27 February 2010

Today was day 2 of moving. We brought a small load out last night; enough for us to stay overnight. We moved everything else out of the room we rented from Jay. Everything is here with us; either in storage on our property, and in the vacation home we will live in until our home is ready.
As you know, we had our issues out here before. We still don't have hot water, which in this weather is just fine. The electricity is turned on after sunset as dark settles in. So far it has lasted into the night and into the wee hours of the morning. However, we do not have any refrigeration. The refrigerator we used when we were here last, finally quit working so they brought in another. The replacement hasn't worked since we hooked it up on Thursday. Doug and I decided that we would buy a refrigerator for our home, but put it temporarily up here. This was going to happen at some point anyway, so we might as well go ahead and make the purchase now since we need it now. We'll travel to Piura or Paita on Monday and see what we can find.
The workers on the property have been working on the mechanical room for the swimming pool. This will be an underground vault that will house the generator and all the pumps for the pool. They have also begun finishing the outside walls of the service zone. This finishing will provide waterproof protection for our stuff stored there. We haven't had much rain... in fact the biggest rainfall was on Sunday when we were in the Galapagos. It was enough to soak the roads and create havok as the soil has a lot of clay. I don't really expect much rain even though it is the "rainy season."
We've been educating ourselves about solar energy and the wattage usage of common household appliances. We still haven't seen the plan from the solar engineer, but at this point we will have some knowledge to discuss our options intelligently.