"Every cloud has a dark mahogany lining"

It's a beautiful Saturday morning here in Tuxtla and as I rolled out of bed this morning the first thing I noticed was a strange soreness in my right arm. This may have been caused by one of two activities- the four hours I spent painting my classroom or the one hour I spent scrubbing our shower. As a good friend of mine likes to say, yesterday I definitely "seized the day".
Katy and I found out on Wednesday that all teachers were able to, in fact encouraged to paint there classrooms in any way we wanted, so we took advantage of the opportunity and put in our paint orders right away. While at first I was overwhelmed by having a giant blank canvas on the back wall of my classroom I eventually decided to go with an "under the sea" theme on one half of the wall and some standard sponge painting (circa Grant Bramley's bedroom 1995) on the other half. Katy and I were super busy all day (led a workshop in the morning on incorporating drama, music, and dance in the classroom and then had to collect school supplies that parents came to drop off) so we ended up staying at school till like 6 painting up a storm. While the process was a bit tiring the end product was really exciting and definitely made the room feel more like my own.
When we arrived home we got in to a bit of a discussion about Mexican hygiene and how it is easy to conform to the culture's lack of cleanliness and organization. So we made a commitment to stick to our American ways and make our home reflect this resolution. So we decided to start with the shower and we both spent some quality time scrubbing the mold that had settled in on the bathroom tiles- also exhausting but unbelievably rewarding.
After all of the manual labor I took my daily (sometime twice daily) cold shower to cool off and then we heard a knock at the door. It was a furniture company that had come to bring me the dresser that we had requested from the American School for my room, since there was only a bed when I arrived. We had been expecting something simple from there storage room but were very pleasantly surprised when they showed up with a brand new beautiful hand crafted armoire, complete with a lock and key that basically looks like it stepped right out of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Seriously, as I said to Katy, I don't think I have ever or will ever own a piece of furniture this beautiful. Needless to say the special delivery felt like a hard earned reward after a long day of hard work. It also made for a bit of a laugh when I came up to go to bed and found Katy sitting inside of it., for some reason I have a feeling this will be a reoccurring scene throughout the year.