un dia casi perfecto

Hello all! Here is a brief scene which is, I think, illustrative of the ups and downs I experienced yesterday.

(The scene: Arianna, Karina, Keane, Carlos and I are sitting in the back of Ann's pickup truck. We are on our way back from Playa Esmerelda, where we spent the afternoon. It has begun to rain approximately halfway through our two-hour trip home. I have pulled my white towel over my head in an attempt to stay drier and warmer.)

Me: I´m Norton Ghost!!*
Arianna: Dude, are you version 9.3??
All: (Laugh deliriously)

* Norton Ghost is a program we just learned how to use to clone computer hard drives.

Basically, we´re all nerds. And we all got severely rained upon yesterday. Before that, we´d had a good time at the beach, although it wasn´t quite as perfect as our last trip to the playa. For starters, the weather wasn´t quite as gorgeous, and we were much more troubled by insects than our last trip. Also, we started off the day with a longish amount of time at Justin´s host brother´s ranch, where some of us rode horses and some of us sat on the porch and played domninos and Scrabble. (Aside: I won a game of Spanish language Scrabble against 2 native speakers! Yo soy awesome! Admittedly, the game was abandoned halfway through, so I am not sure how I would have fared in the intense endgame of Spanish Scrabble. Still, I´m counting the win.)

And now, a bit of tragic news: my beloved 5-year-old iBook appears to have left me :( Specifically, the display seems to have died. I suspected it wasn´t going to make it for two more years, but I was hoping to get a little bit longer out of it. Oh well. Pretty soon I´ll be working in a computer lab all day, so I suppose I won´t really need my own computer. However, this does impact my previous strategy of writing up blog entries, saving them to my thumb drive, and uploading them at the Internet cafe, so as to have to spend less time & money at the Internet cafe. Harrumph.

Also, a brief note about my upcoming schedule: On Thursday, we leave El Seibo and return to Santo Domingo for a teeny bit more training. On Monday the 28th, we find out our permanent project sites! On Tuesday, we leave to visit our project sites through Sunday. Then we return to Santo Domingo for a little more training and on May 8, we have our final graduation ceremony. On May 9, we move to our final project sites for good! Everyone is super excited to find out our project sites, although we´re all a little bummed to be separated from each other. However, apparently most of the ICT sites are close together, so hopefully it will be pretty easy to visit each other. I´ll definitely let everyone know when I know more about my site!