Doom da da di da di
Doom da da di da di
Everybody's gonna love today, gonna love today.
Anyway you want to, anyway you've got to!
Everybody's gonna love today,
Gonna love today, gonna love today.
Today was my sister Audrey's 18th birthday. I missed out on our traditional mint whipped cream-cookie cake.
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| Cookie Cake |
What a crazy day it was here! This morning was absolutely gorgeous--no wind to speak of (for the first time in a long time!), sun shining, the white egrets softly soaring over our "lakes"... and electricians and painters and maintenance workmen about campus already, noisily working on their projects (I awoke to their laughter outside and was instantly peeved). Heaving myself out of bed, I headed to the shower, which was freezing cold. Thanks, solar panels, for not being fully installed yet. (Water had been shut off yesterday while they worked on it. Apparently still not hooked back up to gas.) So I headed to the laundry room shower across campus, where the water was not much warmer. Not having showered since Sunday night after the beach, I NEEDED a shower. The shivers of JanTerm without consistent hot showers returned and reawakened my senses. My annoyance level with the day was readily increasing.
Then came the other "tortas." The morning was filled with work in the office, running around trying to get a bunch of little things accomplished, and not really making much progress on any of them due to interruptions from students, faculty, carbon monoxide alarms, and the like. (Apparently, the alarm was going off because the one in the kitchen was being obstructed or out of a battery or something... NOT because we're all slowly suffocating or something. Don't worry.) The morning's wafting warmth and blue skies quickly clouded with not just our usual misty, horizontal precipitation that comes from living in the microclimate of a cloud forest, but with heavy nubes (clouds). An aguacero broke from the clouds mid-afternoon.
Water droplets dripped (ok, more like cascaded) from the techo (roof) into our comedor (dining room), caught by a few recycling bins. The wind must have blown some of the tiles ajar and allowed some water in!
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| Water drips into our comedor |
Amidst this rainstorm, the electricians were still working on whatever it was that elicited their services (I'm still really not quite sure what all was going on--just that Lindy said they'd be here all day and the electricity would be off). I ran to my room, with an umbrella overhead, to grab my rain boots in order to head into Heredia to take one of our students. I still managed to get my bottom half drenched during the 10-meter scurry from the academic building to my room in the dorm building. Memories of fall semester three years ago flooded back to meƒ... the rainstorms, waterfalls and ríos cascading down hillsides and streets, eroding pieces of the roads away. Only this time, I had my rain boots and a good rain coat!
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| You can't really see the rain itself, but it sure was coming down (as indicated by the instant puddles on the surface of the grassy ground). The lake-ponds refilled almost instantaneously when the downpour hit. |
I took Amy, one of our upper-level Spanish students into the Universidad Nacional (UNA) to her first night class she'll be auditing there. How nostalgic, to enter the Filosofía y Letras building and find her classroom, the warm moistness of the air and smells and chatter of students at the UNA all surrounding me once more. Tonight, after dropping off Amy, I reflected on my own rainy semester a few years ago, as I drove back home to our rain-inundated mountain.
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| Disclaimer: this is not THE cow that was stuck in the ditch! (Photo credit: Bucky's Fb album) |
Upon my return, I learned that the fire department had been called, and big trucks were on their way up in order to rescue a drowning cow from a ditch. Waterfalls and rivulets instantly form in these sorts of downpours. It caught us a bit off-guard though, since we thought the rainy season had passed (or at least this type of aguacero-type, heavy deluge that inundated the CRC during the fall semester).
This downpour really represented the general craziness of life right now, and all the things that are filling my head. I feel a bit inundated myself, with the millions of things that happen around here on a daily basis. We rush around the campus, fulfilling requests, answering questions, setting things up, planning, answering phone calls and service calls and seeing to the inquiries and needs of students and maintenance workers and visitors. My energy level sometimes drains, and the busyness of the ever-increasing to do list gets to a point at which all the details just sort of cloud the mind. Don't get me wrong; I am still loving this job and the excitement and variety and change it brings every day. I mean, seriously, a cow in a ditch and a painfully annoying, high-pitched beeping alarm are all in a day's work--just a par for the course. I think I just need to breathe and have a good, relaxing weekend to recoop, regather my energy, and start afresh.
The rest of the evening was filled with other craziness that is known as life to us here at the CRC. Emily and I picked up a couple students from their host fam houses and went into Heredia to have some tres leches and other postres (desserts) while we touched base and did our 1-on-1s.
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| Tres leches |
Despite it all, today ended nicely. The skies cleared, leaving a balmy, starry night, with not even a hint of a breeze. I made a fire in my fireplace for the second night in a row (this time a bit less smokey due to the lack of wind outside). Bean, Emily, and I sat in front of the fireplace, basking in the warmth of the flames, in a nice rocking chair and on my now at-least queen-sized bed (two beds pushed together, with extra comforters on top!).
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