Call me Josh Renaud, rain-bringer.
Yes, there’s been an unusually high amount of rain in Santa Cruz since I arrived in January. And on Wednesday it was really rainy. It has also been very windy. I can’t complain about rain, since it eases the pain of the high temperatures that are the bane of my existence.
Sorry, I just had to get those rhymes off my chest.
Anyway, yesterday I had breakfast again with Arnold and Greta, and then later helped Louise learn how to optimize her scanned photos for sending through email. (Begin rant: if you don’t know how to do this, then you are probably one of those problematic folks who scans in family photos and emails them to everyone. The problem is that your family will spend 2 or 3 hours waiting for one photo to download, since you failed to crop them or resize them. Rant mode off.) Then Becky Turner asked if I could look at a computer for her. It was a PC with a dying hard drive that was making an awful noise. I thought it was a sound effect from the speaker, but she told me it was the actual hard drive.
Later in the day, Yoli and I went to the bank to make some withdrawals and change currencies. Then it was off to the Hipermaxi (a large supermarket) to get supplies for our planned Pizza evening on Saturday. While at Hipermaxi, we ate hot dogs (the foot-long kind, though in this metric country I have no idea how long it actually was). Mine was topped with crispy potato gratings, which was actually pretty good.
Buying food here is quite unlike the U.S. most of the time. The cheese was got was not pre-grated. We got mozzarella, a big 500-gram hunk of it. We also bought ham (couldn’t find pepperoni) and 4 pizza crusts. The pizza crusts are orange, and look a little differen than what I’m used to, so I have no idea what they will taste like. It will be an adventure.
At work I made more excellent progress on the website. Rusty has also been highly complimentary of my work, and I’m glad that he’s been pleased with it.
Wednesday night we had planned to shoot some pool with Yoli’s dad and brothers-in-law, but the rain nixed that idea. Instead we spent it talking with her parents. It was a very fruitful conversation.
I took the bus home alone again, since I know the route pretty well, and it saves money when Yoli’s not escorting me. The ride home is always crowded. It’s not crowded when I get on the bus, since Yoli’s home is past the third ring. But as the bus goes through the city center, it takes on a ton of people, and by the time it comes to Calle 5 and Av. Paragua (where I get off), it’s hard for me to get to the door…even when I’m sitting in the seat closest to it! But the buses are cheap and reliable and go everywhere. If only St. Louis had public transporation like this…
hahaha, oh Josh, that hard drive has to be REALLY bad if you mistook it for a sound effect.
we do have buses like this in St. Louis and they’re never crowded! you can go anywhere in the city you want and get mugged in the process.
That hard drive sounds like it was in pretty sad shape, that poor computer.
We have a bus system here, but they’re not reliable; you can’t count on them to be on time.