played all of the way through the first episode of the Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mystery of Little Riddle which cute, funny and fun.  We enjoyed it.  I think that my dad would enjoy this game.

One of the big challenges that you face living in a super poor country and living outside of strict tourist areas is that people are constantly begging from you.  It really is everywhere.  What makes it much, much more difficult here is that because of the design of the homes and the fact that the house is wide open to the street at all times.  So we have started to have beggars coming to the door on a regular bases, calling into the house where they can see us (there really is nowhere to hide) and asking for money.  It was bad enough when it was an older woman once in a while.  But now it has started being punk kids, often well dressed and clearly just begging and annoying residents as they try to live or work, on their way to school or whatever.  And they just hang around outside of our door.

We lost power for a little while today, but less than an hour.  We could see the guys working on the pole down the street so were not too worried about it.

This afternoon I walked over to Cafe Isabella and picked up a lunch, rather than a breakfast, order to take back to the house with me.  Their lunch and dinner menu is huge, which is awesome.  They are rather like a diner with lots of different options and so close to us.  We are pretty excited about that.  So I ordered a fish burrito and a veggie burrito and a tuna melt (which in Spanish is called a “tuna melt”) and some fries to take back to the house.

The food is never super fast at the cafe so I sat out on the deck and got invited to sit with the retired expats who hang out over there.  I had at least half an hour of hanging out with them.  I learned a lot about the area and places that they thought that I should go visit and how they were living here as long term residents.  It was very informative about life in Nicaragua.

Quiet evening tonight.

We must have been pretty tired as even I did not get up until after eight and Liesl was not out of bed until a quarter after eleven!

We got a lot of rain today, the most that we have seen since we have come to Nicaragua.  It rained for a very large portion of the day.  Mostly we have gotten short bursts of rain but today we actually got long, sustained rain which was really nice.  It was mostly pleasant to sit out all day, no risk of sweat which is a nice change.

Dominica and I ate leftover pizza for lunch today.  We overestimated two nights ago and got way too much for the kids. So now we are eating it cold.

I wanted to go out for another walk today but it really did rain nearly all day.  Some of it was light and if I knew that it would stay like that I might have risked it.  But sometimes it would turn into a torrent and I really did not like the idea of getting caught in that so decided to stay in.

This evening was a family video game evening.  Last night we played Dominica’s video game which was not child appropriate so they were not able to hang out with us while she played it.  Tonight I played Back to the Future also from Telltale Games, like the game that Dominica was playing last night.

Liesl and Luciana came in and snuggled in the bed with us while I played.  We played for probably two hours.  It was a lot of fun.  The Telltale games are so perfect for people to watch you play, it really is like we are all watching a movie together as a family, but one where we get to interact with it all of the time.  I am looking forward to finding more and more of these Telltale games, although we already own nearly their entire collection (some titles twice via both Steam and GOG) so really we are mostly waiting on them to get off of their butts and write some new games for us to play!