A Day in the Life

Here's an example of how my weekdays lately have been going:

Wake up a couple of times from the neighbor kids crying/screaming and the hot sun beating into our room on the east side of the house. Get out of bed around 8:00, Brett's already up and almost ready to go to school. Make coffee for breakfast and either fruit or weetbix (a New Zealand cereal, it's fiber bars that turn to mush with milk, but the only good source of fiber here). Then sit at our mini coffee table with the back door open, eat and stare at the ocean, and kick out the neighbor's cat about 10 times - he never learns. Say hi to the puppies Lucky and Simba. Get water from our sima vie outside and boil it so it's cool by lunch time. Get ready for work, I either go into the Fisheries or MAFF office around 9:00 for a couple of hours or until lunch time. At Fisheries I update data entry type stuff to help them catch up for now, at MAFF I prepare tutorials to teach the two ladies there on Word or Excel. Both offices are only a minute walk away, I can see both from our house. Then come home for lunch, Brett's usually already home from school, we have whatever leftovers from the night before, sandwiches or instant noodles. Hang around for an hour or hour and a half (lunch hour here is 12:30 - 1:30), try to cool off - our house is a lot cooler than other places since it's right on the ocean and has huge trees shading it. Then figure out what to do in the afternoon - either go into the other office I hadn't been to yet, help out at the Youth Congress, or just take time off and check internet or hang out at the house, I never played computer games at home but lately am addicted to spider solitare. Then we figure out any food we need to buy for the dinner and the next day, and what to make for dinner. Start cooking a little before sunset, 7:00ish, and watch the sunset if it's not too cloudy. Eat dinner, light mosquito coils, and usually watch a DVD, sometimes Brett tutors the neighbor kids in English before dinner or I'll walk around on the beach. Then listen to the neighbor kids cry/scream some more at night, and the dogs barking off and on, and sometimes pigs squeeling really loud, and fall asleep. There's almost always some kind of odd happenings as well - dogs dying, neighbor kids throwing stuff in our trees or clothes lines, people knocking on the door early in the morning (once even a jehova's witness!), funerals, boats coming in and tons of activity in town, etc. And once in awhile we go out to Mariner's restaurant/bar during the week, and we recently found a DVD store by our house that has tons of pirated movies so we've been seeing really recent movies now!

By the end of each day I've probably drank tons of mosquito larva in our water, said "malo e lelei" twenty or so times as well as answered "alu ki fe?" many times (where are you going?), boiled water about 3 times, lit 2 or 3 mosquito coils and applied tons of mosquito spray, kicked out the puppies and cat many times from our house, and checked the market and stores for anything new and exciting. Some of these things are just really repetitive everyday here.