The search went very quickly. After looking at a few houses today, there was a clear winner that should have enough space for us. We hope to have things locked up by tomorrow and in no time we should have a new place to be living near the center of Leon, Nicaragua.

And we like being able to go out in Leon. Going from the beach is expensive and tiring. So we have started to look at having a place in Leon to use part of the time.

Saturday. We went into Leon today for food. Did some testing with Filmic DoubleTake and a neat idea but ultimately, useless.

Today was Sasha’s 12th birthday party and my first ever time going to Coco Calala the vegetarian restaurant in Leon, Nicaragua. The kids went swimming today, they don’t get to a swimming pool very often.

Tonight was our big night out with Allen, Ana, Ivonne, Paul, Dominica and I at Jalisco in Reparto Fatima north of downtown Leon. We like the food from there, but they had slow service, all food was wrong, they were out of nearly everything. A very disappointing experience.

We tried going out dancing tonight for a rumored 80s night, but it was not.

Puesta del Sol opens a new restaurant and cocktail bar today, and a pool just for guests. Looks interesting.

Our “new” security gate has been installed at the Simple Beach Lodge. The old one just fell down. Not very secure.

Dominica made advent calendars for the girls. Ciana is enjoying opening hers.

Allen is back from his trip abroad. He’s been in Costa Rica and came up by bus.

Big work day for me overall.

I’m really wanting a Fuji XT-4, but an Olympus EM1 MK2 would make more financial sense. Trying to decide what professional camera to get for the future of my filming.

Liesl and I have been binging Brooklyn Nine Nine.

Really starting to love using Final Cut Pro X. I’m learning it quickly and it runs so well on my M1 Mac desktop in the office at the hotel. It really makes my editing life so easy.

I’m taking a break from GoPro videos to play with my iPhone 13 with the DJI Osmo Mobile 3 gimbal, which is awesome. But I am not thinking that it is great as a vlogging solution so much as for filming more generally.

Dominica is out Christmas shopping in Leon, Nicaragua.

Today we had to make the really tough decision to forego returning to the United States for Christmas. If we were going to go we would have to have our tickets already and the cost and risk of doing it is just not plausible. This is going to be really hard on the kids, but with the omicron variant of COVID surging in the USA it is extremely dangerous for us to return. Not only is there the health risk of exposure, of course, which is the first variant that really puts the kids at risk; but the bigger realistic risk to us is the cancellation of flights. There’s so many countries closing borders right now, flights being cancelled and so forth. If we came home we easily would get stuck unable to leave Nicaragua, or stuck partway back, or in the USA unable to get home.

It’s is Sunday and our Internet is out again. A bit frustrating. But lots of dog walking today. Lots of video editing today including a new DriveWarp is done.

Happy thirteenth birthday to Liesl! It is so hard to believe that we have a teenage daughter now. How did we get so old?

The idea of birthday presents is pretty hard in Nicaragua. There is essentially nothing that the kids want and what they do want they get all of the time, like new video games and such. Liesl just got a brand new Asus laptop while we were in the USA and so for her birthday today she got the hand-me-down Nikon D90 DSLR with the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens that she loves so much. She has always wanted that camera and now it is hers.

It is a lot like the Canon SLR of my dad’s that I grew up with. It is the camera that I used as a child and always wished that I could have one of my own. And I did buy my own but not until I was about seventeen and then I bought my first Nikon, the N5005. The D90 is still a super capable camera producing outstanding images and the 18-200 lens, while nothing ground breaking, does an amazing job. That camera and lens have been my workhorse camera since Liesl was born, including my solo trip to Germany and The Netherlands in 2009.

Today is our first real day of just getting out to road trip in our new country of Nicaragua. We drove from Las Peñitas to León to Matagalpa today and visited the mirador, the cathedral, met up with Nohemi, and then drove back. We took the GoPro and recorded a new episode of DriveWarp that will be coming out in a month or so and we did some filming up at the mirador.

We had one of the biggest Thanksgiving parties that I can remember and we weren’t even in the United States this year!

It started off as a casual, simple flight of just two hours from Miami to Managua. What could go wrong? We’ve done all of our paperwork, we are vaccinated, our COVID tests are negative, we have our shuttle scheduled a day ahead, we have left ourselves more than four hours at the airport so that we do not have to worry about anything. Today should be a really easy travel day.

The plan today is to fly early in the afternoon, arrive in Managua, and meet up with Paul and Ivonne who have a van headed to Managua to meet us as we get there and deal with some paperwork with the lawyers when we arrive.

Was about to get in some videos while waiting on the shuttle which forgot to get us today. So we lost about forty five minutes waiting for them to come get us.

We were very lucky that everything fit into the little Nisson Rogue. We were pushing our limits pretty heavily. We used every last inch of the car and if the girls were any bigger they would not have fit with one of the big suitcases between them in the back seat and smaller carry-ons under their feet! As it was, everyone had to hold their backpacks.

The drive from Friendswood to the IAH airport was absolutely insane. We allowed ourselves a lot of time to make the drive and it was not enough. More than two hours of driving just to cross the city and the traffic was very scary the whole way.

We did arrive safely in Miami.

My day started at three in the morning when I had to get up and drive Diane to IAH airport so that she could get her flight back to Syracuse. It was almost five thirty when I got back home, bringing some Whataburger with me for the family knocking off essentially everything on Luciana’s “must eat” list from America.

I managed to catch a quick half hour nap before having to get up to drive the family into Houston to get our COVID test done with Auspicious Labs who were totally fantastic. We will be using them every time from now on. Not only was their price good, but the kids’ insurance covered their testing completely and our insurance partially covered ours. That saved us so much money and worry.

The testing was quick and easy and time for the long drive back to Friendswood. It is amazing how far apart COVID testing centers are. If you live anywhere but right in the city, you have nothing.

Today is our big packing day. Tomorrow we are headed for Miami.

Finally got a sub from Aunt Cookies, my number one food item that I miss when I am away from New York. This is the only food that I got on this entire trip that was not a huge disappointment.

Walking the dogs this morning was hard because of how messy everything was. They were pretty tired and not looking for the longest of walks since they had such a long and stressful night last night. They truly hate storms. Mia shakes and runs around and just cannot sit still. Clive hides and plays dead when he is not shaking like crazy.

After the morning walk I joined everyone for breakfast. Amos comes down early to hang out. Ivonne sleeps several hours longer than he does. She does not normally make an appearance until nine thirty or ten. But he comes down closer to seven. We had our coffee. For breakfast I had fresh fruit like papaya, pineapple, and mango, some yoghurt and a little granola.

Paul and Dominica went into León today to do party shopping. The dogs were more than happy to come into the office and just collapse. They are feeling the stress and need more sleep. They are so funny, their routine is so set in stone. Up at five thirty. Talk two to three miles. Come back and hang out with everyone in the restaurant for two hours. Be restless for a while. Then settle down. Then Clive will bark that it is time for real naps. Then I take them into the office and they both just climb on the bed and totally pass out until about two o’clock unless they get disturbed.

So I actually had a decently productive day it being nice and quiet in the office. I really enjoy the quiet and lack of interruptions. The hardest part is that the dogs need me quite a lot of the time.

It is hard to believe that Dominica’s big party is in just two days. And Allen arrives in Nicaragua in just four.

Tonight we just all hung out in the hotel lobby. We had dinner and visited before calling it an early night. The restaurant was quite busy. It is a Monday night on a post-holiday week and we had a very good turnout. The word has gotten out, we are the place to go.

The hotel was pretty busy even first thing this morning. We had a lot of tables for breakfast. We started out on the edge of the beach instead of at our usual table because some drunk girl had wandered in off of the street and passed out at our table. So we sat on the beach while she was removed. Then we moved to our own table because it is a lower priority table that we use so that we don’t take up the premium spots on the beach when the guests start to file in.

Sua, the giant restaurant just up the street from us, is still closed today, which I really can’t believe. Being closed Monday through Thursday is no big deal, even they probably don’t make any real profits for those days. And Friday is a shoulder day. Being closed on Saturday was bold, it would be seriously scary to be closed on a Saturday. But Sunday, on a holiday weekend. My gosh, that is huge. This is the busiest day for a month or two, at least. Being closed today is the worst possible timing for them.

Saeed came by this morning looking for someone to drink with. So I joined him as he ordered bloody Mary’s and I got mojitos. Eventually Dominica and Paul were drinking too. There were tequila shots, whiskey shots, it was a very relaxing morning. We hung out until nearly noon.

This afternoon I worked on my final DuoLingo achievement. The “Finishing #1 in Diamond League” badge, the hardest one to get. It has taken me about a year of trying to finally get that one. I had to put in about three hours of completely focused work on DuoLingo today to make that possible. It feels great to finally have all of that done and out of the way. Now I just need to finish the stories and lessons without any specific goals.

The hotel is so busy today. Totally sold out, but that is easy with the very few rooms that we have. But the restaurant had over fifty patrons in it for most of the day. That’s insane. That is standing room only around here. I hid in the office as much as I could all day. There is no way not to just be in the way with that amount of stuff going on.

This evening a storm rolled in. And it was a big one. Really bad timing with us having a full restaurant as the roof on the beach side is just awful and useless in a strong rain. It is the first big thing to get replaced once we fully own the hotel. But the challenge there is that we really want to move that to two floors instead of just one because we desperately need the additional seating capacity as the restaurant has just gotten to be crazy. The challenge, though is that it will then mean that there is a restaurant right off of one of the hotel room private balconies. We have not figured out how to deal with that problem, yet.

The storm was really intense and really terrified the dogs. We had to spend about eight hours trying to keep them calm. They really do not handle the intense storms here well.

To make the evening even more exciting, the new septic system failed from the massive onslaught of the biggest rain of the season and we actually had things flowing the wrong direction. So it turned into a plumbing emergency during a huge storm. Not a great situation.

And then, just to make things harder, the power went out. Not surprising as the storm was incredibly intense. So intense that we were afraid to go to generator power for quite a long time before there was so much lightning.

The staff worked so hard today, we got them pizza from Puesta and I got salmon toast for Luciana. Josue and I had to go pick it up in the pouring rain while wading through several inches (up over my ankles) in sludge running down the road. The water on the road was up to our hotel entrance level.

It was a wild night. Our maintenance team, not just Wilbur, was here much of the night figuring out what to do. There is going to be a lot more work going on tomorrow, for sure.

One of the big problems that caught us tonight is that the new roof is not on yet, nor the gutters put in. Because of that all of the water coming down in that space is going straight into the septic system instead of running into the street like it normally would. That is a high priority item for tomorrow.

Dominica was up at three this morning and ended up with insomnia so decided to just get into the kitchen and get to baking since she has cakes that need to be made this morning anyway. Around four she accidentally woke up me and the dogs. So we were all awake after that point.

By one this afternoon our new septic tanks were in and operational! I cannot believe how fast this crew works, and doing everything by hand. It is insane how much labor goes into this process. I took the dogs out for a walk just before one and as I was heading out Wilbur showed me the caps getting ready and the water already going into the new tanks. They had to put in the new drainage pipes this morning.

The hotel was quite busy today. It is great. Overall I would not say that the village is overly busy. But it is not slow. We had a good crowd all day, though. We were easily the busiest place in town (other than Suyapa, they really aren’t in the same league.)

We visited a lot earlier in the day. Then I put in some hours in the office writing and watching the dogs.

A lot of the evening was hanging out with Amos and Anahi. We even sat out on the beach and got to watch the sunset. I almost never actually get to do that.

Late this evening Amos had a big group of friends come in from Managua and we sang happy birthday and did cakes.

At ten this morning a local fisherman came by with a 27.5 lbs yellowfin tuna! We are very excited. Tuna is available from time to time now because the estuary is open now so tuna fishing is happening again. We are so excited. You do not get tuna just every day, and especially not a yellowfin. This is high end tuna. And thankfully Darwin was here and knows how to prep the tuna was starting cutting it up right away outside. So we are having tuna for dinner tonight! It is just under two dollars per pound here. Street price from a fish monger is generally between eight and fifteen dollars per pound for non-sushi grade tuna. So the price for us here is fantastic. And at that price it gets delivered!

It was Grand Central Station in my office this morning. I never had a moment to even think about looking at work stuff until noon. I really need an office that is not also the room in which everything happens. Every bit of people talking, people eating, showering, getting dressed, taking care of the dogs, and on and on happens where I need to be working in absolutely, unbroken silence. I’m not too distracted by the maintenance sounds outside, they are clearly outside and it does not normally interrupt my concentration. But the people in the room, any people in the room, make me unable to focus on my writing and other critical, highly focused activities.

I have been so busy this week that I have been unable to schedule any of my Spanish activities. So instead of having four days of one thing per day I am doing three classes just today! My afternoon is quite busy, and quite stressful.

This evening, after work, we hung out with Amos and his friend that came in from Managua and Ivonne. We did not stay up late, though. We went to bed around eight thirty! Everyone was feeling quite tired.

Dinner was tuna steaks and it was amazing. The lemon sauce was just fantastic. All so good.

I did my regular Spanish stuff (Drops, DuoLingo, MemRise) before falling asleep a little after ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

https://youtu.be/yf2jyrVPzUM

Everyone (except for Liesl and I) went up to León today. Luciana has a follow up appointment at the doctor’s about her toe. So Dominica took my broken Teva sandals with them and they found a shoe repair place that fixed by shoe super fast for less than two dollars! Incredible!

Dominica took Luciana to breakfast at Mañana Mañana where she had some waffle and ice cream thing.

Luciana’s doctor’s appointment went pretty well. They had to do a little more trimming on her toe, but overall they said that it was looking good and things should be all fixed in about three months.

Work was really busy for me today. And tomorrow is going to be crazy, too. Especially in the morning. I skipped lunch today, just worked right through. Not really a problem as I have been eating too much, anyway. There is just so much good food here and it is so easy to have someone make it for us.

The rain came at four thirty this afternoon. Earlier than it usually does. There was some thunder, too, so of course Mia got nervous. Poor dog is still scared of every storm.

There was a break in the rain around five thirty and I took the dogs on a nice two mile walk. It was sprinkling most of the time, which was great. It was nice and cool with gorgeous deep grey skies and all kinds of lightning across the sky. Perfect weather for a long walk.

Just fifteen days until Allen moves to Las Peñitas. His last Utah based staffer was done as of today. He has already shipped a bunch of his stuff to come down here.

This evening Michellez came over and the girls all wanted pizza. So we just gave in and had pizza, too. Each of the three girls ate one half of a pizza from Puesta del Sol. Dominica and I split a Norwegian pizza (smoked salmon) and Ivonne had a little bit of it and a tiny leftover bit was shared with the staff.

So last night staff asked Ivonne if they could all go out to León to go dancing tomorrow. She had told them “no”, it was a bad idea as they would all be too tired to work. But when she told us about the idea we were immediately like “whoo hoo, that sounds like a great idea” and, as Ivonne likes to say, “I think it is a bad idea, but it is your hotel.”, so we are all going and our hotel chauffeur is going to drive everyone. It should be a lot of fun. This will be our first time going out in almost two years! Everyone needs this.

I took the dogs out at nine for their last walk of the night and I clocked in a rather light walking day at just a little over fourteen thousand steps for the day.

I had to do book edits tonight. Boy this is all very exhausting. But I am over the halfway point and moving faster and faster as I get into the groove.

Found out today that Kat had missed getting her vaccine in the States due to weather. She never then rescheduled. She went to a music event last week and, not surprisingly, now has COVID. There is very little going on with COVID down here. But boy are we hearing a lot about how bad it is back in the EEUU / USA.

It was a good morning for a shorter walk since I have my Spanish class at nine this morning and it is a double length session, so a full hour, as my class for tomorrow had to be moved to today. This is week four, I believe, of doing Spanish lessons. I do ninety minutes a week of the Spanish lessons themselves, typically three days of one thirty minute lesson each. Then I have homework. And once a week I have a class on “how to learn” that I take with a neuro-scientist who works with me on techniques for how to learn things. I then have one thirty minute brain training session (homework) to do every day for that. Plus I do DuoLingo and Drops daily (both on roughly 540 day streaks) and Memrise as well (only about three weeks of that.)

I got to working on my Spanish at seven. I would have started much earlier but as soon as I returned from walking the dogs this morning I had missed a few support calls and I spent at least half an hour on the phone dealing with a customer.

I’ve been getting way too much breakfast the last few days with these amazing breakfast burritos. So today I told Dominica to just get herself one and I would just have her leftovers. Otherwise I get one of my own and her leftovers! If I am still hungry after half (or more) of her burrito, I can just order some fruit or something else easy and healthy. A burrito and a half is way too much.

Spanish class was exhausting. A full hour of being grilled continuously in Spanish is a lot for my brain to handle. Especially as it is no longer simple conversations, but rather it is specific verb conjugation discussions.

Today’s hotel excitement is that our septic tank is dramatically past capacity. This is not exactly news, but something today, or probably yesterday, caused it to back up so our laundry and kitchen waste water is sitting above ground filling the laundry area and covering the walkway! This is a major problem. Since we do not actually own the hotel fully yet, it is that much more of a problem. So we have to coordinate with everyone and agree on how we are going to handle it.

We already have one quote for the new tanks and filtration system. Just waiting on a second quote before pulling the trigger. We have everyone that is involved agreeing to a plan of action at this point, which is the bigger deal. We are ready to make it happen and hopefully it is something that can be done tonight or tomorrow.

For lunch today Dominica and I had fried tofu bites and house salads. Liesl had pancakes. Luciana had her regular bagel with cream cheese. That has been her favourite for quite a while now.

I had a busy afternoon of working on many small projects. It was not horrible but it kept me from getting to a lot of things that I would have preferred to have been working on.

This evening we had shrimp and fish fried rice for dinner. Our kitchen makes the most amazing fried rice ever. We can never move away from the hotel because we get the best food imaginable here and we are so spoiled. We will never be able to live any other way ever again after this.

Just for fun, our power went out this evening around seven, maybe just a little after. At eight we decided to go to generator power. We cannot run the air conditioning when on generator, but it is dropping down to much cooler outside tonight than we set the air conditioning to normally, so it is not a big deal overall.

So the entire hotel staff wants to go to Leon to the ZonaRosa to go dancing on Friday night. Dominica thinks that this is because I dance around the hotel so much than it is infectious. So we are bringing in a van to take everyone out. That will be a fun hotel outing.

I took the dogs for a late night walk in the dark. Only three of us with real power from our generators… The Simple, Suyapa, and Sua. All three of us are fully open for business. Roca has a generator but it powers their sign and not the hotel so you can see them, but they aren’t lighting up the street or offering powered services to customers. So I walked the dogs only as far as Sua and then back home. That should be enough, but it is not very far.

With everything going on today and no street lights, I only did about 8,200 steps today. That’s half a normal day for me! One of my absolute top “dislikes” about this area of Nicaragua is that the street lights are on regular power without any backups. So if the power is out, the streets are dark.

The problem with the power being out in Nicaragua is that everything just slowly gets warmer and warmer as time wears on. And the more you do anything, like run fans, the faster the air temperature rises.

A funny thing, to me, is that in Spanish we do not say that we have lost power. Instead we say that we have no light. Which is confusing since you can have light that isn’t from the electric. So you can have lights on but no lights. But that is what they say.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.

It was a very short dog walk this morning. None of us were feeling it and Mia was sick again and threw up some plastic bits. So I did not want her to walk more than necessary. She had been sick just before going to bed last night. That she was sick again on our walk this morning made me a little nervous. And a good excuse to give me feet a rest.

Alex came by this morning and stayed for a few hours. Then I had to run to get to meetings. I had my first Spanish class for the week. Just half an hour today, but I have an hour long class tomorrow. That will be very mentally exhausting for sure. I never do an hour long class. My whole morning will be spent preparing for that.

Today felt really exhausting. I am not sure why. I got to bed a little on the earlier side last night and slept in a little this morning. But it just felt like I was really tired all day long. It was quite hard to get any work done. I mostly gave up on doing anything that was mentally taxing.

About five this evening the rain returned. The power went out for a few minutes just before the rain started so I took the chance to step outside and record today’s SGL video vlog for YouTube while there was no way for me to work. By the time that I was done the power was back on and I was able to get the uploads going.

I took the chance this evening to shave my head for the first time since being back in Nicaragua. I only have a small razor so it took a while and I am not sure how good of a job that I did. It is hot here and having any amount of extra hair for me is a problem as it makes me sweat that much more since I only sweat from my head. So tomorrow’s video should look a little different. I felt better having that done.

Dinner tonight was veggies and fried tofu. It was really good and quite healthy. I needed something light tonight so it worked out well. While we were eating the power went out again. It was less than five minutes. Overall we have been pretty lucky with the power. We are still very glad that the generator is there just in case, though.

The girls’ friend Michellez came over this evening and played with them for a few hours. They watched Hotel Transylvania 2 and did some art. It was about ten when she headed home. It was still raining when I took the dogs on their final walk for the night and, of course, they came back and jumped on our clean bed and got muddy paw prints all over it.

I had work to do as late as a little after eleven. I also did my memorization meditation exercises and then was ready for bed.

I only did two miles with the dogs this morning. Sometimes we need a little break.

Dominica and I took the dogs for a walk together around noon and noticed that it felt super warm. It is only ninety three today, but Google says that it is a “feels like” one hundred and two. We noticed, for sure. In theory it is because rain is headed our way this afternoon.

I felt really tired much of the day today. It was a struggle to stay awake. I had plenty of coffee. Maybe I am not getting enough sleep.

I took Clive for a walk this evening just in time to see the sky get quite dark. So I ran out immediately after getting him home and brought in the chalkboard that sits out front and then grabbed the GoPro and went out to film today’s episode with the gorgeous storm rolling in.

We had quite a lot of rain come down this evening and it lasted for several hours. That cooled things off a lot.

I took an early break from work around five thirty to get dinner. Then it was a long evening of working for me.

This evening we had a crew working through the night to install a new sink in our bar. So our water was shut off around nine thirty. They only had it off for about an hour. But the new sink has a leak and they need to work on it again tomorrow night.

Late tonight I managed to get in my memory training session. It is so hard to get time to do meditation work. There is no thirty minute period of the day, even late at night, that kids and even employees don’t need me! Maybe that is why I am so tired!

I got to bed at a decent time tonight. Trying to get a full night’s sleep as I have been a little tired recently. Clive always getting me up at five thirty in the morning no matter what is going on can be exhausting as there is no way to adjust for more sleep.

I got my Spanish classes scheduled for the week. I was lazy about that. I have them the next three days then my memory training class on Friday.

We had thirteen people in the restaurant when I returned, which was right as we were opening. So likely we were pretty busy even before we had officially opened for the morning! By mid-breakfast we were up to eighteen having already turned over one large table. That is not including us, which is another three.

Today is supposed to be very hot. Thirty six Celsius, which is ninety seven Fahrenheit. So today is a good day to hide in the office as much as possible. Both because it is hot and because the restaurant is busy and we do not want to be taking up space.

I did some work on the book today. The dogs were extra exhausted. Probably from the long morning walk and the general heat. I found out this evening that tomorrow is a holiday, perhaps only in Managua. So there are just tons of people here because of that. The restaurant was totally full for the entire day.

Surprisingly taking the dogs out to walk a few times at the peak of the heat did not really feel all that hot today. There is no question that being here for two and a half months we are starting to adapt for real.

I went out and did some SGL vlog videos to upload to YouTube. I’ve been a few days behind and I managed to all but catch up except that while recording the video for last Thursday the camera shut down from overheating! I was not outside for that long and the sun was getting low, but it was still too much for the length of time that I was recording.

This evening we decided that there was nowhere in our restaurant to even sit and that it would not make sense at all to eat at our own restaurant. While out walking Clive I noticed that Puesta del Sol was totally empty, not a single customer. So we ate there. They will be packed after our last table has left, so they are doing fine. They just do not get the crowd prior to sunset as they are not sitting on the beach. It is great that we have them on WhatsApp so I can just text over, discuss our inevitable special order with them, get the price, put together the cash, and walk over when everything is ready. So handy. As if living within shouting distance was not enough.

Luciana got the walnet and gorganzola rigatoni. My mother’s parents would be so proud to know that their ten year old granddaughter was living in Central America regularly ordering gorgonzola. It was their favourite.

Liesl was not in the mood for anything over there so is getting food from our own restaurant. We can at least do roomservice to keep from taking up space in the restaurant itself.

Dominica got rigatoni pomodoro, and I got seafood lasagna. I also ordered three pizzas and two orders of bruschetta for our crew who are working so hard tonight!

We ended up having to deal with a staff problem tonight. No fun, our first firing event since coming down here. Luckily we have a manager so we only had to deal with so much of it. But it is still stressful, especially when dealing with it in a touch economy like this. But it was a serious issue and clearly she knew that she was doing multiple things that were guaranteeing that she was getting fired sooner or later.

That made for a stressful night. So I stayed up late with Dominica and Ivonne having cosmos while they destressed.

Today Liesl asked to start Unity (the game development platform) classes. She spent a few hours watching training videos on YouTube about it. I spent a few hours trying to get it installed on her gaming machine.

I had no real work today. It was great. Now that we have a weekend guy on staff it is making our lives so much easier. Not only do we have greatly improved overall company capacity, but we have coverage specifically over the weekends when traditionally I was stuck being on call and while things were generally not very hard on the weekends, getting suddenly interrupted so that I could never enjoy doing anything relaxing really wears you down.

This afternoon Liesl and I went out on our first photowalk together. I just used my OnePlus 8 phone with Ektacam to do more traditional street photography while she took the Nikon D90 with the 35mm f/1.8 prime (50mm equivalent) so that she could learn more about that. That’s the camera that she has been learning to use so that she gets the full control experience. She did colour work and I mostly did black and white. We had a lot of fun and walked rather a bit. We walked quite a bit through the barrio and to the south end of town past Barca de Oro where she has never been.

Liesl wants to go out and do photography a lot more often. She enjoys using the camera and going on the walks. It is a good way to get her out and walking, if nothing else. She is one that likes to just stay at home if at all possible. She’s pretty happy just hanging out in her room most of the time. So any voluntary outdoor activity is a big deal. Luciana wants to swim almost daily and wants to go to Carla’s pulperia at least a few times a week; and once in a while she will even walk the dogs with me at night when it is cooler. No one but me can handle their midday walk as it is just too hot.

It is amazing but I appear to be the only person here, Nicaraguan or otherwise, that does not instantly burn when going outside. Even all of the locals are amazed that I get no effect from the sun. I get hot, but not burnt at all. I really do not notice the sun in any way and I am outside more than almost anyone (because of the demands of the dogs.) I wonder if the insane amount of sweat that I generate from the top of my head acts like a sun barrier because it is always there and must impact the light passing through it.

This evening was some Genshin Impact with the girls. The three of us played for maybe an hour. We never get a lot of time to play. But I am steadily making just a little bit of progress. The girls did not have anyone come over tonight so it was a good night for us to hang out together. I have seen very little of them in the evenings this week because Michellez has been over so much and they are all so excited to have access to their big Steam gaming rig again and the Oculus VR system. Ivonne is really enjoying that, too.

I got to bed at a semi-decent time. My late night walk with the dogs went pretty long. We did about two miles before calling it a night. My watch has measured my month of July as coming it at just a hair over one hundred miles of walking! That’s a lot to keep up for a whole month. And I am not sure if that is tracking all of my walking or if it is only the time that I am running the GPS tracker, which is just a fraction of my overall walking time.

It is amazing how much I can just feel myself getting healthier being here. And we are making absolutely no effort to eat healthy food. Everything is just naturally healthier and there is almost no snacking or dessert. Having our own chefs means that we can order real food, including healthy food, and do not have to worry about how long it takes or the effort. Instead of going for chips because they are ready and I can just grab them quickly, I can text the kitchen and ask for a real meal, and ask for it to be delivered to my office. So I do not have to think about it again until it arrives and ready to be eaten. So I can just keep on working without having to involve myself in the food process.

Today our shower in our “bedroom” at the hotel had its drain back up and started to flood the room. Thank goodness for tile floors, I guess. We were in a panic, but we had the best plumbing experience today. Our plumber was over in just TEN MINUTES to get everything fixed.

This is the day that I often use as an example of “nicatime”. People say this often and foreigners are often frustrated by the lack of firm schedules in Nicaragua. But in reality, “nicatime” often means “as quickly as possible”, instead of the American system of “I’ll take much longer than necessary in order to reliably schedule a time that we can almost certainly commit to.” Both systems work, but Americans often see the lack of schedules in Nicaragua as things taking a long time, when in reality, it seems that things are done way faster here, but far less predictably. Just like with computer programs: the ability to predict the time to accomplish a task comes at the cost of completing that task quickly. Scheduling has overhead, often a lot of it.

This past week the Burger King in Geneseo, New York which is the BK that I grew up going to and was the site of one of my first jobs, was torn down. After I had left GMI in Flint, Michigan and before starting classes at MCC in Rochester I had been working at the Pizza Hut there in Geneseo as the crew chief and one day walked over to the BK next door (we shared a parking lot) to see if I could pick up some spare cashier hours on the side. They instead hired me as a regional assistant manager (like an AM but not assigned to a specific store) and I did all of my training there at the Geneseo store. So I have a lot of memories there. Plus, of course, that store must have been there from before I was born as I have no memory of it ever not being there. The store could easily be fifty years old!

It got really warm today. We were sweating in the house after having fleeces on yesterday. In the afternoon it was seventy nine in the house!

There is so much school stuff that needs to be boxed up. The old dining room that turned into the school room eventually turned into school storage and is totally full of home schooling materials. Over the years all of the different projects, books, attempts and whatnot of home schooling just collected there and has now become the densest storage in the house.

For dinner everyone was tired, so we just ordered delivery from Dominos.

I did a lot of work on MangoLassi today. The site has been horribly out of date for a long time and really needed attention. There have been all kinds of factors keeping it from getting regular updates and I am attempting to fix a lot of that and, potentially, move it to a more modern and, hopefully, much cheaper hosting option. It has been on the same Linode instance since about 2015, that’s six years without upgrading the hardware. It’s run great, but there are so many versions newer database, programming platform, operating system, and platform itself. It is time for some love and attention.

I put in many hours working on the MangoLassi updates. We went from NodeBB 1.12 all the way up to the current 1.16? We took MongoDB from 3.2 all the way to 4.4 (going through 3.4, 3.6, 4.0, and 4.2 along the way.). We updated from NodeJS 10 to 15!

Then the even bigger change. Backing everything up and migrating from CentOS 7 running on Linode to Ubuntu 20.10 running on Vultr! What a day.

We all worked very hard today. There was almost no downtime. But the vehicles are quite heavily loaded up already and there is more to go out to them in the morning. MangoLassi has been moved to the new site. The girls have made a lot of decisions about things that they are not going to keep. Paul made two donation runs today as we filled his SUV twice with stuff to donate! We have a few full bins and some furniture all going to Emily, rather than to our storage unit. It’s a crazy amount of stuff that is done. The kitchen is so empty that it is nearly useless other than the food in it. Everything has been packed.

I leave for Atlanta the day after tomorrow (late on Monday) and will be gone pretty much the whole week. They think that they can get the rest of the house painted and enough packing done that I will have to do another run to Houston to the storage unit next weekend.