1st week at school

We have just completed our 1st week back at school.......this is our 3rd year of teaching in the tropics, but it still feels wrong to be going back to school in August! it doesn't matter that our holidays started in June.....for English people, August is about holidays!!!!

It was very tiring getting up at 5am again.......Monday to Wednesday wasn't as bad, as we didn't have to be at school until 730am, but the children were back on Thursday.....and we were at school for 6:20am!!!!! Luckily for me I only had one day, because Friday is my day off.....but I was still awake at 5:00!!!!

We have had a few nights of really bad storms this week. Tropical Storm Greg is heading away into the Pacific, but blowing across from the Caribbean is Tropical Storm Harvey. The Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras and Belize will get the full force of it, but we are still experiencing some amazing thunderstorms. I cannot recreate the noise on here, but the thunder is so loud it sounds like a bomb exploding, and it sets of car alarms.......not entertaining when it happens in the middle of the night!!

I am sitting on the verandah as I write this and it feels positively chilly, despite the thermometer telling me that it is 26 degrees! The sky is getting dark, there is the distant rumble of thunder and the air definitely feels like something is blowing in!!

We have had a bat living in a fruit bowl outside our front door. The maid was hysterical the other afternoon, and she managed to explain to us that when she had been dusting the shoe cupboard that is in the passage opposite our front door (the passage would have been outside originally, but when they built a garage on the front of the house, it got covered over) a bat flew out of the fir cone filled fruit bowl that sits on the top of it! She was very disturbed, as was I, and I was trying to get her to tell me which direction the bat had flown in......towards the garage, where it could escape to freedom, or into the house!!! She pointed towards the garage, so I am keeping my fingers crossed! She told us that placing a garlic clove in the fruit bowl would keep the bat away! Old wives tale???? We put a garlic clove there anyway, a couple of days later there was bat-poo on top of the cupboard......but since then the garlic smell has been more pungent and we haven't seen any more traces of bat life! The joys of living in the tropics!

Talking of animal life......we seem to have got the kitchen ants under control, with continual spraying of nasty chemicals, but the bedroom ants appear to be a lot hardier. I don't like it when I wake up and can feel and see super fast little ants running across me! Andy pulled the bed away from the wall and sprayed the wall, floor and bed legs a few days ago, and still they were back this morning! I have taken the bedding off and we have sprayed the mattress and the room again. We will not be beaten!!

I didn't think that El Salvador got much in the way of wildlife, especially in the cities, but in the past couple of weeks one friend has had two coral snakes in her garden and another friend has had a coati  in his garden. I am just hoping to attract some humming birds to the garden. Apparently they are attracted to red flowers, and we have quite a few read and orange flowers......I'll let you know if we get any.

The picture above is a coati......also known as a Brazilian Ardvaak.

Here comes the rain......it is strange that as the sky lightened it has started raining.....you would expect the opposite!! It is coming down like stair rods....!!!!

This is a very short video I just took with my phone.....I will try and take some better videos if we get a storm later!!

Ok, I need to relocate indoors as the rain has started to blow into the verandah........

Adios amigos........hasta luego xx