Changing filters and Why I haven't been posting

June 4, 2011

When Baltazar picked me up on Saturday morning, he said Gloria had called and was coming to Las Mercedes with a church group. If I wanted to go back to Tegu with them today, I could. I had time to go to El Cacao as planned and then I could go back to Las Mercedes to pack. I would only miss one day of surveys. Sounded good to me, and then I could get both of my suitcases back to the states to bring back supplies.

Back in LM, one of the men from the church group helped me change out the water filters, which were green with algae. Just in case some one some day wants to do this again: just twisted the filter containers hard (lefty loosey). I'll leave the spare filters in the cabinet. There are two types and only the boxes (not the actual filters) are labeled so be careful as they look identical. Unfortunately, the solar panels still aren’t working well, so I the UV filter won’t work, but the other two will.

The group also discovered that the sink in the bathroom I don’t use pours water on the floor. I fixed part of the problem with the screwdriver on the leatherman multitool that Penny gave me (Thanks, Penny!) but the other problem is that they used some really flimsy plastic accordion piping to connect the sink to the PVC drainpipe. This had cracked in several places. I’ll try some duct tape, but it probably needs to be replaced. The sink in the kitchen started out with duct tape on the pipes, so now we have a matching set.

After lunch with the church group, I told Regino I wasn’t going to Belén. He looked a little upset but recovered quickly. Regino never looks upset, so I decided to stay. I just sent my suitcases with Gloria since I’m staying with her on Tuesday. The consequences were that I inadvertently gave up internet and electricity earlier than planned. **This eventually led to me not posting for two weeks as I was having way too much fun in Dallas to get caught up on blogging** . On the plus side, I get to go to mass with the community and do one more day of surveys. Not a big deal. I prefer to keep Regino happy.