Jan 11

A Hard day's night

This morning started off with a snooze and nice cold weather. The night before, we added fans in the rooms and sleeping became more bearable. We started off the day with the breakfast choices of eggs, rice, and/or cereal with the option of water or juice to drink.

Today's adventures occurred around the house and spanned many projects. Basha and Derek were tidying up their microcontroller commands for the weather station while the rest of us worked on cabinetry, bee hive enclosures, and support packaging for the weather station.

The first task undertaken was grinding and routing the tool cabinet we made earlier in our trip. We learned how quickly Nicaragua's humid environment can effect organic matter when we examined the cabinets and found mold growing on the wooden panels. We sanded down the cabinet and moved onto routing the edges in the closing steps of our cabinet build. Giselle and Cristian used a router for the first time and after a few hours the cabinet was prepared for painting.

Parallel to the cabinetry, Trevor designed a bee hive assembly in Solidworks before beginning a design for the weather system packaging. This prompted a trip to the "fancy" hardware store named Sinsa. Trevor and Cristian took a taxi there and it immediately reminded them of home. The store was very modern and all prices were in US dollars. It even played American music in the background. Soon Trevor and Cristian found that the store did not have what they were looking for. They went to multiple hardware stores until they decided to scrap their original design and simply work with what was available at Sinsa. This resulted in Trevor and Cristian carrying a large sheet of plywood, screws, and 3 metal L-brackets multiple blocks back home to Casa Nica.

Lunch today took place at our usual hangout whose options included breaded steak, beef stroganoff, and pork stuffed with sautéed plums. As usual our meals turned out amazing and the team was refocused and prepared for the long afternoon.

Giselle and Zach worked the rest of the afternoon to paint a red interior and white exterior on the cabinet.

Most of the team felt under the weather today with upset stomachs, nausea or coughing. The team took an evening break to find remedies. Two headed for the grocery store to find medicine and remedies for their sickness. The rest headed to a fried chicken restaurant and fueled their glutton for punishment. The night continued on with our longest working evening yet!

Derek and Basha packed in even more time with the micro controller they loved so dearly by now.

Giselle tried to sleep off the sickness in a hammock.

Cristian, Trevor and Zach ran power tools until 10 pm to build the weather system supports and to help keep the neighborhood awake.

Everyone called it quits by 10:40 PM with a commitment to continue more work early tomorrow morning. Showers with running water commenced and we headed to bed.