- A nice steady rain had started falling by the time I went to bed last night, which made a nice natural lullaby. But for some reason I just wasn’t tired, and as I lay there awake the rain died off and then came back with a vengeance. I’m used to torrential downpours lasting for half an hour at most, but this must have gone on for about three hours. It wasn’t even nice to listen to, it was so loud and angry-sounding. And then after a while I felt a wet drop right in the middle of my forehead. The electricity wasn’t working to turn on the light and I couldn’t tell where the water was coming in with just my headlamp. But it wasn’t a real leak or my whole bed would have floated away, so I just moved my pillow down and eventually went to sleep. I asked Tomasa in the morning if that rain was normal and she said it was, and apparently Gilma slept through the whole thing. I’ve been known to sleep through plenty of things (classes, mostly), so hopefully I’ll be able to sleep through rainstorms like that come rainy season. (I asked Gilma in the evening how people stay dry and she said they basically don’t – hoo boy, this is going to be interesting!)
- Fairly boring day at the office. Spent the morning doing some data entry-type stuff and talking to Shannon on gmail chat (she might come visit, but apparently only if we can see some Mayan ruins), at lunch with Robyn, then spent a while with Tacho in the afternoon as he tried to show me what he’d been doing with inventory stuff before they suspended his salary. I really wanted to see what he’d done on Excel since I feel like that would be most useful for me to learn, but he ended up making some weird chart in Word. It was very strange watching him – he obviously knows how to do more stuff on the computer than me but he did a lot of it very inefficiently, like hitting ‘undo’ 50 times instead of just using ‘delete’ and going to Google to type in ‘hotmail.com’ instead of just typing it into the address bar. After a while he basically decided the chart he’d made was too complicated (I agreed) and said he would work on a format tonight and bring it in for me tomorrow. I just hope I don’t end up more confused…
- Left the office right around 5pm, biked home, half hour jog (now my knee’s hurting), exercises, shower, made one pupusa before filling ran out, had dinner (including “chimól,” which is like a nice fresh salsa) with a crapload of flying ants that kept landing all over my body and in my food.
- I was eating an orange (American style) for dessert when a police truck backed up just down the road and a couple of guys got out and poked around on the side of the street for a little while. Gilma, Tomasita, María Inez, and some other relative (Gabi?) stood in the yard and watched, then Gilma proceeded to tell me that a guy had had his throat slit in that same field about a year ago and that Vidal had been held up at the day before yesterday in Zamorán by two guys with pistols. Apparently they wanted to take his (old, crappy) bike but he convinced them to just take his $20 instead. So Gilma told me she doesn’t want me to go any further than Mata Piña because it gets quite isolated and I am, of course, a foreign female who has a new bike. I asked if maybe we should start using the combination lock (“condado”) I brought with me on the door to the house. She said that home robberies really aren’t an issue, but that we could look into getting a key lock, which would protect my stuff but also allow Tomasa to get into her own house. In any case, the string that she usually uses to tie to the door shut sure wouldn’t keep anyone out if they decided to see what sort of stuff the gringa brought with her. And here I had been feeling so nice and safe! But I suppose it is better to be cautious than to get mugged. I keep hearing about “delincuencia” as one of the big national problems, but since I hadn’t seen anything strange here (except for Loli’s bike) I was sort of thinking crime was only a problem in the cities…
- Brush teeth, journal, Bible, bed.
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