two posts in one day! its like christmas, only Jesus died today!

March 15, 2008

I still have an annoying cough. Comes and goes throughout the day. Really annoying. I went for a run this morning with a friend/trainee of mine around a futbol field. Showed her some basic parkour vaults in the central plaza in town. Felt real good to get exercise again. No cough until I started writing later this morning and afternoon.

I'm actually writing all this by hand. I loaned my laptop to my boss so he could use the good internet connection in his office in Tegus to download Gnumeric for me so I could hopefully use the WatSan spreadsheets like everyone else with a laptop.

Let's see...my new house. I rather like the layout. A main house with a living room (with a tv and stereo system). Two bedrooms as far as I can tell, a kitchen and another room with a hammock and two gates to the outside patio/backyard. Toilet and shower rooms aren't connected to the house. The wood-burning stove room is also not connected, nor is my own room. My room is brand new, 100% concrete, on the other side of the yard. Not a bad room. Heats up during the day due to poor ventilation, but the windows are enough to get it nice and cool during the nights. My room is huge compared to my room in Santa Lucia, but it has a work in progress feel. Unpolished concrete slab floor, only 1/2 the walls are painted, and there's a pile of scrap window panes in one corner with a can of paint. When my family helped me put up my mosquito net around the bed, they had to put nails into the walls and I used thread to suspend the net. It's pretty makeshift, but now I'm sleeping with a mosquito net like a pro. I only have 3 plastic chairs and 2 coffee tables to organize my stuff and keep it off the ground away from the ants that live in the cracks in the floor, but it's sufficient. Power outlet for my iPod, phone, and computer recharge needs. The main house is mostly concrete, but with tile floors, wooden rafters, and sheet metal roof visible above the rafters. No insulation, no real need for it.

Family is pretty cool. I was out late last night hanging with the gringos, and my mom said she'd leave the side door from the street to the inside patio unlocked. I got in, locked it behind me, brushed my teeth at the pila outside their bedrooms, and went to bed without waking anyone. My mom told me she got up at around midnight and worried for me, but saw I had locked the gate and knew I was home safe. Said I was silent like a cat. I said "rawr!" and made a cat claw pose in my head but I think in reality we just laughed together. She likes jokes, and I'm getting to the point where I can crack a few of my own. It helps when your audience is jovial to begin with, like this family.

The 12 or 13 year old boy and girl like to talk to me. The 6 year old boy is pretty shy, and we only really just exchange pleasantries. Hi, bye, bon apetite. If you ever see someone eating in Honduras, you can say "buen probecho!" and you'll get a "gracias" in response. Total strangers. But yeah, the 1.5 year old girl has learned my name and hands random items to me everyone once in awhile (money, photos, food, etc). My 18 year old brother has been busy lately. The cat is used to having its tail pulled and being dragged around the tile floor. Isn't big on getting petted, but rubs up against me every so often. It's a pretty cool cat to be honest. Indoor and outdoor cat. Boy cat.

I realized, walking through the streets, that sleeping dogs and cats invariably make me feel better about life in general. It's a comforting sight.

The other night I shifted in my bed and heard a crash from beneath me. I grabbed a flashlight and saw a metal bar between two broken wooden support slats had buckled and fallen. There was now a big pit in the center of my mattress. Today I finally fixed it. Lifted the mattress up (dusty! cough cough), snapped the metal bar in two with my beastly strength and put the two pieces at 90 degrees to their original position, now across the other wooden support slats. So it's much more comfortable now. Hopefully it will last.

A typical weekday! I wake up at around 4 am now when the dad gets ready to go out to do road construction a fair distance away. By this time, I'm cold so I put on more pj's and put my headphones back in.

Some random guy just came to the window of the living room in which I'm writing, bought some tortillas from my mom and gave me some "charamuscas." At a distance, it looks like the baggie of heroin Travolta buys in Pulp Fiction. It's actually frozen milk and sugar in a plastic bag. Bite off a corner of the bag and eat it like a freeziepop thing. Icy. So right now I'm basically sucking on the outside of a plastic bag that has changed hands more times than I care to imagine. But it's cold and sweet and free so it's good on this hot day. I just asked my mom and she said that guy is the son of her neighbor who is hosting another trainee buddy of mine across the street. So I didn't just take candy from a stranger. Honest.

Typical day, take 2. I sleep with my iPod on all night. Headphones fall out as I toss and turn. Wake up at 4 am, go back to sleep, wake up at 5:45 or so when my mom decides to start making tortillas by hand-grinding the corn to make the dough. Right outside my window at the wood-burning stove. My alarm is set for 6:07 am, so I listen to fast music to wake me up until then. Coooold bucket bath for a half hour. I make noises when it's time to rinse. Get dressed, eat breakfast, typically some sort of fried or scrambled egg, beans and tortillas. Kill time and walk to my 7:30 am Spanish class. Language in the mornings, return home for lunch, could be nice hot soup on a nice hot day, or another plato tipico with beans and rice and egg and heated cold cuts, similar to bologna. Also, "chop suey" is popular here. Fried noodles with veggies and meat tossed in. Back to class, at the library this time for tech training. Last week we did 3 field trips to practice surveying. After class at 4:30 I typically chat with gringos or go to the internet cafe for a couple hours, then return home for dinner at 7 pm.

Dinner is a variation on the same, but last night I had baleadas with beans and manteca. Manteca is this weird sour white butter sort of thing. Put ingredients in center of a white flour tortilla, fold tortilla in half, and poof, one baleada. I like them more with just beans and eggs inside, though. Then I chill with the family for a bit, do Spanish homework, get tired and get ready for bed. Brush my teeth at the pila (it's the above ground water basin for storage of water between water days, and for washing clothes...has a concrete washboard and drain for the grey water), do some stargazing at 9 pm and crash. Usually hard.

Next week is Semana Santa, or holy week. The whole country basically takes a week off for vacations and rest and celebrations, some with religious significance (palm sunday, good friday, easter) and some without. I have normal days Monday and Tuesday, a cultural day Wednesday with all the gringos and their families at the library, then freedom until next Monday. Should be interesting.

I'm gonna take a nap. Told my family I was gonna sleep a little...like a cat, and they laughed.

----------------------

Good nap. Ridiculous how much my iPod can revitalize me. Bed is definitely fixed sufficiently. Eating lunch at 3 pm right now. Egg with bologna-esque mystery meat cooked in, refried beans and rice and tortillas. This family likes spicy food and they always have some local brand tobasco on hand. Good people.

Slow day today. Dad and all the sons went to the beach. I can only go on trips if my whole family goes. So its me, the mom and the two girls. Older sister said it would be a boring day, I told her I enjoy dias tranquilos. Need to write, get some rest...good way to relax. I think we're going to play Bingo later. They play with labeled pictures rather than plain numbers here, so its good vocabulary practice right now.

For now, I'm gonna switch back to writing to my chick. Toodles.

----------------------

March 20, 2008

Random fact to give you some small insight: in this part of Honduras, if the light bulb in your ceiling starts flickering, it's not because the bulb isn't all the way tight, or is faulty. It's because the electrical current from the grid is actually fluctuating drastically. The PCVeterans tell me that you can murder laptop and iPod batteries by leaving them plugged in all the time here.

One month anniversary with my chick yesterday. Celebratory phone call with fairly good reception followed by fond thoughts exchanged via AIM for an hour or two. Pretty darn good day. Pretty much set in stone that she's coming to visit for my birthday for a week or two. We're going to Copan Ruinas. Plane tickets haven't been purchased just yet because I want to get a price for a hotel first so I know how long a vacation I can actually afford.

I am totally boppin out in my bed to Chuck Berry and Richard Hell and the Cramps. I want to do the Pulp Fiction dance with a certain someone. Pre-heroin OD scene. You know what I'm talkin about. Lots of Pulp Fiction references in this one, huh? My guitar-playing buddy loves the movie, has most of it memorized. He got dengue fever last weekend! He's the first in our group. We think he's pretty B-A. He's working on getting his appetite back now...got over the fever and the eyeball ache in a couple days. He said there was 24 hours where he just plain didnt want to move. So much so that he didn't. Just sipped water when he could lift his head. There are 4 strains of dengue here...catch one, and you're immune to it. Catch them all, and man, you need to learn how to use bug repellent, man.

Let's see...got my computer back. Got Gnumeric working, but there's a wonky bug when you import excel files...all the cell dimensions get skewed and apparently you have to manually reset them all so you can read the data in the cells. Tedious. There's got to be a better way.

The cultural day yesterday was neat. Spent about 2 hours the night before last shelling tamarinds. I'd forgotten how good tamarinds are raw. But the plan was to make a tamarind punch sort of thing, so we did. Used a blender on the shelled tamarinds. Poured boiling water onto the wad of tamarind goop to make a sort of tamarind tea, then ran the mix through a colender to have a smooth liquid drink. Add a lot of sugar, stir to dissolve it, then add ice to make it refreshing. Turned out very well. Made a big pot for 50 people or so, and it was gone. Lots of added sugar. Today I told my mom we need to make it again. She said if I'm willing to buy the sugar (most expensive ingredient) then she'll get the tamarinds. I'm totally gonna take her up on that one of these weeks.

Cultural day. Went to the local school near the central plaza (though they call it the parque, not the plaza) and there were dances by the schoolkids and a big potluck lunch. Found out I had to give a little speech about how I prepared the fresco de tamarindo about 5 minutes beforehand. Yeah, that was an awkward speech. My mom just yelled at me from the crowd everything I needed to say because I was drawing blanks. I ended by telling everyone it was the best fresco ever and everyone laughed, so I guess I did alright. Afterward, I found out that my Spanish skills have leveled up. I was novice high with a little plus sign, now I'm intermediate medium. So I went up two levels in 5 weeks...that's apparently pretty good. It's amazing how much better you can sound when you remember how to talk in past tense. Also, intermediate medium is what is required to be sent into the field at the end of the 3 months of training, so I'm golden.
So yeah, tamarinds. And now Kashmir comes up on my iPod. A couple fond thoughts, heading your way, Sarah.

Two wrong numbers on my cell phone in two days. Amusing. I'm sure they'll get back to their buddy and be like "Dude, I tried calling you but I got some gringo instead. What gives?"

Make that a ton of wrong numbers. And the call keeps getting dropped so I can't explain to these two people that I don't want to tell them who I am. They should be able to tell me who I'm supposed to be so I can tell them I'm not that person so they can leave me the heck alone. Not keep asking who they're talking to.

I finally realized I can take better-than-nothing quality pics with the webcam built in to my XO laptop. Got some shots from my rooftop mango paradise, some shots of the host fam. I'm happy in 'em. Aww happy Alex. I'll try to upload them in another blog post...I think it should go smoothly. Otherwise, I'll just make a new facebook album.

I'm gonna make a € sign just because I can on this keyboard. It's the small things like that that make me like this computer.

I helped my sister do some homework today. Halo is a direct cognate into spanish, and...and...I forgot the other words we looked up in the dictionary. I have terrible retention of trivia.

I would like to give a shout-out to Project Gutenberg. I downloaded a plaintext file with Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" from their website...two freaking megabytes of .txt data. Ridiculous length. Tried loading it up on my laptop, and this text file locked up my XO. Let me repeat that, my XO laptop got pwned in the face by a plaintext rendition of classic Russian literature. So I went back to the internet cafe the next day and broke the file down into eight 200 kb chunks that my XO can stomach. Got Faust, Treasure Island, Paradise Lost, The Trial, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot also, and broke them down into chunks, too. Faust is actually pretty short...only one chunk. So I'll probably read it first, when I have nothing else to do. I have 2 years. If anyone has suggestions on other stuff I should read that I can easily get in free plaintext format, do let me know. Robinson Crusoe might be a good one... I can just imagine the man is actually crying out Wilson! Wilson! when I get bored. I don't really wanna try Moby Dick or David Copperfield. Anna Karenina sounds pretty boring, too. I'm looking forward to finally finishing The Idiot and Paradise Lost, though. I might take a stab at Proust. No Hemingway on the PG as far as I could tell.

I'm now up-to-date on my xkcd.com too. I love that comic. Had my second job interview with my bosses this week, too. They asked what I considered necessary to lead a happy life here. I told them that I need the basic necessities of life: food, water, clothing, shelter and internet access. My morale can soar with these things. Electricity is understood to be included with internet access. They said that would be totally fine.

Now I'm bopping out to Boys Don't Cry by the Cure. Seriously, I think I look like a 15 yr old schoolgirl when I dance around on my bed in front of the computer. Thankfully the webcam is off. Air drums and air microphone for the win. Who needs a PS3 to play Rock Band? Not this guy. I'm in a good mood.

Hey Mom and Dad...remember those albino-looking geckos that we had at the house and in the garage all the time? I have one in my room. He lives up by the ceiling and I like to think he eats any mosquitos that get repelled by the mosquito net. I need a name for my pet gecko.

Cheers, mates. Que le vaya bien.