Sorting, sorting and sorting

The bad sorted coffee beans.

This is the amount of coffee beans that are removed and discarded from 2 lbs. of roasted coffee before it gets bagged and shipped. I have been stuck on sorting duty for the last few days. The good news is that I have been grinding the bad beans and drinking it myself and it is not bad! Then we take the used grounds and put them in the compost. Nothing goes to waste here....

Puppies playing in the trench.

The puppies are helping Rick with the trench. He is trying to bury the the conduit before it rains, still not sure if it will rain tonight or not. The thunder here seems to last forever and it can be a precursor to a rain storm. However, there are many micro-climates here and you never know if it is just going to rain in the city or actually make it to our yard too.

Orange tree.

The orange tree in the front yard has a ton of oranges. I added some into the crockpot with tonight's dinner. We only have a few orange trees, which is enough for us and some extra to share with the orphanage down the street. We do not have enough to actually harvest and in the rainy season, they mold fast if you do not use them right away. I am also going to have to talk to the birds that keep putting holes in some of them to attract bugs. Which they later come back and eat the bugs, but I have no interest in them using all of the oranges as bird feeders.

Coffee tree.

I had to put a large picture here so that you could see the amount of "cherries" on the coffee tree. They are full all the way from the very top to the very bottom of the tree. I am so excited about this year's crop, the plants are doing amazing! The cherries will start turning red soon (a couple cherries have already started, but the majority of them will be ripe starting around the end of October through December.

Other things going in our lives
Just so you know, as awesome as it is living here, there are still some bumps in the road. I am trying to keep this blog to not only let people back home know how we are doing, but to help other people that might be starting a similar journey.

Today, we met with administrators for a school and started the paperwork to enroll our child. As you might have noticed, I said "started" and not that we just finished enrollment. Like most things here, there is a process and it might change daily, I am not quite sure. I thought I knew what documents they would need, and the brochure when we arrived mentioned some of those documents and some new ones. However, it turns out that they ended up crossing 4 items off of the brochure checklist and told us that those were not important anymore and they gave us new items that I had never heard of. It will be like a treasure hunt to find the buildings and people we need to accomplish the new list. :)

We met with the bank today to get an official letter, which is supposed to be part of the visa package. It turns out that when we went in on Monday to request and pay for the letter to be drafted and they told us it would be ready in 2 days...what they really meant was, "We do not want to type up the letter now, come back another day." We gave them an extra day, not wanting to push our luck that it would actually be ready yesterday. So, today when we went in, they had us sit down and then they wrote the letter while we were sitting there....sigh. Hopefully it is the correct letter and we can mark that as done now. :)

The contract printer for the coffee labels is out of ink. We had been told to check back this week, but it appears he is still out. In the meantime, we are printing the labels off of our inkjet, which just smears on the shiny labels, so we then laminate the labels so they hold up. Crossing my fingers that the printer calls us soon telling us that his ink shipment came in! For those that have already ordered coffee....know that it took 30 minutes to make 8 labels! We even went to a few stores to buy a commercial printer, but so far have not found one, so it looks like we just wait for our guy to get his ink shipment.

We have not finished unpacking, but I think we have most of the important items found. Now that our new particle board furniture is unpacked and put together, we actually have places to put items. I think we are down to 7 totes left to sort through.

Still excited about the Coca Cola in a bottle down here! :)