I´m updating!

I just received a letter in the mail and it’s reminded me of how much I love hearing updates from people that I miss. And on that note I remembered my very inactive and outdated blog.
I’ve been in my site for about four months now and things are going well. The following is my typical day
At 5:50 am my cell phone alarm goes off, though I usually get out of bed a little past 6 am. For awhile I was waking up at 5:30 and it made me miserable. I’d open the back door to see a sky that looked exactly like it did when I went to bed, and my house definitely does not have a magnificent view of the sunrise. Anyway, I grab my water bottle in the morning and down about half a liter of water because my mom’s latest obsession is drinking lots and lots of water. Plus it’s so hot and dry here that I get dehydrated when I’m not consciously drinking water all day. I make a cup of coffee with my water boiler and French press (courtesy of my generous sitemate) and something for breakfast (usually oatmeal, peanut butter and jelly or banana sandwich, fruit, pancakes, rice porridge, or something leftover). I water my plants –which includes a garden of little watermelon and squash plants, which aren’t looking too good after I transplanted some that were too crowded. I’m probably going to replant them soon. I have a seedbank of tomato, bell peppers, hot peppers, and other random seeds that I’m hoping will sprout soon. I just transplanted two basil plants and a mint plant that I bought last weekend. There’s the pineapple top that I planted a few months ago and I’m hoping has sprung roots. And then I have what’s left of my ginger plants, which were looking great until a piece of plastic fell on top of them and my host mom forgot about them. I’ve managed to revive one and it just sprouted some new leaves. There are a few bags of avocado, guava, and papaya seeds that I just planted and am waiting for to sprout. I have a mango and a few citrus plants that grew in my compost pile which are now in their own bags. I’m hoping to practice injertos with them once they get big enough. I think the English word is grafting? It’s when you take a branch of a grown tree with favorable characteristics and stick it into a little tree. If it sticks then the little plant will grow into a tree with combined characteristics –perhaps the resistance/hardiness of the original plant but delicious fruits like those from the branch. My old host family has an amazing lemon tree without spines and big seedless lemons. You can make mega citrus trees with lemons, oranges, and grapefruits. If you can’t tell I love my little plants, but back to my schedule. Nicaraguans bathe in the morning but I can’t bear to pour cold water on myself in the cool morning, so I get ready minus the bathing and ride my bike to school. Depending on which school I’m going to, the bike ride is either two blocks, or 5 km in one direction or another along the carretera. The bike ride to one school is nice and flat, but when I come back at noon I go against strong winds in the scorching sun. What makes it worst is that my bike tires are consistently flat even though I pump and have someone check them whenever I get tired of having to pedal so hard to barely move forward. My other 5 km route is half uphill to this little school that sits on the top. Going is tough but coming back is wonderful because half the time I don’t have to pedal and I move with the wind! Anyway I go to class, give my class related to some environmental theme, hang out with the kids for awhile and then head home. This week we were supposed to make compost piles in all of my schools, but things ended up being far more complicated than simply digging a hole and dumping organic trash in. At one school we’re flattening an area because the teachers I’m working with decided it was the best space even though it’s slanted and covered in trash. So it needs to be flattened and fenced before we can even dig the hole. At another school we spent all morning pounding fence posts into the rock hard dirt. We even dug the hole, but since the school doesn’t have running water all the time, we couldn’t make the compost pile without water. At school number three, I arrived to meet my profe at the bus stop. She had to cancel class to go to a meeting in my site, which someone told her about yesterday. Of course she failed to notify me, but that’s nothing new. Hopefully one more week and we’ll have our compost piles decomposing. Continuing with my schedule, I ride back to town and pick up some veggies for lunch/dinner. I discovered this week that the Spanish NGO in my site (that has absolutely no interest in working with Peace Corps volunteers) receives super fresh fruits and veggies to sell every Monday. I bought a giant cantaloupe for 16.50 cords (a little less than a dollar) and it was the sweetest and juiciest cantaloupe that I’ve ever had. Besides cantaloupe and watermelon season (volleyball sized watermelons also cost a little less than a dollar), did I mention mangoes are now falling off the trees and littering the ground? I hung out at home cleaning today and I heard at least five mangoes fall off the tree in our patio and thump onto the ground. The tree we have has these little yellow mangoes, which are not bad for free mangoes, but my old host family’s house has these head sized red ones that make me want to cry. Avocados are coming up too, which is also very exciting. They’re harder to get in Leon since they’re not really grown here, but nonetheless I look forward to eating mangoes and avocados everyday. Back to my schedule –I make lunch, and then read outside for part of the afternoon. Sometimes I have random appointments like talking to someone at the health center or mayor’s office, or someone comes by for an English lesson, but it’s really too hot to do anything active in the afternoon. My zinc roof turns my house into an oven so I pull my plastic chair outside to read in the shade. Today I bought a hammock made out of woven plastic so that I can sit or lay outside! When the sun gets lower, at around four I can go inside to nap in my living room hammock. I water my plants, and at around 5:30 I go for a run down a dirt path. It’s about 4 km roundtrip and some days different people come run with me, others I just say adios to everyone along the way. One guy walks out of his house to the road every day when I pass by just to say adios. There’s one house with a bunch of girls who will run with me away and back to their house. Conveniently they are the girls who help me pick up cow pies when I go collecting them for my compost or garden. After my run, I make some food, bathe, watch shows/movies on my computer or go visit my host family, read, and am usually in bed by 10 or 11 pm. It’s amazing how living in Nicaragua has regulated my schedule. I’ve never slept this early in my life! On mornings that I don’t go to school, I wash my clothes, mop my floor, clean my kitchen, inject pesticides into the holes that wood bugs continue to drill in my wooden bed frame. It sounds gross, but it’s really just outrageously annoying. I have done everything people tell me I should do, but every week I find more wood shavings and every week I inject the holes with more pesticides or diesel, but they always come back! I’m so close to scrapping this bed and just buying a mattress and box spring. That sounds a whole lot less frustrating. Weekends are little gringo get-aways when we can hang out in the cities and eat yummy food, have a beer, run errands at the bank and post office, go out, get groceries, and stay in dingy hostels where the workers know our names. It’s really quite nice.