1st person plural. And other nerdiness

The 1^st person plural is so easy to conjugate and now that I almost always have a little person in tow, I get to use it frequently and don't sound like an idiot quite so frequently. I have long known that I get pleasure out of learning other languages. I am not sure exactly how that reward center got built but it's there. If I get to say a word that I recently learned and haven't uttered before I get a little high. If someone uses a word that I just recently learned, I really enjoy it. The amount of Spanish I speak per day greatly influences my mood. There are worse vices I could have but maybe not nerdier ones.

Monkey or plastic?

The first week here we were driving back from Remanso Beach and I noticed a tree with several black plastic bags in it. My initial reaction was sadness that there was garbage in the trees.  Then it occurred to me that it was odd that there were numerous plastic bags in ONE tree and not in others around it. 

And then I noticed that they were monkeys, not plastic bags. 

The same thing happened to me on a run the other day. I was running alongside the Pan-American Highway (like you do) and saw a black plastic bag in a tree.  Except it was a monkey.  It was a nice reward for running in the heat.

I have also seen a frog the size of my head, a tarantula the size of my 3 year old's foot (but thankfully not ON Calhoun's foot), beautiful birds and scorpions.  Stuart got stung? bitten? by a scorpion.  He's fine. 

That's all for my wildlife report.

Avgolemono

I thought about making the subtitle of this post "If life gives you lemons...".  It is sometimes hard to strike a balance between local food and comfort food.  For the first two weeks we ate every dinner out.  It was delicious but expensive.  Not half as expensive as New York, but expensive.  So the next week we made our own food but being far from home and not yet comfortable with the ingredients here, we mainly stuck to pasta. We even bought a couple of imported boxes of macaroni and cheese.  But tonight I feel as if we found the kind of familiar dish that works perfectly with local ingredients.  We aren't Greek but we LOVE avgolemono and after looking up a recipe a year ago it has been a monthly dinner (at least).  And the ingredients are so easy to come by.  In fact, lemons can be found along our road, having dropped from the tree perfectly ripe.  Tiny lemons and lemons bigger than I've ever seen!  So we had Avgolemono soup, cut local veggies (cabbage, carrots, peppers and cucumber) and for dessert I made no-bake cookies with peanuts, honey, peanut butter, cornflakes and flour. 

Picture Posts. It's a good day today....

1 out of 3

1. We now have a place to live.  We are moving there in 3 days after we tool around the country to make sure we don't want to settle somewhere other than SJdS (San Juan del Sur).  The place is a little outside of the town but close enough to get Ari to school without any fuss.  It has a communal pool- Calhoun will tell you with his voice ever-rising with excitement that.... the pool... has a... tunnel!!!  There is also a gorgeous view of surrounding hills, though not of the ocean.  And room for visitors :).

So that's the one out of three.

2. We still have no car (we currently are renting but just found out that you can't hold the title to a car unless you are a resident- ACK!)

3. We still have no job. 

The kids have been here for a few days now and seem to be adjusting OK to a life of swimming twice a day.  That is my new goal- to have them learn to swim while we are here.  I know- lofty goals!  But sometimes you just need something attainable.

I am less sure about our goal of becoming fluent in Spanish as you see and hear English wherever you go in this expat town but we will have to see.  Of course, I am also hoping that we get to learn more of Nicaraguan culture and get to know real live actual Nicaraguans.  I am banking on my kids just starting to play with someone and it growing from there.  Luckily they don't know the pressure is on them.