Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Monday and our time in the USA for this year is nearly over. We are in Houston (Friendswood) for a few more days, but we have only tomorrow as a full day with the family. Wednesday afternoon Dominica’s parents will drive us to our storage unit so that we can arrange a payment process as our old one expired with our old credit card, and then we will go to the Holiday Inn by IAH airport where we will get an early night before getting a flight out Thursday morning from IAH to MGA and back home in Nicaragua.

Lots of rain today, quite heavy storms. Very little happening here, it’s just the four of us and Dominica’s parents in the house (with the pile of dogs.) I spent the day working; no surprise there. I’m set up at the kitchen table, which is horrible for my back, but like I said, just one more full day to go.

While here I’ve been doing a LOT of web site design, getting a lot of things off of the backlog. Work has been keeping me so busy the last few years. I feel like we are never really getting close to getting anywhere. Every day is such a struggle. But after yesterday’s hotel disaster discoveries, I’m feeling quite a bit better about the hotels, at least.

We went out and got Panda Express for lunch today. But sadly, like so many things we’ve discovered being back here in the US this year, things just aren’t like they used to be. Ciana’s favourite thing there is the chow mein without the veggies, only the noodles and sauce. That’s how they used to make it for her back when we lived here. Now they say that it is pre-made and they can’t do that anymore. She was disappointed. We still got Panda Express, we all miss the honey walnut shrimp. But it isn’t the same. They never have specials anymore, either.

Dinner was Beyond hot dogs. Something we can’t get back in Nicaragua. Then this evening around nine, the girls and I went to HEB so that they could go grocery shopping. That’s one of our favourite things. We were careful to only get a very few items tonight, though, some Cheetos Mac and Cheese, some green tea mochi, strawberry shortcake ice cream bars, some mini danishes, and Spaghetti-Os, of all things. But you can’t get those down south.

After that trip, I settled in to edit and post my video for the week after verifying the night’s lottery run. Then I worked until two in the morning, always so much to do. Luciana came down and said hello at two, getting her last water for the night. I charged up my phone, wrote this post, did some final tweaks on some projects, killed a cockroach, hung out with the dogs (mostly Holley) and called it a night.

Speaking of roaches, the girls often complain about all of the bugs in Nicaragua. But being here, we’ve had so many cockroaches, way more than they are used to. And here they are active and fly a lot (Palmetto Bugs). Ours back home are far less frequent, even without any doors or screens to block them, and rarely, if ever, fly.

Hard to believe that another trip to the US is almost over. It’s become such a foreign country to us. The weather, the traffic, the restaurants, the schedules – none of it feels right. I think mostly it’s because this isn’t the America we left, let alone the one that we grew up in. Things have changed so much. Lifestyles have changed. Moods and attitudes have changed. More than other eras, this is really rapid. It’s weird seeing this from the outside. We don’t sense just how much things have changed until we are here. And so often it is the little things that you don’t necessary put together: the ending of overnight businesses, restaurants closing earlier, prices going up, sizes getting smaller, food selection going away, vegetarian options vanishing quickly, etc. Many small things, but they add up to a rather large picture in the end.

Today was mostly quiet. I ran a little bit of errands this morning then focused on time in the office much of the day.

Tonight, Luciana thought that we should go exploring and see if we could find Fritter and her kittens. We know that she has them stashed somewhere, but we have no idea where. So we did some exploring and when we did, we stumbled on four more kittens hiding in the pile of metal on the far side of our garage! How have these kittens been hidden for so long? They aren’t as old as the kittens that are in the house, but they are reasonably close to them in age.

Our best guess is that Cruller is actually a mom and not the father of our other kittens and that she just helped to watch over them for Fritter. We took out food and water for these “new” kittens and Cruller was with them. They are living very close to where she spends her days. I can only imagine that she stays close enough to get to them in seconds, but around the corner of the garage so that they can’t see her so that she can teach them to be independent. We’ve been seeing her for months and never saw her pregnant. We are so confused.

So now we have even more kittens to watch over. Four is so many, and we are certain that Fritter had hers in the last three days. So there are likely three or four more newborns still hidden somewhere as well.

We watched some of the second season of H2O Just Add Water tonight. We are increasingly frustrated with the show. It started off acceptable, but it really goes down hill and the main characters start to become offensive caricatures over time. It has a lot of potential, but in reality, it isn’t good at all. The girls liked it when they were little and watched it with Clara. But now seeing it as older teenagers, they see that the “protagonists” are cruel and offensive stereotypes. Not a good show for children. It’s definitely a show targeting young girls and provides a message that girls are dumb, only care about boys, and need boys to provide everything for them. By the end of the second season, not one of the girls was able to maintain a job without her high school boyfriend either getting her a job, being her boss so hiring her, or just paying her family’s rent so that she doesn’t have to work. Not one is self sufficient or have any utility, while every boy on the show is gainfully employed and constantly there to “save them”. It’s really over the top.

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.