Tidbits about life here

I forgot to post one of my entries from last week when I visited the Santa Cruz Zoo. If you’d like to read about it, click here.

Anyway, I’m no longer “wrestling” with the electric shower. Instead, we’ve settled into a strange sort of daily dance.

Here’s what I’ve learned: the secret is to keep the water pressure right. When I first turn on the water, if the pressure is too high, the cap on the shower head will pop off. That’s no good. So I keep the pressure low to start off. Then I switch on the heater. I can tell by the electric hum the florescent lights make (and by the water temperature) if the heater is on. When the hum grows much louder, it means the heater for whatever reason has stopped heating. I’ll have a few seconds of hot water left to turn the knob slightly and increase the water pressure. Doing this causes the heater to come back to life. This cat-and-mouse game continues throughout the shower until I’m done. It sounds silly, but once I figured it out, I was thankful I could maintain hot water throughout the shower.

When I wake up in the morning, I often hear the sounds of a military group a few blocks away. I’m not sure if they’re singing or just shouting something in unison. Since my windows are always open (it gets hot otherwise), I can hear a lot of other things. There are lots of vendors-on-bikes who drive around. They let people know they are coming with special horns. For instance, the “milk man” has a cow “moo” sound effect. All the milk men use the same one. It sounds like a real cow, but it’s not. There are vendors who sell a kind of food (I forget what it is) and their sound effect is a distinctive cell-phone ringtone. But it’s not from a cell phone. There are others, but I can’t remember them all. You can hear lots of birds, and sometimes at night you hear parties (which always have loud music). When it rains near Yoli’s house, where many of the roads are unpaved, you will often hear frogs (or toads, I’m not sure) croaking.

Wednesday was a good day with ups and downs. For breakfast yesterday Yoli brought two cups of a cinnamon jello substance that she said was made from nerves (yes, THOSE nerves). It’s supposed to make you stronger, I think she said. Well, it tasted good, and I had the last of our Fruit Loops to top things off.

We spent the morning at El Jordán again. Today was Yoli’s day to teach her typing class. I made excellent use of my time there and completed a first draft of one of the two fliers I’m making for El Jordán. We ate lunch at Corina’s apartment with Kelly, but Corina and Kitty (the lady who made lunch for us last time) were not there. They were “in jail” as Yoli says, which means they were ministering at the city jail.

At work, I made a little progress on the website, but also discovered I had shot myself in the foot without knowing it.

I’ll try to explain this as simply as I can. Basically, I do most of the work on the HTML files in a text editor called BBedit. BBedit is a very powerful tool, and one of it’s best features is a multi-file search-and-replace. It lets me go through hundreds of files (if I want) and replace every instance of some piece of text with another. For a webpage in Spanish, this is important since the language has many special characters (like á, ñ, etc). These characters have to be replaced with a special HTML code.

The problem for me is that I had mistakenly told BBedit to search through EVERY file in my Seminary web directory. I should have restricted it to only text files. So, it also went through my graphics files.. the logos, maps, etc. They were corrupted. But I didn’t know it at the time. I saw something was wrong today when I tried to load the pages in a web browser. At first I thought it was a problem with OS X, but I tried other graphics in my other directories, and they worked fine. So then I thought it was a problem with Fireworks, my main web graphics program. But that wasn’t it, either. Then I finally realized what happened.

To make a long story short, I fixed some of the graphics, but couldn’t repair them all. So I’ll have to redo many of them. But it wasn’t a huge loss. I’m pleased that I was able to even figure out what I did wrong.

That evening we went to the home of Louise (the GMU secretary) and Chris (a teacher at the seminary). They bought Bolivian pizza (we stuck to fairly recognizable toppings) and tought us how to play a card game called Hand and Foot, which requires a special deck of cards (they all said “Rook” so maybe that’s the brand, like “Uno”). I didn’t win, but I had one good round. Yoli had several good rounds and was in contention, but ultimately she lost, too.

All in all it was a good day.