Each morning, if we happen to wake around 5:30AM, we hear a cacophony of bird calls, and a lone rooster.  Roll over and go back to sleep, and get up around 8:00, and it is completely quiet.  We have been here for two weeks, and the only birds we have seen are a few pigeons on a single park (Parque San Blas) at the other end of town.  Where do those noisy birds go once the sun rises???

In fact, where are all the animals? I saw 2 cats in one yard in Banos de Cuenca, but other than that no cats at all.  Despite many flowers around, I have seen only one bee.  No windows have screens, and we often leave our windows open for ventilation, yet I have seen (and killed) only one fly and one mosquito in the apartment in more than two weeks.  I have seen no squirrels, or any other animal that would be common in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Of course, we are at 8,200 ft, which has a lot to do with the absence of many animals, but it still seems rather odd… and where are those birds that sing so loud before dawn?

We are settling into a more normal routine now.  I stopped my formal Spanish tutor classes (more on that in the future), though Evelyn continues with her tutor.  I am now spending 1/2 hour per day to do a Pimsleur audio tape.  Yesterday I started writing software for LeapFrog again, as was my agreement when coming here for this long.  I got off to a rocky start at first, as I discovered my programming environment needed more updating and tweaking than I expected, but I was still able to deliver my first completed project today, on schedule.

The rain has returned — with a vengeance. After staying away for the entire 4-day Independence celebration, the sky opened up yesterday and poured for 4+ hours, then again last night, then again today.  We are told the rainy season is coming, and it looks like the weather is trying to make believers of us.