a little over due

Hello folks, lately I have not been in a writing mood, hence the tiny blogs for such a long period of time. Hopefully I can change this.

Yesterday was a very productive day (for this month).
I got up at 8:30am and was up and running by 9am. This is like light speed compared to the week (or two) before this. I went to the plaza to buy a newspaper, came home and read it all, and did the sudoko puzzle. After a lunch break, I started working on a project for work, and did that for an hour and a half (it was hard work, I needed a break). I went to S’s house to use the internet there, and got a lot of things done online. I returned home and continued working on the program until it was time to leave for tennis. As it turns out, we couldn’t have tennis, so after a dinner break, I continued working until my energy ran out. Overall, very productive. Oh, I also went to the grocery store at one point, which is not working, but it is necessary and something I had been putting off for a few days.

Baseball:

Baseball continues to go well. Two weekends ago we gave the kids the gloves to take home for the first time because we didn’t have a practice last weekend, and that way they could practice on their own. This Saturday they did very well, you could tell most had practiced. Unfortunately, a few had gotten hit with the baseball and now were scared of the ball, which is a little hard to deal with as a coach. We did a running game, which I thought the kids would hate, because they don’t like to run, but they loved it! They did basically a giant relay race around the bases where everyone had to run through and we timed them. They did it once, and challenged them to do it 20 seconds faster and they did it 30 seconds faster.


Work:

I am finally working again. My counterpart has a huge grant from an agency and part of it was to construct latrines. We have been going to watch the construction and give people a little push into getting the latrines done. We just started to visit the sites with the people from the funding agency. It’s been interesting. Considering during my time not working I wasn’t speaking Spanish, I have been having a few problems trying to get sentences out of my mouth. Oh well.

Tennis:

Finally! We had tennis again. We have had nightly curfew for a while and therefore no tennis. I went with two people to play. Now, they told me on the walk down there that they played the night before and were bored just hitting around, they said “there was no one yelling or telling us what to do.” Well, I love to yell and be bossy, so that made me happy. Well, they wanted to run. I told them two laps around the gym and we ran three. Then after normal warm-ups, we went back over how to hit fore-hands and back-hands. Then I gave them the option of what they wanted to work on, and they said more forehands and backhands. I made them run. It was a good time. I was just standing there hitting them the balls and dodge the balls coming back. At one point I had them doing backhands and if I didn’t know their level, I would have sworn they were trying to see who could nail me with the ball. Later one of them left (realize that there were only two) to buy water (just outside there was a place to do this). That’s when I told them that if they wanted a break, they needed to tell me because I was just standing and not running. Well, they still wanted to run, so I put them in the middle of the court, and hit balls to the sides and they had to run after them. We only had four balls, so it’s not like Paula’s old Death game where you run until you can’t and then still go after two more.
Later I tried to teach them how to serve. Well, this didn’t go so well. I need to think about this more and then learn the VOCAB to do so. They were starting to get it when we left. It was good though to play and joke around, and then talk in Spanish a lot. You would be surprised how little Spanish you can speak and live here. Part of that is having 2 sitemates and we speak in English to each other.

Random:

So, I finally started drinking coffee. I don’t do it regularly, but I can get through a cup of coffee. Now, it has been the big joke in my office that I don’t drink coffee and just about every day I went into the office for the last 5 months, I was offered coffee. Well, the other day I shocked them by saying yes, I wanted coffee. It was a big moment; people were saying it was a miracle. Walther took a picture of the big event. Later that day though I was working with someone who apparently was not inside to see the miracle and he was joking with me about how I don’t drink coffee, and I was like, “I just had coffee in the office this morning!” But he didn’t believe me. Later that day, he started this coffee joke up again, but this time Walther was there to show him the proof. Now though I am expected to drink coffee ALL THE TIME. That just is not going to happen.


What else has been going on? Well, I didn{t bring the most updated version of my blog entry today, so I will post this and put the other stuff on lately. I have almost completely broken my internet addiction. I am working on a project now and have been getting some information from my boss through the internet, which is the only reason I have been on lately. As you can tell, I haven{t been that big into writing lately. This includes the journal I was so good at keeping for six months, which I haven{t written in for three weeks.

Ahh, what is going on? I am trying to plan my first real vacation here. Now, in the states I pretty much just went on vacation, taking care of the details as I went along. Not so here, I have to plan everything out, and international phone calls are expensive.

Political situation seems stable right now, even the newspapers aren{t writing much about it.

There is a big soccer game for Honduras coming up Saturday. It is against the US. If Honduras wins or ties then they progress to South Africa nad the world cup games. My coworkers and I have been joking about this for a while now.

I had an interesting morning. I had woken up early, but hadn{t actually gotten out of bed yet when I got a call from T. She brought the wrong passport and was leaving for Costa Rica that morning. The was calling me from the bus station in the next town over, and she had to convince them to let her on the bus (they check for valid passports beforehand so they have no trouble getting everyone through the borders) and that I could bring her other passport down to the main road and give it to her there. So, I got dressed really quickly, ran to her apartment, starting going through her stuff, I couldn’t find the thing, and I didn{t have minutes on my prepay phone, so I went next door and had to try to explain that I needed to call Theresa with their phone for a second and that I could give them money for it. I finally find the passport and hail a cab to the highway. It all worked out at the end, but I doubt she ended up sleeping for the ride which was her original plan{ its tough to sleep with that much adrenaline running through your system.


Ok, if you are wondering why I have odd symbols in here, Spanish keyboards are a little different. Now, this keyboard wont let me type some symbols including apostrophes. This also includes the at symbol which I need to log onto blogger and therefore I had to open up Word, find the symbol (stupid vista making things hard to find) and then copy and paste to add in the sign and get onto this blog.