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.
Saturday. We were all super tired this morning. Paul had taken the dogs last night as he was home long before Dominica and I were and the dogs like to go to bed early (like around seven thirty or eight.) Liesl and Luciana had stayed with the dogs down in Dominica and my room while we were out in León, but he took them to bed when he got back hours before we did. So they were super needy this morning and wanted to spend the entire day hanging out with me.
So it was really a “dog day” for me. I pretty much got stuck in my room with the dogs for the entire day. If I did anything else Mia would be mostly okay, but Clive would just whine and look at me sadly until I returned and snuggled him. So I was napping and on my phone for a lot of the day. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.
Dominica had to bake this morning as there is a birthday at the hotel today and she is making the cakes. That took nearly all of her morning. The kitchen teams wants her to teach them how to bake. Apparently not many people here know how to bake things like cakes.
I did try to go out for a nice walk today to get some exercise and as soon as I made the attempt the dogs demanded that they come with me. So no luck on my plans. I did already have the GoPro set up to take with me, however, so I strapped it on anyway and did a time lapse of walking the dogs. Not a long walk because there were just too many cars and it was exhausting to manage the dogs, traffic, and the camera all in the middle of the day. Not the best footage, but it is interesting and gives something of a view of the area around the hotel.
The caterer for Dominica’s upcoming birthday party gala at the hotel stopped by today. Yes, we are catering an event at our own hotel and restaurant because we are shutting it all down so that all of the staff can attend, along with all of our staff from Managua and Matagalpa. So we are expecting quite a lot of people as most everyone will be bringing spouses and kids. We are setting up the parilla on the beach and Paul will be BBQing. That event is in eleven days, just two days before Allen gets here. Next week is going to be super busy around Las Peñitas.
Luciana and I were talking today and she is really feeling the itch to get traveling again. It was such a big part of her developmental years, the lack of traveling now is really noticeable to her. This is a little weird, of course, because we just traveled all over the US from Dallas to New York to Orlando to Miami and then flew down to Nicaragua and now we are here in Central America where in some ways every day feels like traveling, of course. But we have been here for three months now, and we rarely leave the village and when we do it is only to go to León so Luciana has already developed a very strong feeling of Las Peñitas just being “home” and not qualifying as travel in any sense.
The two places that Luciana has expressed really wanting to go are to Guatemala where she wants to visit some amusement parks (they have big water parks and a big dinosaur park up north) and to return to Spain and Greece both of which we lived in so long ago that she does not remember that much about them.
There is a small waterpark in León that we hope to be able to take the girls to soon. And there is a small dinosaur park near Managua that we need to try out. Luciana is very interested in spending more time back in Managua. In her words she really enjoys “modern cities”. She things that San Salvador, San Jose, and Tegucigalpa look interesting. She is hopeful that for our visa renewal that we will go spend some time in San Jose so that she can explore the city. I am as well, I think that we would enjoy a city break and there should be a number of museums to hit, too.
Right now, our plan is that we will be down there in mid-September.
Pineapple Upside Down Birthday Cake
Tonight we had a mini birthday party for our new head chef. We waited until the restaurant had closed and did singing and cake around nine. Everyone really liked the cake, it is not the kind of thing that you really find here very much.
We went to bed relatively early tonight. Tomorrow Paul, Dominica, Ivonne, and Leo have to go to Managua. We are exchanging the broken washing machine (we have owned it only three months) for one that works (Dominica is pretty annoyed that no one listened to her about not buying a Whirlpool and it broke in weeks and Whirlpool has absolutely no idea how to fix it already) and buying a second (non-Whirlpool) washing machine so that we have extra capacity and a backup unit for when the main one inevitably fails again (in a few weeks, probably.) They will leave around nine in the morning. Tomorrow is Sunday so our busiest day of the week and the hardest day for us to use the restaurant ourselves so a good day for everyone to be gone. I’ll be staying home with the kids and the dogs and getting some writing done.
Friday. The dogs slept in fifteen minutes. Then we went on a 2.2 mile walk. It was pretty nice out this morning, but I jogged for part of the way so was sweaty anyway. I could not be out for very long because I have so many meetings this morning that my whole day is just jam packed with them.
My first meeting of the morning was with a customer at seven thirty. Yes, getting the day started for real. That one went super awesome and was my cause for concern yesterday because I did not know what they wanted but rather than being bad news, it was exceptionally good news. And it took up most of my early morning.
Then I had my Spanish language memory training lesson at nine. After than the marketing team had a meeting at ten thirty. Then a sales meeting at eleven. It was getting close to noon before I had more than a few minutes to get away from all of the meetings. In between some of the meetings this morning I did manage to get breakfast tacos in the restaurant, at least.
We had our second person, thousands of miles away from the first one, get diagnosed with dengue fever this morning! He’s been sick for several days already, so he might be a week into it at this point.
Major construction going on at the hotel today. We have to replace the septic system or, more accurately, we have to add another one. So today the “trash area” as we call it is being torn out and very sadly, the palm tree that lives there is being cut down. Then a new septic tank is being installed. And a new ground floor put in on top of that. A pad for our two generators (we only own one so far) is going in there so that they will have a permanent home someplace safe and quiet away from most of the hotel. Then a roof is being built over it all so that when it rains the water does not just go directly into the septic system causing it to overflow. It is a major project.
For lunch today the new head chef made chicken cordon bleu for the staff (and Paul.) She is stepping up the game around here.
With the tree being removed, I am now very, very inclined to build up over top of the laundry and trash area and extend at least partially over the entrance walkway and make a room back there. Whether it is a hotel room or just one of our private rooms, I am not sure. But the street is very interesting where we are and having a room back there with a view of the hotels, a little view of the ocean, and all the visibility into the late night bar and street scene. Would certainly make me a lot more connected to the village.
Tonight is our team night out. It turns out that we are going out to celebrate everyone being so happy because the one mean team member who was making everyones’ lives awful got herself fired and everyone is just so relieved.
Around six Paul had some friends over and I hung out with them until about seven. We just sat out on the beach having beers and tequila. Our staff started straggling in around six thirty to be at the hotel ready to go out tonight. I skipped dinner because there was no time to play host and to get to the showers before it was time to go.
I showered at seven thirty and got actually dressed up for only like the third time in three months. Since I wrapped up all of my customs stuff in Managua nearly three months ago I have only left Las Peñitas once in all of this time and that was to go to León to deal with the bank and that was just for one to two hours and I did not even manage to eat anywhere. So this is my actual first time getting to go out and actually do something since moving to Nicaragua!
Leo and one of his driver friends were at the hotel at eight and we were ten of us heading out: Paul, Dominica, Ivonne, Juan Carlos, Ingrid, Jaho, Hernan, Erika, Wilbur, and, of course, me. We went into León downtown and started the night at the Gecko Bar. We were there for quite a while. We got several rounds of drinks (that were not very good) and an order of variados which is basically a big tray of typical Nicaragua bar food samplers. A very popular thing here.
Food and drinks took forever. We moved on to 23 Bar which was the originally planned destination. There it was more drinks but nearly everyone went dancing. Paul, Wilbur, and Ivonne had all already gone back to Las Peñitas making it an early night. We stayed out until after midnight but could not be out super late as some of the staff have to work tomorrow and some have classes. Leo came and got us and we were on our way back and were home before one in the morning. Ingrid was the only one to stay behind and checked in that she was home safe at two thirty.
Overall today was pretty great. Really positive news from work on all sides with several fully confirmed new customers and a couple of “not completely official” but rapidly moving forward “final stage” customer components. Super productive overall just getting loads of stuff done which makes me feel great in general. Then a nice evening of hanging out with the locals before an awesome night out with about half of the team on the town for my first time out dancing since I last went with Rachel in the first weeks of 2020!
