Thurs, July 29-Boredom (it's not what you think)

When one is a pool rookie, like myself, you forget to bathe. After all, I am wet most of the day and it seems kind of like a huge bath. I am so content and tired at the end of the day and all I want to do is cool off and fall asleep. Usually I am pretty cooled off at the end of the day. So I get on my jammies and I’m good to go. After awhile I am quite aware that I haven’t taken a shower in some time. Like right now. I should be taking a shower but I’m sitting on the front porch where it’s nice and cool watching it rain hoping Jordan has some common sense and comes home because Hannah did and Jordan is hanging out with Liad and Idan. If it starts raining too hard she’s going to be S.O.L. with riding home in it. As the crow flies they don’t live far but walking or biking, it’s far. Especially, in the rain. Our road right now is almost not drivable. Check out the pictures I took of it last night before it got dark. It wasn’t a road anymore. It was a river. We did have a nice beach day after breakfast today. It was cloudy so we didn’t lather up on sunscreen, which is a process, and it was nice and cool. I didn’t even go swimming. I just sat on my towel on the sand and watched the surfers and people. It’s so fun to people watch at the beach. Everyone has something different they do to keep themselves entertained. The Tico’s play soccer, the teenagers like to sit and do nothing, if they aren’t surfing, kids usually are in the water non-stop. Nobody has sand toys which is so funny to see. I remember a time when I would come to the beach and the kids were little and I used to wonder, “What are the kids going to do without sand toys??” How stupid. It’s like giving a baby a box. They’ll love it. The local kids play with shells, water, sand and their hands. No toys. I used to have this mesh bag in my camper filled with junk. There were buckets, pails, shovels, watering cans, balls, etc. I used to dump it out for the kids and they would go through the stuff and within 5 minutes all of those annoying toys would be spewed all over the place, forgotten by the kids, and I would be tripping over them and yelling at the girls to pick up these toys, which would never get done. But, every camp trip that mesh bag would be repacked and re-dumped out and I’d get annoyed all over again with all of those toys. Things would get lost or taken or misplaced. That mesh bag has nothing in it anymore and I won’t replenish it. We do have our actual toys like smash ball and stuff like that that we still use. I wish I would have never concentrated so much on the pails and shovels and cool sand toys that Target used to sell. It was such a waste of money and after being here watching how all of the local kids can play in the sand perfectly fine without colorful sand toys makes me smile. One of my biggest worries before coming here for the summer was if I would get bored. I had all of these images of me being bored, too hot, cranky, and so on. I was actually scared about stuff like that. Being here now it’s so unlike anything I imagined. If I feel an eensy bit bored I can fix that in a hurry. Just get on the bike and ride or take the umbrella and walk in the rain and check out the flooding. There are so many different things to do here and when you don’t have a car it makes it that much more fun. Having a car is a necessity, we have decided, but we are fine this time around. Today, we came back to the house and I started making tortillas and rice and beans. It’s so much fun to cook from scratch. I do a lot at home too but never in my wildest dreams would I consider making pizza dough or bread at 10,600ft above sea level. Even rice, as I’ve written before, takes an hour and almost 2 for brown rice. I am loving my ability to cook anything here. I’m going to tackle empanadas next. Jordan just showed up sopping wet and having a ball. Having friends here sure makes a difference in their summer. It will be a summer they will never forget. Me too.