Sheep Guarding Llama

Wow how can it have been fifty years? This feels a bit surreal.

This morning started off with rounding up the kittens (Orange Juice and Chemæra) and getting them off to the beach for their sterilization. Liesl forgot that she was going this morning and wasn’t awake and ready. So we had to get her up and moving so we were running quite late. Once we got her ready and the kittens packed into the backpack, we drove to Marcela’s house in San Mateo to get Happy and we were off to Gigi’s on the beach for the clinic. Happy is visiting everyone that he already knows, but for our kittens this is their first real trip. Chemæra has gotten lost for a few days and once went to Dr. Jorge’s vet clinic so she’s left the grounds before, but this is Orange Juice’s first time outside of the estate walls in his entire life.

Both Fritter (very pregnant) and Cruller, the parents, were there as we took the kittens to the clinic, watching us leave from the garage. Hopefully both of them can be sterilized soon as well. No need for more batches of fur babies.

Felipe is at Marcela’s house today doing a day of work on her garden. She’s been in the house for over a year and a half now and has never had the time or energy for any real projects. But she has so much nice space there that she can do something with. She’s been cleaning like crazy the last few days trying to figure out if something in the house is contributing to how sick she feels. She is always worse when at home. Now they are working on her front garden area. She doesn’t have a car so the “driveway” is a perfect spot for a big garden. And there is ground all the way around her front patio, so her seating space could be contained in a surrounding wall of plants.

Once back home I’m back to work, calls and programming. At one point I went out to the garage to visit with the cats, Fritter and Cruller, and ended up laying down on the garage floor and napping with Fritter. She really appreciated that and actually came and snuggled. She’s so sweet.

Our babies came out of surgery a little after noon and were doing just fine. But we were unable to get them as early as we should have because a powerline came down on the Poneloya Road and started a house fire. They had to shut off the power and close the highway so that they could work on it. So we were unable to return to the beach this afternoon and the house got very hot. We really wanted AC today, it’s a warm day.

The power was off about two hours while they dealt with the downed power lines. Then Dominica and Luciana went out to the beach and picked up OJ, Chemæra, and Happy and brought them home. Since Marcela went to church and is going to be in Managua tomorrow he needs to be here. So he is in my office (and yay, he puked on my desk while I was working.)

Tonight Luciana and Dominica baked me two apple pies for my birthday, and Luciana did decorations to make a fox (my favourite animal) and Happy 50th on the pies along with lots of autumn leaves in different colours. They turned out so well, both in how good they looked and in how good they tasted. These were “just like back home” pies! Really successful. Best I’ve had in many, many years.

Marcela and Happy went home around eleven. Happy was doing well once he was back in his own house. Marcela has to leave at 5:30 in the morning tomorrow to go to Managua for three medical appointments and to get her kids and bring them back to Leon for the weekend.

Once I was hope, Liesl, Luciana & I moved into the game room with the two little kittens who had had surgery this morning and we watched the final few episodes of H2O Just Add Water which has all of the makings of a simple, feel good, cute show but is saddles with some truly epically terrible writing that leaves you truly hating every single one of the characters and upset that the show deals with really traumatic child mental abuse and plays it off as silly and not important. It’s certainly not a good promo for Australia to have their best known children’s show portray child abuse, toxic parents, abducting children, threatening the lives of children, attempting to enslave children, illegal seizure of public lands, etc. as problems. They show things like children being abducted and their lives being threatened and not one character in the show considers it a problem or reason to say, involve the police or coast guard. It portrays Australian society in such a horrible light, it’s amazing that the government didn’t do anything to limit its release. In nearly every scene we’re all yelling at the screen like “Why are you staying with these terrible people?” and “Why is no one involving the police?” And basically no character is even slightly innocent. All the parents openly hate their children, all the protagonists lie to everyone around them and behave totally awful and create all their own problems, everyone is beyond dumb and forgets the entire context of the show every few minutes, even SeaWorld who seems to have sponsored the show is often shown specifically as not knowing how to care for animals and being an abusive employer.

At the end of the night, the kittens seem to be all in good shape.

Happy Birthday to Rachel! Well it is Monday and I feel like the weekend was ultimately unproductive. That just makes me stressed. At least the girls and I did get to hang out quite a bit. And Liesl and I have been working on her math classes a bit. More of that this evening as well. We are trying to hit that and her cinema classes really hard so that we can show significant progress.

I did manage to record a few videos today for YouTube, so feel productive about that. Worked on a lot of software development stuff all day.

Overall today was not too bad. The show did well today, the team worked well, I was productive.

Marcela is super sick again today. She was very good yesterday, it seemed like we had made real progress. We had changed her mattress and she seemed almost good as new. But today she is super sick again, almost to the point of going to the hospital.

Areyson came by to use my studio to record some audio for some social media production work that he is doing. Everyone wants to use my Rode XLR Podmic.

Liesl and I worked on her math classes tonight. She’s making really good progress. In fact she flew through her classes and is done! She still has the final exam, but only the exam. This is huge. Nothing has hindered her life more than her math classes. She is already done with science. Just the final exam and math is done, forever.

This evening the girls and I watched some more H2O Just Add Water until about two in the morning.

Liesl and I put in a lot of time working on her math classes today. She is in the home stretch and we are trying to get her done. She’s already completed all of her science classes for school, for forever. It’s weird thinking of my baby as having already gone through every science class that she will ever have. And she’s just a few days (hopefully) away from being able to say the same thing about math. It’s so hard to imagine her having her school life behind her now. When you are a kid it feels like it goes on forever.

This afternoon I went to a studio downtown to do a photoshoot with The Bernies. We did photos in the studio, then went to my house and did photos in the garden as well.

This evening the girls decided that they wanted to go to Puesta del Sol in Las Peñitas for dinner since I needed to run down there anyway to pay some bills. So at 7:30 the four of us drove down there and had dinner. Their menu is much smaller now so not the selection that we miss. Lots of menu items we want are gone so that is sad. But it was nice to be there again. Luciana doesn’t think that she’s physically eaten in the restaurant (as opposed to take away) for four years, not since we lived on the beach!

After dinner we came home. Liesl and I watched Some Like it Hot for her cinema studies class. I have to say, that is not a good movie at all. Very bad, in fact. I can’t how badly written it was. The story is dumb, the dialogue is downright painful. The acting mostly seems like people just walked on to set and flatly said a line without context; which makes sense as the dialogue is so jilting and awkward, how could you act through it? So far this is the biggest loser movie in her classes. I’m truly shocked that this is considered a classic. It’s neither good, nor artistic, nor watchable. It’s a terrible performance from nearly everyone involved, not a good example of the works of any of the people. Even Joe Brown absolutely sucked in this after decades of being a big player in Hollywood; and I’m a huge Tony Curtis fan, but this was not something for him to be proud of.

Luciana joined us after the movie and we all watched two episodes of H2O Just Add Water which isn’t a great show, but is more entertaining than the movie. Then it was time for bed.

Saturday. I was hoping for a very relaxing day. But, of course, I ended up way too busy. I got up and worked just a little, but then had to go out to the beach to help with coordinating some social media activities there at the hotels. So first we ran errands, then picked people up, then went out to the beach.

I ran into fans of the show while at the hotel, of course. That never fails. So I was busy talking to one group of guests or another for about two hours. Then in the late afternoon it was a trip back to Leon and just about to drop Marcela off when we got an emergency call that a cat needed to be rescued in Zaragoza and the only cat trap was at the beach. So we turned right around and drove back to the beach, got the trap, came back, got the girls to go shopping, went to Zaragoza and dropped off the trap and then went to La Colonia to do some late grocery shopping.

While at La Colonia I got recognized by two fans of the that had spoken to me but had not yet met me in person; and then while there Janet arrived, too. The girls hid with Marcela in a different aisle to avoid meeting people.

Once we were done at La Colonia we dropped Marcela off at home and the girls and I came back to the house with our new groceries. We had a good haul and found the fish patties that we really like that are hard to find and I made those for our dinner.

The girls and I watched more of season one of H2O Just Add Water before going to bed.

Liesl totally forgot that she had to go to Managua this morning for some blood work at the clinic and stayed awake all night. She was just going to bed when I stopped in to check on her about fifteen minutes before she was scheduled to get in the car to go! That was a rough morning for her, just going to bed and instead going to Managua, again.

Dominica was running late and it was nearly nine when the “definitely before eight” trip was out the door. They stopped to get Marcela (but only after I reminded her – she was already zipping straight by without stopping) and all went out to Managua. Just Luciana and I (and Aida) in the house today with the menagerie.

It was a long day of work for me. Luciana was sick last night. She coughed so much that, like Marcela, it made her sick to her stomach. But overall she’s not feeling that much worse.

I had to run out to the beach to deliver some money today. So that cut into my afternoon. But I managed to record today’s video out on the beach, so that was a nice change of pace. We have Canal 8 out filming on the beach again tomorrow, too.

I just worked this evening. Liesl got home from Managua and just crashed, having had zero sleep last night. Luciana is tired from being so sick and needs to work on school. I was in meetings until very late and was tired as well. So we just decided to all go to bed early tonight instead of hanging out.