Ouf, it’s rare that I think that I’m working too hard, but when I’m transcribing 100+ minutes of audio daily while still maintaining a spotless home and garden, there’s no other way to put it. The days are really running together, but, thankfully, I’m managing to get some quality sleep so I can start fresh every morning. I’m really looking forward to a day when I can drive into Mérida, park, and just amble for an afternoon, but I don’t see that day coming anytime soon.

This continues to be a novelty for me since the famine days of sitting around looking for work really aren’t that far behind me. One of my clients asked me to let him know when my queue is empty so he can send me more work and I was able to honestly tell him that that is not likely to happen in the near future. My queue has been sort of like a merry-go-round where clients have to catch an empty spot when it goes by them because it’ll disappear quickly!

I’m not exaggerating when I said that I landed here broke the likes of which I haven’t been in almost two years and so I would be a moron to turn down work just because I’m tired. Once the May income starts trickling in at the start of June, I’ll have earned myself some breathing room, but, really, I need to keep up this pace straight into July.

Yesterday afternoon, I had to go get groceries. It was one of those do or die moments since I was out of just about everything but rice and peanut butter. We had an impressive storm in the late afternoon as I was finishing up work on a new movie project. The amount of rain made me worry that the roads in my neighbourhood would be impassable, but when I went out about 30 minutes after the rain stopped, everything was fine.

I decided to just go to Bodega Aurrerá in Progreso and come straight back since I had more work to do in the evening. There, I was able to get some of the things on my list, including the so important beer, and a few treats, like dulce de guayaba letting myself be tempted at the till by a display of cacahuetes japoneses, or cracker nuts. I’ve been making some decent tacos at home for my lunches, so I also bought some commercial salsa verde and guacamole to put on them.

I’ve somehow found an hour every night before bed to work at my Spanish, so I also treated myself to a new notebook for that and a package of 10 different coloured pens, a very inexpensive gift (about $50 total) that made my “schoolwork” more fun that night. I’m working on a new verb tense, the imperfect (one of the past tenses) and treating it like a vocabulary lesson. Instead of using the standard verbs, like hablar and comer, to learn the new tense, I’m using new verbs that I’m struggling with, like dejar and romper.

I am once more grateful that I can go from French to Spanish because that makes learning Spanish so much easier. Dejar, for example, translates as “stop” or “leave” in English, but not in the senses that immediately come to my mind. Stop is more like quit (eg. smoking) rather than doing so in a car and leave is more in the sense of something being dropped off than exiting a room. There is no ambiguity as to the meaning if I go from French and so I’m once more understanding what an enormous challenge learning Spanish would be to a native English speaker with no other points of comparison. I mean, the imperfect of, say, comer (to eat) is  comía, comías, comía, comíamos, comíais, comían. In English? It’s ate, ate, ate, ate, ate, ate!

So it’s really just routine here in paradise, but dang, the living is easy. 🙂 Now, I have to really get to work!!!