Does anyone know what this week is?!

First of all, two days ago was Jenny’s 24th birthday. We celebrated a little before leaving for Nica because I knew there was no way I could buy her any good birthday presents here, plus my family was all over it and they had a little “Jenny’s birthday gift shower” the night before we left. I even got her the new Harry Potter book before we left and kinda tolerated it for 2 weeks while she read it every free moment possible. All that aside, I still feel crappy about it because it wasn’t much of a special day at all. I remembered it was her birthday first thing in the morning and greeted her with a happy birthday kiss when she woke up (at 5:30 am)—mad points for me! But after that I think her day pretty much went down hill. She got 3 birthday cards in the mail ahead of time, which is pretty sweet because that means our mailing address here works and Jenny has some thoughtful and on the ball family. Anyway, back to the downhill part. We started the day off with a nice breakfast of fried chicken, rice, french fries, and cucumber & tomato slices, with fresh orange juicy drink. Not bad, but then she spent 2 hours doing laundry by hand, then joined the rest of us as we spent 8 hours painting solar oven stands with the really nasty paint ultra diluted with paint thinner. This time I wore a bandana as a mask and it worked like a charm. We had a lunch at noon of rice, a dry bean cake thingy, and some cucumber and tomato slices. Then back to work painting. The good news was that we finished in time for us both to take our “shower” before it got dark at 6:30 pm. We had dinner with our Nica family, then we went to bed drowsy-eyed by 8:30pm. No birthday cake, no happy birthday song, no presents. I could have taken here to Ocotal for dinner, but last time we were in Ocotal after dark just about everything was closed already, by 6:30! Also it take 15 minutes to walk to the bus stop, 20 min bus ride, then another 10 min to walk into town. The last bus back to Sabana Grande comes sometimes at 6:45pm, sometimes never. So if you don’t leave by 3pm, you have to pay a taxi to take you home, which cost 10x or more what the bus does. And we had work to do with painting, so no Ocotal for dinner and icecream. :o( Sorry for your crappy b-day honey.

So now to the second point of my entry, Do you know what week this is?!! It is opening week of college football season!!!! YEAH!!! Wooohoo! Go Hokies! Ranked # 9 preseason by both poles, picked by all the experts to win the Atlantic division and the ACC championship, and slated to play #2 LSU next Saturday in what is rumored to be a preview of the national title game. O hell yeah its going to be a good year!! So I did some research and found that there is a local sports bar just down the street from the internet café that opens at 12:30 and has ESPN, our first two games are on ESPN, sweet! Unfortunately todays game starts at noon eastern and in Nica we are 2 hours behind you there so I have to go to the internet café to follow the first half or so of the game. Here is the plan: logon to ESPN and watch the game on gamecast, while being logged into my new ESPN insider account which gives me access to a streaming scoreboard update realtime, in addition I found that Yahoo broadcast offers an online subscription for only a few bucks a month and they cover all the VT football games!!! Sooo sweet, I can listen to even the most worthless games this season (like VT vs. William and Mary) on live radio from Nicaragua! So I am really hoping that this sports bar thing works out because that means that I’ll get to watch VT vs. LSU live next week if I can get them to stay open late enough (kick off at 9 pm eastern 7 pm Nica) otherwise we are headed to Managua to find some venue to see this awesome game. I hope all you jerks have fun flying to Louisiana to watch it live.

So in spite of Jenny’s birthday being pretty sucky, this isn’t such a bad week. Now we are in Ocotal awaiting kick off and all decked out in our Hokie gear. After the game we plan to do some double celebrating, and if we are lucky we will be able to get our hands onto something that resembles a steak if the sports bar ever opens, then finally some ice cream and special birthday treatment for Jenny. Happy College Football Season everyone, and Happy Birthday Jenny!