Sheep Guarding Llama

Thursday. The dogs let me sleep in until six this morning. Which is awesome. I got to go to bed early last night, too. So I really got a good night’s sleep.

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.

https://i.imgur.com/RwB6oJk.jpg

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.

Wednesday. Today feels like a really busy one.

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.

Tuesday. Up and walked the dogs. It is really the same every day.

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.

Sunday. I got up at a quarter till six and took the doggies out for their morning stroll. We did the loop over to Barca de Oro, down the estuary road, back through the backside of town and down to the main road and up a ways before coming back. Then a leisurely breakfast, today I had an omelette. Dominica got a burrito, again. I think that she’s had nothing but breakfast burritos for an entire week now. She is completely addicted to our new menu item. Of course, she will do this, get tired of it, and go a year without ordering it again. That’s her pattern. She always does the new item until she almost never wants it again.

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.

Monday. One of the big restaurants in town is closed this entire week so we will be getting extra traffic from that. Pretty cool.

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.