We had a full house today at the farm! Yara managed to drag herself out of bed, plus we had Ricardo with us for the first time. Guess what kind of day it was… machete day!! John dropped us off in an area with some pretty short weeds and said that he and Anthony would be working in an area with taller weeds because they’re harder to cut down. Nick and I just looked at him and he said, “do you want to come work with us?” Nick nodded, I chimed in, “me too!” (and John looked at me with doubt in his eyes, but whatever because he still let me come), and he led the two of us plus Ricardo to the tall weeds. They weren’t as tall as that one day last week that I said was the best machete day ever, but I’m not going to complain. Still a good morning! The only issue with tall weeds is that by the end, I have scratches all over my arms and weed pieces in my hair which makes it harder to look presentable for school… but hey, that’s what headbands are for, right?
My school day was behind the scenes anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal if I looked a little disheveled. I went back and worked on the computer with the newfound battery, and now everything is working so well!!! The power of google is incredible. The new battery fixed one problem, plus I disabled/resolved all of the other things that used to pop up every time the computer booted up. It used to take probably 5 minutes to get started, and you had to make selections and log in and do a bunch of other stuff. I wanted to make it as simple as possible for someone who wanted to use the computer, so I got rid of all of that. Now, you can know nothing about computers and start it up in about 1 minute with no prompts and no problems. Hooray!
Everlasting also brought his laptop in because he’s having some issues, and apparently the work I did on the school computer convinced him that I’m acceptably proficient at fixing computers. On Monday when I was looking at the school computer and saying what I thought was wrong with it, he asked me if I was trained in computer hardware. I said no and kind of laughed, and he looked at me like he didn’t trust for a second that I was going to fix it (to be fair, I couldn’t have promised anything because I also didn’t trust for a second that I was going to be able to fix it). Looks like I did okay because now he’s trusting me with his own property! Lucky for me, his issues were simple (one involved just switching his Y and Z keys which were swapped for some reason… I looked like a genius when I just popped them off and switched them). Phew! I have a reputation to keep up now, so failure isn’t an option!
This was a fix-it kind of day, and after school we went back to Baptist and continued our desk repair work. Anna, Yara, Avy, and I worked for a couple hours and managed to fix a good number of desks. I was proud of myself for a few desks especially that were unusable or wobbling like crazy, and I got them into good working order! Most of them just needed extra nails to make stronger connections between the different pieces of wood, but a few were missing supports or other pieces that we needed to scavenge from broken desks. In all, I’d say we got through close to 20 desks today. That sounds good and all, but it also means that there’s still a lot more work to do considering there are seven classrooms with desks, each one has 10-15, and literally every desk has something that needs to be done to make it fully functional. But each desk we work on makes a difference! One step at a time.