Cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning

I lost track of which day it was yesterday, and when Enrique laughed at me I said, "Every day is like Sunday here." But I was wrong. Everyday is more like Friday - you have to work, but not too hard, and you can stay up late at night. 

Seems the start of summer rains have come. It rained a storm this morning at about 8:00. The far dorm is still leaking, even though Nico fixed the roof, seems we'll have to get a more permanent solution for it. Enrique thinks it will rain tonight and maybe tomorrow and then it will be summer.

I spent the day yesterday cleaning the rest of the house and waxing the floors made of ceramic tiles, the tiles create all the dust in the house and the only way to stop it is to wax them. Lucky it is liquid wax that goes on really easily. Even so, it took me 5 hours to finish up, and the waxing has to be done every two days for a while - until the tiles build up a good layer. I did one more layer today before moving all the furniture back inside. Nico took a photo of me on my hands and knees this morning, so if anyone doesn't believe me I can post it.

It's damn hard work, so I thought I would cheer myself up by taking a few photo's.

This is our cat, Tita - really it is Putita, which means "little bitch", but we don't call her that. She eats anything you put in front of her, from salad to live mice.

And our dog, Toto - yes, from the wizard of OZ - who should really have been called Tonto, which means "stupid" in spanish. He's still just a puppy, maybe he'll get better. The worst thing about him are the ticks he brings home, some of them are full to the the size of jelly beans, and we have to pull them off and squash them. Yuk!

These are the positions these two maintain for the majority of the day, I guess it is Sunday for them every day.

We have two new additions to the family, Nico found two small birds, on the ground, whose nest had been destroyed by the hail the other day. He's feeding them bread soaked in milk and dulce de leche, caramel.

This is the new bathroom that Nico built, we all had a hand in painting it - I did all the white today. It has a nice new shower head that works very well. I am really looking forward to a shower there as soon as the paint dries.

We spent another 3000 pesos on building materials for the new house on Wednesday. I'm slowly working my way towards paying as much as Nico has, the only problem is with getting money out here. It is costing me R30 to withdraw R900. No one seems to allow people to buy pesos with a card here, not even at the airport.

Nico leaves tomorrow night to go an tour around with a friend for a few weeks, he'll be back before christmas. So I'm on my own - sort of, Enrique has offered to help me whenever I need it - and I haven't learned any more spanish since I got here more than a week ago. Bad Nell!

I'm sure I'll be fine. I'll practice shouting and screaming in spanish at the spiders...