muttney

We have the swine flu remnants - this has been one hell of a week. We're still in California, looking to get on the road before G's visa expires. My friends have moved the cats to Zamora for us, and we'd better get out of here before we have no friends left in any country ...

Avoid this flu if you can, it is a bugger.

R

Well, here I am, sitting around my palatial accommodations, basking in the warmth of a beautiful cloud-free day, eating grapes and wondering how I am possibly going to spend the vast amounts of free time at my disposal. Then I wake up and discover that I'm really in Northern California freezing my ass off. I talked to the boss in Mexico (gracias, jefe), and Gary and I are going to drive back together, hopefully before mid-April. There is a lot to do to finish packing and sorting the moving truck, and it makes sense for us to travel back together - my Spanish is a lot better than his, which doesn't say much but would mean that we need to call bilingual friends a lot less. Besides, I'll have a road-trip about which to blog! I have to go back to sleep now.

This will be the last newsletter for awhile, I do not know if I will get around to it whilst I'm in California for a month.  My birthday is next month, monetary donations are certainly encouraged!

I have been busy cleaning the flat and getting ready to leave, and there's not much to write about this week.  Enrique and Adrian are living at the ranch again, so it is nice to have dogs around the place again.  Adrian has a new Schnauzer puppy, who is a little princess and about as big as a tea-cup.   Lots of things are blooming, the sheep are fat and happy, the chickens are fat and happy, the cats are fat and who knows what they think or feel?

There were some hoodlums trying to rob the place, but they haven't been in evidence lately, so maybe the Cousin Mafia has done its work.  The mornings are cool and crisp, the afternoons hot and sunny, who could ask for anything more.  And this is the time of the year that I'm heading to California where its pissing down and cold.  Oh. well, without dark we wouldn't appreciate the light so much.

And on that philosophical note, I'm going back to getting ready to leave.  You will note that I am not working my ass off!

R

Happy St. Valentine's Day, sort of. While considering the implications of celebrating a Catholic 'martyr', consider that, instead of spending money on expensive processed tree slices with trite little generic sayings in, you could do something nice for your loved one, like cook a fabulous meal. Or you could simply celebrate your love every day of the bloody year.

Some of you may not know, but Manchas is no longer with us. I think he picked up some poison in the yard, and died within an hour of ingesting it. He was becoming a very good companion, and it is a real shame that the assholes who live in this little town are putting out poison in the first place, but that someone appears to have thrown it into our yard is unforgivable. I'm missing having him around, even though he could be a total pain in the ass. I ranted more about this on my blog: http://rikkutas.blogspot.com/. Visit. Leave comments!

The roosters are experiencing spring in a testosterone-laden fashion: they are fighting for supremacy. John has feathers missing from his neck, and the little bantam-y bugger was having at Cecil when I went out at dusk to make sure they were all in the coop and safe. Now that they are out and about more, I am finding eggs in the chairs, under the table in the utility area, on the table in the utility area and in various bucket-like objects in interesting places. Odin only knows how many I have missed. and the little bastards are not afraid of me, so they've been coming up on the deck and digging in the potted plants. It's sort of cute to see them taking dirt-baths in the patch by the side gate, but I don't think Enrique is going to be too chuffed at having his pot-plants up-rooted.

I'm slowly getting ready for my trip to see my doctors and renew my visa. I'm trying to get the flat cleaned up so the cat-sitter doesn't have to avoid my obstacles. The sheep are fat and happy, I think, but who can really tell? They bound around and look ... well, bouncy, so I guess that's what counts. The scritchers in the roof are still at it, and the cats occasionally get interested in trying to reach the ceiling to investigate. Otherwise, they just lay around and be cats. It's getting very warm in the afternoons, which is a good excuse to sit around and do nothing for a couple of hours after the plants are watered. My cousin Leah and her husband cruised around Cape Horn just lately. I hate her. Go here to see pretty pictures: http://thegoatslunchpail.blogspot.com/ I have been trying to put together a list of alternative drugs in order to minimise the adverse reactions I experience, so I haven't been reading a lot of news. Maybe I can find something to grouse about next week. Well, I could grouse now about the fact that my MP3 player is giving up the ghost, but my tunnels are still carping, so I think I've about covered it for now.

R

There hasn't been much going on lately, which is probably for the best. I changed the taps in the kitchen without benefit of (1) knowledge nor (2) Gary, my Big Butch Plumber, and am pleased with the results: there's not much for leakage anywhere and water comes out when one turns the handle. Note the singular. The cold water kind of dribbles, and I think it's going to require cleaning out something or changing something and I think it will wait until someone here knows more about it all than I.




The days are getting longer. How can I tell, you ask? Eggs. The coop is no longer on vacation, and I am getting eggs again on a regular basis. I am slowly catching up on the watering and the washing of utensils and things of that nature. Adam and Eve are eating the lower forty with relish. (that is a joke, think about it) Manchas seems to be enjoying the opportunity afforded him to practice his singing with the neighbourhood glee club, as most nights someone beats a puppy or something and they all start up. Don't much care for their modern harmonic structures, but they seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. The neighbour cousin still has his herd in the next field, but I think that the glee club has driven that right from his, for want of a better word, mind. Sap appears to be rising in various flora, and the tree near the kitchen door is in full spate Too bad its name translates as 'cows' ears'.




My husband has contributed to this issue, and I quote: So I was thinking...since Pluto is no longer a planet, and Antarctica is shedding ice shelves so fast it's bound to be downgraded from a continent any time now (would that make it "incontinent"?), I think they should get together and date or start a support group. Can't you see it? Pluto & Aunt Arty arm in arm strolling the beach, bemoaning the loss of the good old days, when both were so massive and distant and cold that - though important fixtures in the cosmos - no one had ever actually seen or stepped foot on them, and all shuddered in horror at the thought of ever being consigned to either one. Now they're just an inconsequential asteroid and a big ice cube, respectively, so to speak. There's gotta be a sitcom or movie pilot in there somewhere...

Investigative reporting at its finest. And that about covers it.

R

Please let me know if the new look is not to your taste or you can't read it or it takes too damn long to load or any other problem you may have with it. I may not do anything about your complaint, but you'll feel better for having made it.

Another fairly slow week in the country. The pump for the lower aljibe decided to stop pumping, but it took me a while to realise because the electrics were still sounding as though it was working. We've now replaced the pump and have water to the house, but they have broken the connection from our sewer to the new, and I therefore can't use anything that drains into the system, like showers or toilets. It's a pain in the ass, among other places, this not being able to shower. I had a lovely visit with our friends in Zamora this week. Whilst there, I got a craving for peanut butter and jam on toast, so I bought a small, over-priced jar of peanut butter. Which leads to the Official Gilbert Utas method of eating toast and jam. The toast, you see, is merely a conveyance. The idea is to load as much jam as possible on the least amount of toast, meaning that, in the hands of the professional, one slice of bread can convey one litre of jam to one's mouth. I didn't say it was healthy or wise, right?

We've acquired a few more birds. No lizard, scorpion or snake sightings. No eggs, no dead roosters. All chickens seem to be happy, as are most of the other denizens of El Rancho. I could do with a husband, of course, but one does what one can. I've been listening to Terry Pratchett books on my MP3 player, the which has today decided to cease communicating with my laptop. My local quacks have managed to kill the thrush, but the cultivation of organisms in my gob yielded a vast supply of a specific streptococcus, the which is requiring two types of antibiotic to vanquish. I expect to be thrushed again soon.

I thought that I had found a useful word site called thesaurus.com, but the editors are idiots, or at least educated in the Los Angeles public school system. The word of the day on the opening page is unconscionable, which they have defined as "lacking conscience." In the school of English as a Foreign Concept, this is pretty close to the top of the list, as the definition supplied is actually for another word, unconscientious, as in slap-dash editing. Something which is unconscionable is something that one shouldn't think of doing, as in, an unconscionable size, amount, or length of time is too great and is unacceptable. For the hell of it, I entered oral, and was informed that oral is something spoken, whilst verbal can be spoken or written down. Have they never heard the expression "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on"? They obviously wouldn't understand that it means that such a contract is, in truth, worthless. No wonder George Bush stayed in office for eight bloody years.

I have to go write an informative letter now, assuming they have a 'contact us' link.

R

This is going to be another short edition, my carpal tunnels are carping and deadening the nerves in my hands.

Bruce has taken lately to sleeping under my chin. I don't much object, he's warm and emits a soothing rumble for quite a long time. When I'm wearing my CPAP mask, his breath is not even much of a problem. It's not even that much of a problem when he occasionally decides that my beard needs cleaning and diligently runs his sandpaper tongue through the hair on my chin. It's when he decides he's found a flea and bites down on it that I get a little perturbed.

The rest of the family seems to be very much the same as last week, barking, baa-ing, clucking and meowing in, for want of a better description, harmony. The weather turned cold again after a couple of nicely warm nights, and it rained the other day and night. More birds are in evidence. I should be happy to report that the music has changed on the public address system, but they have chosen a version of "Torno a Sorrento" which appears to be played by a computer with no sense of time playing a xylophone. Oy fucking vey.

That's about as much as my fingers can handle.

R

Nothing much has happened here this week. The fiesta noises have been at a minimum and I haven't had any visitations of note. There was a lizard in the kitchen, but he ran away so quickly that I didn't get much of a look at him. The unidentified scritchers are still having a field day in my roof, but I haven't found any more reptiles in any of the usual places. The hens have laid one egg, or I have yet to find their hiding places in the cacti and flora around the yard. The frogs in the guest bath appear to be happy, and there are several varieties thereof that appear to like climbing the outside of the walls. I found a huge scorpion in the flat, the which I promptly dispatched to his afterlife in a most workmanlike fashion. The dogs are. The cats resent being constantly in the house and occasionally let me know this is no uncertain terms. The ovines are quite fun in their own way, and becoming very blase about their daily journey to greener pastures. Significant proportions of immigrant residents are still in evidence, and massive American gas guzzlers abound in the narrow streets and alleyways. A couple of new layers of large gravel have been applied to the route of the sewer, not much of an improvement, truth be told. The beginning of smoke season is unfortunately upon us, and the burning-off of last year's crops has created brilliant orange sunrises and Los Angeles quality air. Thursday, I had a lovely day in Zamora with Celeste and Miguel, but no results from the culture of the organisms in my throat. I'm listening to recordings of the entire Terry Pratchett oeuvre, which is very entertaining and I highly recommend that, if you are unfamiliar with his books, you find some in your emporium of choice. As the English say, he's brilliant. We're having a bit of a cold snap: night lows in the high 40s, gasp, shudder. Miss Eve is definitely wider than Adam, so I'm girding my loins, as it were, for her eventual parturition. As if I know what the hell to do if anything goes awry ...

That about covers it. Listening to my books on MP3 means that I haven't even been thinking whilst watering the plants, so I don't even have anything to rant about, philosophically speaking. Odin, do you think I'm getting mellow in my old age?

R

Well, fiesta month is finally winding down. I am fully aware that we haven't actually run out of diurnal saints, they've only become more silent. but it is a relief, nonetheless. I learned a new decorating tip on a recent interminable ride to Zamora: foil-wrapped beer cans. When one thinks about it, it is better than simply following the usual procedure and throwing them from the window of the car after you've emptied them. And with the economy in the toilet, reusing containers is to be lauded, right? Unfortunately, there are few things in greater supply here than empty beer cans.

Enrique has been here the last couple of days, and it is nice to have company around the place which speaks a language I understand. The dogs are, at best, mediocre conversationalists, the chickens only want me for my seeds and the sheep only talk when they've wrapped themselves into a gordian knot and can't reach the perfect blade of grass that they must have right now!! We aren't even going to pretend that the cats have anything but the basest of self-interest in talking to me - I wonder why the ancient Egyptians worshipped them, did they prize slant-eyed condescension? These two pampered brats could probably force themselves to catch a mouse if I stopped feeding them for a couple of weeks, but I guess that kind of begs the question about why we allow them to keep us in the first place.

The other reason that it is so nice to have the boss around is that he can make decisions about shite I've been putting off asking, and he really enjoys gardening. Don't ask me, I've never understood it, either. All that dirt and back-breaking weeding. (Shudder)

The chicklet is now nearly indistinguishable from Miss Kate, who is still ruling the roost with an iron feather. John has been less vocal lately, I assume because he's reached middle age and is above crowing at every little thing. Cecil is still interested in eating from my hand, occasionally deigning to not ignore my presence. Black Beauty and the Barred hens are still too skittish to be that near me, unless they are really really hungry. There appears to be harmony among the testosterone set, and without the hooplah to which Miss Kate resorts to enforce her will. There appears to be an egg or two in the nest, so their production stoppage (strike, in American) appears to be whimpering to a close. As I've yet to receive demands, I am not sure as to the actual cause of the stoppage, but isn't that usually the case with these things? the French have turned them into an art form, afterall.

I am beginning to research ovine parturition, which, in theory, will simply happen. I intend to be prepared as much as possible, because 'letting nature take its course' usually results in very unexpected things. Like younger sisters. Most of the sites I've found so far seem to think I know something about sheep anatomy and gestation, so It's been a little less than informative. Adam and Eve, however, seem to be having a good time of it all, and are learning that there is a fast way and a slow way to get down the hill to all that luscious food and have lately been opting for the fast way. They still manage to tie their leads in the most amazing knots - they could teach the Royal Navy a thing or two. Adam has developed an alarming habit of head-butting Eve in her side, so these had better be some pretty sturdy lambs she's growing.

The hordes of temporary residents appear to be thinning, although today's trip to Zamora was a traffic nightmare. Less English is heard in the streets, and this year has been startlingly free of Enrique's relatives wanting to see the house. Speaking of which, I have been giving lemons (physical ones, by the way) to Tia Signora and daughter-in-law at the bottom of the hill - three mature trees produce way more lemons than any one person can use - and this has created an interesting little drama. Tia Signora managed to produce Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde, although some years apart. Unfortunately Dr. J. appears to be the one who has left, leaving Cousin Pendejo to snarl at me from behind his ten-foot fence. It's his wife who's been the recipient of my lemon largess, do you think he's jealous? Not much of a problem, as the opinion of assholes has never carried much weight with me, but it will be nice to be able to stroll down the hill without worrying about having my ankles attacked.

I have to go drape a cat around my neck now - more fucking 'dance music' has just begun.

R

Knowing, as you do, that December is fiesta month at El Rancho and that each diurnal saint requires (1) fireworks and (2) loud music and dancing, I was particularly impressed with last Wednesday's saint, as there was a stunning (and deeply appreciated) silence quite late into the evening. I thought maybe s/he was a deaf and blind saint and didn't need all the noise and flash and gunpowder stench. It turns out I was mistaken, but at least the early evening was less hard on my ears.

Unfortunately, without saints, someone else gets to pick the music, and this year's choice is pretty much the same as last. Josh Groban, or someone very similar is a so-called singer who can make the interval from Some to where into a 14-note scoop, warbles Somewhere over the Rainbow; the Three Nine-ors, or maybe even eight-ors, get to run through Schubert's (ultimately boring) Ave Maria; Groban-clone again (with chorus) wavers along through Panis angelicus; leading relentlessly to the grande finale of White Christmas, for Odin's sake, crooned by someone with the talents, and I use the term loosely, of Bing Crosby crossed with Sarah Vaughn (think wobbly scoops in a four-note range). White fucking Christmas in a country that never sees frost, let alone snow, is just a bit precious, don't you think? It would be hard to make it worse. Although, come to think of it, one of my high school music instructors, Duh-wayne E, could have made a worse tune-stack and in fact did, several years in a row. Which thought was brought to mind by tonight's Musical Interlude: a brass band warming up whilst amplified competing with the PA system's roster: Some blat blat where fart blat o blart fat ver bat flart the rainbow...

I could hate christmas. In the first place: spend spend spend. In the second, some Republican asshole is guaranteed to complain about the 'war on christmas' because Gawd knows that Amurikah is a one gawd place and that no-one could possibly believe in Allah, Buddha, John Stewart, Teddy the Bear or the Great Unknown .... and fifteen days of firecrackers and dancing to oddly unlikeable music and crowds of cars and circus equipment. Yes, boys and girls, Mexico's is a gawd who likes to spin around in circles until s/he pukes. Sounds like a 70's disco night, actually.

Did I mention that I gave a Dinner last night? I made boeuf a la bourgignonne (using cabernet sauvignon, actually), and it was very tasty and we had a good time. I'm still cleaning up the dishes, of course, but it is nice to have friends over for an evening of food and jokes, even if my limited language skills prevent me from fully understanding some of them. The jokes, that is - I definitely understand the food.

Well, that about covers it. The hens have stopped laying as my christmas present, which I actually appreciate. The sheep and the dogs are behaving moderately well, the cats are shedding tonnes of hair, the weather is perfectly lovely.

Whatever it may be that you celebrate this time of year, may you have joy and love.

Rikk

December is fiesta month at El Rancho. Well, in all the surrounding hamlets, villages, valleys, cracks and cervices, anyway. There's a new saint every day, and each of them requires (1) fireworks and (2) loud music and dancing. I, surely the only one in the country, am pretty damn tired of the same five songs over and over. I can hardly wait until the public address system starts playing christmas carols. Last year's selection was pretty standard but for the inclusion of 'Somewhere over the Rainbow' and I'm hoping that this year's will be a different five. I am prepared to be horribly disappointed.

I wandered down the hill today with Adam and Eve, as the lawn is mostly brown and looks pretty inedible to me, which is actually pretty usual, the lawn looking inedible to me, but it also looks less nutritious than I think they deserve. It was not the ordeal that I had anticipated, actually. They were very interested in all the strange and wonderful new weeds and flora along the side of the road, which meant that the two minute stroll took closer to ten, but I think they appreciated the change in diet. Whilst in the lower forty, I harvested a million about-to-rot lemons and observed the progress of the millions of new little green ones. I gave a bunch of them to Enrique's aunt, who lives across from the lower forty. There is a very large and unidentified (to me, anyway) tree in the lot, and upon one of its branches was a lizard, coloured the same as the dark grey-brown bark, doing press-ups, either for his own entertainment or to impress someone I couldn't see. As soon as he spotted me, though, he blew himself up to terrifying proportions, telling me to mind my own. As he started out about the size of a pencil and ended up the size of a moderately thin fountain pen, I failed to be overly impressed, but it was sort of endearing, the whole testosterone/territorial thing in microcosm.

Knowing that December and its concomitant noises loomed, I have been searching out earplugs on my various forays to the nearby cities. I have failed to look up the Spanish therefor, so have been limited to looking at stock in stores and hoping that one will have them where I can see them. No luck yet. So, necessity mothering and all that, I have begun to train the cats to sleep either side of my head, which creates a kind of white noise purring that is infinitely more soothing than the snap crackle pop of Mexican pop music. Unfortunately, neither of the felines is being particularly co-operative in this venture, although it is amusing to position them. And for a short while, my ears are toasty warm. Maybe I should try to position one of them over the top of my head with his feet in my ears ...

The hens appear to be uninterested in sitting eggs, so I've been collecting at least five every two days. I am not supposed to eat all that cholesterol, so I'm not sure what I'll do with them. Miss Kate is not settling down much, but there are still three live roosters, and none of the other hens looks as though she is wanting for food. The large Barred rooster has been eating out my hand, which is a lot like having one's eyebrows plucked. I have decided to name him Cecil, as his golden ruff and portly body make him look exactly like Sir Richard Attenborough playing Lord Burleigh in the Cate Blanchett 'Elizabeth'. (By the way, his name is pronounced Sessle, for all you non-English-speaking readers.) Black Beauty is still sporting anomalous white spots on her rump feathers, so I'm assuming that they are a discoloration rather than an attachment of foreign substances. The wee chick is now about the same size as BB but still smaller than Miss Kate, and the Barred Rock hens are plump and looking like good eating. One of the Barred hens attacked a serpent the other day, which Cecil promptly appropriated and ran away. It was very funny to watch her chase him, and to watch him 'fighting' it, once I decided that they weren't about to get poisoned or something by it. At one point, they had managed to tie it into quite a complex looking knot. Nothing has drowned in the fish pond this week. The half of the sewer from the pedestrian bridge to here has been smoothed, and I use the term loosely, over, so the challenge in walking to the village is now less about falling into the trench than it is about falling over one's feet. The other half is still a work in progress, but I don't have to go that way, so it's not as disruptive. I had Enrique Taxi-driver point out the Rincon Grande presidencia the other day, as I need to pay a bill there. I have walked Spawnus Devilus to the building that he indicated every day this week, at 08:00, 09:00, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00 and 1:30, and it is never open. Odin knows we can use the exercise, but I'm not getting a good impression of local bureaucracy, let me tell you. It is almost cold in the mornings and quite hot in the afternoons, so there's not much to complain of in that regard. There were some Monarch caterpillars on some of the patio plants the other day, so I'm looking forward to their metamorphosis. The avian population still seems comprised of mostly sparrows and a couple of doves. The suicidal wasps are still littering the bathroom floor with their corpses and, to the chagrin of the cats, the four-footed Scritchers are still colonising the bathroom roof. The guest bath frogs vary from three to four, and extremely large spiders appear regularly at various spots on the walls. The winds have been better-behaved, so none of the remaining potted plants has been released from its confinement this week. I'm very disappointed to have discovered that my eyelashes have shrunk and no longer sweep my spectacle lenses. Now, if my waist would follow suit and stop sweeping the floor when I walk, I'd be happy.

R

December 1st is World Aids Day, so spare a thought for the millions of PWAs around the world. Then send up a curse at Ronald Reagan for not having the guts to talk about the disease before it became a world-wide crisis.

The chickens have started laying eggs, as you may remember from last week, but the composition of the flock has changed a bit. It took me a while, but I have finally realised that one of the hens is actually another rooster So, we have John, the original multi-coloured rooster, one that is larger than he with gold neck feathers and black-and-grey barring, and a third, smaller than John, with almost-white neck feathers and larger blobs of black-and-grey barring than the big one. And speaking of trios, this week I fished Papa lizard, Mama lizard and baby lizard out of the fish pond. They unfortunately did not survive the experience of swimming with the fishes.

It also occurs to me that you should spare a thought for the people who manage to grow the food you eat. The usual work-week of: Monday morning, Monday afternoon, Hump Day, Thursday, Party Night, Party day and Hangover, turns into something quite other on the farm: Up at Dawn, and, to quote Janis Joplin, it's all the same fucking day.

We had a cloud build-up yesterday, but it failed to rain. It is getting harder for me to find patches of green around the house for the sheep to crop, so we're going to have to see if I can manage to walk them down the hill to the lower forty. The aljibe down there has a little overflow that keeps a nice swathe of grasses and things like the lemon trees in water all year long, so Adam and Eve will have some delicious grazing, should I manage to get them to it. The goat-and-sheep-herds seem to walk themselves up the road to pasture and down again to drink, so one assumes that it is possible, but the goatherds have established a series of hoots, whistles and hollers that (1) I don't think I can duplicate and (2) would only confuse Adam and Eve if I could. I have been practicing 'walking' them around on their leads in preparation for the great migration, but I think that getting through the gates at both places will prove challenging. They don't actually steer, you see, they more sort-of run in three directions and bleat. They're very sweet-tempered, but they just don't understand English instructions. Or maybe they're like Spawnus Devilius and choose not to understand instructions. The other challenge looming on the ovine horizon is shearing, the which is a competitive sport in Australia, but I don't even know when to try, let alone how to get it done in 32 seconds.

So, 'tis the season to be ... religiously noisy. My friend Roxana has a poster on the store that lists the saints and celebrations for the first fifteen days of December. It is four feet long. One assumes that the latter half of the month will be posted later. Over the last week, we've had several evenings of fiesta in the surrounding hamlets, the excuse for which escapes me. The other day, the bus to Zamora stopped at a little place called Las Fuentes to disgorge passengers, unfortunately about three seconds after the locals had lit about a million firecrackers simultaneously. The air was positively Los Angeles with smoke and the choking stench of gunpowder, which is not a good thing for my lungs. Nor, for that matter, anyone else's, but I don't have to breathe using their lungs, so who cares?

There are a lot of sparrows in yard, but not much else for avian life-forms. There was a small, mouse-sized black-and-white critter drowned in the fish pond this morning. It may in fact have been a mouse, but not a breed I'd ever seen before. The squirrels (or mice or something) in the roof of the flat are scritching out a symphony in the mornings as I try to ablute before facing the dawn. The cats are fat and as contented as they will get without being allowed out into the real world. A thousand or so wasps have gained ingress to the bathroom, where they seem to do nothing but die and clutter up the floor. The wind has been less in evidence this week, which means the afternoon swelter leads quite nicely to the afternoon nap. No further sightings of scorpions in the flat, no new snakes in evidence, and the roosters are all still alive. Miss Kate is still really bossy. She has taught the other hens how to lay eggs on the laundry-table, but I've yet to find any under the cacti. Eve had a bot-fly infestation up her nose, whatever the hell those may be, and the vet sold me some liquid crap that I had to give her once a month for three months. Well, now that her system is cleared out and immunised, Adam has them. Me giving sheep a syringe full of goop orally is something to see. Well, at least it is less of a challenge than I imagine giving a chicken an oral dose would be, not even considering that I can at least catch the sheep.

I have to go sweep up wasp corpses now.

R

It's almost interesting to watch the construction of the sewer. The sections of concrete tube are maybe 1.5 metres in length and half a metre in diametre. The trench is about 2 metres deep and a metre wide. White PVC-type tubing, about 15 centimetres in diametre, delivers the products of digestion to the old sewer by running through the new at 90 degree angles. So, there is this long trench with two or three sections of concrete tubing stuck together, then a space through which a white tube runs, and then more concrete tubing stuck together. The space between the sections of concrete is probably 30 cm, maybe a bit more. What fills the gap is a brick beehive which may or may not have removeable covers (they haven't got that far yet on the bits that are still open) and into which the white tube is being sealed. I, for one, have never thought much about the construction of these types of things. I feel sure that the method is a little different in the rest of North America, but this appears to be how it's done in this little piece of Mexico. I told you it was almost interesting.

The up-hill neighbours have had a truckload or two of sand-like dirt dumped in the road, and the younger members have been shovelling it into the cracks, canyons and interstices left by the rains. Junior Wife is now able to drive her car up to the house, a relief for us all. From the look of it, though. one good rain and the road will be back to exactly the same shape it was in last week before they started spreading the sand. Or, another way to look at it would be: what idiot thought it effective to fill those gaps with sand? Well, we still have six months of dry season left, so they may decide to actually do something useful to fix the road.

Miss Kate lays white eggs, Black Beauty and the Barred Rocks lay brown. My babies are growing up: I found 2 white and 7 brown eggs in the nest I recently re-filled in the coop. I am assuming that, as there are two roosters in there, all eggs will be fertile, but I don't know if anyone is going to be interested in sitting on them this time of year. The laying of eggs is somehow related to the length of daylight hours, but we may be close enough to the Equator that it won't make any difference. Anyway, this development means that I need to get efficient about finding a way to keep the dogs from killing the chickens as, now that the ladies are laying, I need to get into the coop more often. It is getting cool enough at night that the eggs I picked up were actually cold, and the brown ones were quite small. The size will apparently increase over time. Miss Kate didn't sit on her nest until there were six or seven eggs in, so if I don't get in there, there will be seven eggs in the nest in two to three days. I think the Barred Rocks are good eating, I'm going to see if someone will hatch some.

The yoghurt treatment proved ineffective, so I'm now taking pills to clear up the thrush. There are many little birds flitting about the place again, all sparrows at this point. I have seen several delightful butterflies lately, one of the large tiger-striped ones and several smaller ones in shades of orange. There was a small bright blue one the other day, too. There was a drowned lizard in the fish pond last week, and a small snake in the yard. There may be a larger snake in the roof of the main house, but all I can see is its shed skin hanging off the edge of the roof. There is another fucking fiesta occurring replete with firecrackers and out-of-tune brass instruments ... and scared cats. Although, they are actually curled up together on the bed, so maybe it's not bothering them as much this time. The Spawnus Devilus has managed to obey commands a bit this week, so maybe there is still some hope. Industrious ants have been sighted at various points in the patio and in various plants. Ant poison has been administered but I still think an aardvark would be a better idea. There is a new, smaller flock of goats pasturing up the hill but the goatherd is a jerk and throws rocks at Manchas. Adam has been very docile and friendly, Eve a little more skittish than he. It remains to be seen whether she is enciente, they both have fat little bellies. Adam's incipient horns are apparently still itchy - we have new scrapes on all the trees to prove it. We have been experiencing very strong winds fairly steadily, everything is browning up, the ground is cracking, all of which means: more watering! With one working spigot! I wish I had a Big Butch Plumber running around (inside joke). I smote a quite large scorpion which was walking up the wall outside the flat the other day. The tiny paper wasps have repaired the hole that formed in their nest. Three frogs have moved back into the guest toilet. All of the bougainvillea have bloomed and new lilies are popping up along the walk. And it's only a month until Christmas!

I think I've rubbed it in enough about our lovely weather so I'm gonna go now.

R

From The Onion:

"Proposition 8, the California measure that bans same-sex marriage, passed by a 52 per cent to 48 per cent margin. [Editor's note: actually, the MARGIN was 4.6%, the actual votes were the percentages listed in the quote.] What reasons did people give for voting for it?

17% always vote yes to everything
5% Proposition was a lot of reading
11% thought it would be last good opportunity to deny someone civil rights
2% unhappily married gay people too lazy to get a divorce
4% still trying to prove not gay after that one night with Sean
.001% love and support their son Frederick but didn't want to see him make a mistake with that good-for-nothing Manuel"

As it turned out, 70% of black voters, probably because we all know that there are no gay black men or women, voted to enshrine Bigotry Ignorance and Fear in the state Constitution. The Mormons, with something like .0000004% of the population, supplied nearly half of the money raised ($40 million, I heard at one point) that paid for the yellow advertising that misrepresented the facts and helped enshrine BIF in the state Constitution. It makes me glad that I'm not American. And, as an exercise for the class, look up the history of marriage, that "sacred 5000-year-old institution". You'll find several interesting things, such as: our current belief that romantic love should lead to marriage started gaining precedence in the late 19th century.

El Rancho was without electric power for two full weeks - not due to the company's fuck-up, by the way - which resulted in lots of interesting developments. There is no water in the main aljibe because I couldn't pump it up there from down the hill. There is no water in the tanks on the roof, ditto. There is no food worth eating in the house, because I couldn't refrigerate anything fresh. There is a trash bag full of biologically hazardous former food-like substances that were in the freezer, unidentifiable, which I couldn't get to before they had all thawed and rotted. We're not going to discuss the smell thereof, which is why it's all back in the freezer. I wasted much money eating things like instant soups that didn't need refrigeration. I managed to cook by candlelight, but washing the dishes had to wait for daylight. The cats were delighted, as they got a lot of quality time with me, but I really don't think I'm cut out to be living the pioneer life. Things are slowly returning to normal, at least around here.

The village, on the other hand, is a mess. A little over a month ago, a crew came along and laid down several layers of gravel on the road that leads from the bottom of the hill to the village. A week later, a crew came along poured some dead-straight lines in the road. They used some kind of powder, the which managed to mostly disappear under the influence of vehicle tyres. A couple of days later, a crew came and dropped a bunch of concrete sections along the side of the road. Now, they've dug a six-foot deep trench down the length of the road, through the nice new gravel, and are dropping the concrete sections into said trough to complete a new sewer line. It is rather an interesting exercise to try to walk to the village, but it is impossible to drive down the road, which I think is not actually making friends of the people who live along it. Ain't progress grand?

The ovines are fat and happy enough, even though I've got them both tethered in order to save the patio plants. However, gale force winds have been wreaking havoc therewith in their stead, so minor casualties abound. The canines are pretty much the same as always. Miss Kate has decided that her off-spring should spring off, and is chasing her away from food with the rest of the flock. I take it that eggs will begin appearing again sometime soon. The rest of the flock is fat and happy, and the roosters are still friends. The chick is almost as big as Black Beauty, who is the smallest of the hens. The white spots on two of her rear feathers are definitely bleached spots and not chicken shit, which, in my opinion, doesn't really add much to her overall look. John is the most amazing combination of disparate colours that glow in the sun. The Barred Rock rooster is larger than he, so we'll see what happens down the mating road. The wind is up again after a respite of almost three days, which means that there will be either plant casualties or roof tiles committing suicide. However, it also means that the heat of the sun will be dissipated, which makes me feel better.

That about covers it. Maybe next week I'll feel like being amusing again.

R

Quiringuicharo Times-Herald 20081026

Sorry I haven't written, I bit my tongue really hard and therefore couldn't type properly.

I have been having adventures in bureaucracy. There are three cellphone companies in Mexico, two GSM and one which is associated with the Sprint/Nextel fiasco. I tried phones from both Movistar and Telcel, as I didn't know which was most likely to work well. There is little difference between them, actually, but Telcel is charging an extra tax that is designed to pay the new owner more quickly. So, I decided to change the phone I have to the other system. The phone that Gary has is on the Movistar system, and I didn't have much trouble with it whilst I was checking out the rival companies. Anyway, October 15th I got my new telephone number. October 20th, some drunken or very stupid pendejo reported his/her phone as stolen using the automated system, and actually punched in my number in error. I therefore couldn't use my phone, and the error recording said that my balance was flat. So, next day, I had to do some shopping in La Piedad and I bought a tarjeta, a card which recharges the balance on one's cell. I got home, input the eleven million digit PIN and got a recording that said I'd made a mistake entering the pin. I tried again. Same shite. Took the phone into the village and conscripted my friend Roxana to help me with talking to the 611 people. After 47 tries, we got a recording that said my phone had been reported stolen. So, Monday, I hied me off on the bus to the client centre in Zamora. They tried this that, talked to three or four hundred people on the phone, and finally said that they would have the problem fixed - in one to 24 hours. Nice window of opportunity, right? Back home, no phone, no balance on the Telcel. In the nature of things, I couldn't get to Zamora again until Wednesday, at which time the phone was useable but I still couldn't input the tarjeta that I tried to use whilst the service was suspended. They made another three million phone calls, and some agent somewhere finally said that the registration on tarjeta was invalid and that I would have to go to a Client Attention Centre to get it sorted. There are two of them in the entire state, one in Uruapan, one in Morelia. The card was worth 200 pesos; the trip on the bus to either of those destinations would be, round trip, more than the value of the tarjeta. I know that Telcel is partly owned by ATT, so that kind of 'service' from them doesn't surprise me, but I thought the other would be less bullshit. Wishful thinking.

Adam has the trots today, which is really ugly. I hope it clears up soon. Eve is quite calm and friendly, so who knows what the hell is going on in her evil little mind. Adam's blossoming horns have been very itchy, from the evidence on the trees. The poultry are poulting along quite nicely. Miss Kate is determined to be the boss, and seems to be succeeding, in the main. Black Beauty has developed an ugly white spot, but I can't get close enough to ascertain if it is a feather that has changed colour or merely a glob of shit she can't remove. The canines are behaving slightly more than usual, so they're obviously plotting something really dire. There are these almost invisible waspy things that build very complicated nests in a really attractive soft grey-brown colour. They don't care about people, so there is no reason to be concerned that they are there, so I just leave them alone and let them build. What started out about 3 mm (very tiny) across is now about 13 cm (8 inches) across and made up of millions of layers of their papery excrementy stuff. This one is a replacement for one that was about the same size but looked as though it had had a little bomb go off inside which blew a hole in the outer-most four or five layers. Well, I have decided that it is a construction fault, because the same thing happened over night to the new nest, and just about the same size hole. They are really tiny, they look more like mosquitoes than wasps, so the relative size of the catastrophe is enormous. Shite, I'm turning into National Geographic again, sorry.

The leg wound from hell is much improved. There is a little hole in the skin, and a small pocket of what we presume to be infection. I am on another course of antibiotics, which will make five weeks in total, and therefore am now enjoying the benefits of a systemic candida infection, as well. One of my medical friends has recommended a therapy, so I have to go stick my dick in a cup of yoghurt now.

R

Quiringuicharo Times-Herald 20081012

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our devoted Canadian readers. Even with Stephen Harper (George Bush Light, to you Yanks) in the world, there is a lot for which to be thankful, and I am. For one thing, this learning to farm alone shite has only maimed me, so far. And happy Columbus Day, or, as Gary calls it, "celebration of indigenous peoples' genocide day". The which actually applies a little less to the Canadian version, as mostly the voyageurs married them instead of killing them, resulting ultimately in Buffy Sainte-Marie, Douglas Cardinal and Graham Greene, among others. Oooh, and Richard Parent, my first ... never mind, we'll just remember that (fondly) instead of talking about it.

Adam and Eve have both ended up tethered, as the little buggers refuse to stay off the patio. They manage fairly regularly to tie their respective cords into most interesting configurations. Either Eve is not in estrus or she's no longer a virgin, as that let-me-show-you-mine behaviour has settled down a lot. They have managed to break a five-foot tall cactus and a four-foot smoke tree even though tethered, so we may have to re-think the moveable cage idea. Adam's burgeoning horns are responsible for some interesting wear spots on various items around the yard, as well. Miss Kate is still trying to persuade me she wants to be eaten. The chick is no longer a chick, she is now a half-size adult, so in my opinion, Miss Kate's protectiveness should come to an end. No eggs yet, no dead or maimed roosters, very healthy looking feathers all-round - we seem to have managed, in spite of the lack of outside access. Which brings us to the reason the chickens can't be let out. The canine contingent remain numbering two, neither of which pays any attention to me except when they are hungry. Manchas and I have been walking on the lead, at which he is improving, slowly. I, of course, am very good at it, having had years of practice with other canine friends. Quite independently of the bloody ovines, a potted fern committed suicide in the wind the other night. The pot had broken well before my arrival, and has been slowly listing to port, whatever the hell that means, since my arrival. With a little nudge from the mach 2 winds, it toppled completely off the deck into the lawn-like substance directly below it. Makes me feel totally unsuited to caring for plants. Oh wait, I AM totally unsuited to caring for plants! The felines are fat and sleepy.

I may have mentioned that the leg thing turned out to be a needle-like object fully enclosed by my shapely calf. I believe it came from the date palm beside the fence, as it is very similar in appearance to bits that still cling to the plants. Why it decided to enter my leg I don't know, but it has resulted in three continuous courses of antibiotic, which, as many of you medical types know, runs the risk of cleaning out my gut of all the little parasites we've come to know and love, not to mention depend upon for digestion. This in turn could lead to yet more and different antibiotics. It has already lead to thrush coating my tongue and throat, and there's not much point in trying to fight a yeast infection with another yeast, so I'll wait until I'm off the antibiotic before addressing that more effectively. In the meantime, my tongue is furry and the inside of my mouth regularly finds its way to between my teeth as I chew, resulting in more spots we'd rather not touch with ... oh, liquids, solids, toothbrushes, almost anything you'd care to name. None of this is likely to be fatal, but it sure is inconvenient.

Our helpful hint of the week: check for the keys BEFORE you allow the self-locking door to fully close.

Last weekend, I made a delightful birthday cake for my friend Miguel. After I had finished icing it, I felt the first twinges of what turned out to be the four days of flu I've just been through, and the cake sat on the counter for way too long before it sat in the fridge for four days. It is (was?) chocolate, so I can't feed it to the hounds, and I've not had much call to attempt to burn food but really do feel that it won't exactly be easy, so I'm not sure what to do with it. It will sharpen knives, at least for awhile, but it's such an awkward shape for that, seems injudicious, somehow. It currently inhabits a black trash bag, indubitably turning into even more of a biology experiment. Oh, well.

I encourage all of my Canadian friends to get out and vote: if Harper wins a majority, Canada will end up in worse shape than the Untidy States, and I, for one, don't want that to happen. Go! Go vote!!

R

Quiringuicharo Times-Herald 2008 09 28

On Monday, whilst struggling to mow the ten-foot tall grass, I thought that I had been shot in the leg. An excruciating pain mid-calf almost had me on the ground. I observed my trouser leg and determined that there was not much of a hole in the fabric, so maybe it really was a ricochet-ed small rock picked up by the lawn-mower. This is an extremely common occurrence, picking up rocks, but the difference this time was that my back was to the rock fence rather than the open yard. I rather panicked, and limped into the village clinic to have the wound looked at. Dr. Pendejo* had called in sick last Friday, and hadn't managed yet to get to the office, so the Nurse was (1) swamped and (2) the closest thing around to a medically-trained professional. She glanced at my wound, pronounced it beneath consideration and gave me some anti-inflammatories. I tried insisting that I could actually feel something sharp poking into or out of my skin, but she was having none of it. I was in great pain and my limited Spanish had deserted me, so I may not have been particularly eloquent in expressing that there was a fucking rock in my fucking leg, but still. I hobbled home, cleaned it multiple times with peroxide, slapped on a bandage and hoped for the best. By Thursday, the wound was seeping orange-coloured stuff non-stop, the hard hot and puffy bit was bigger than a large mango and the centre was an alarming black. I hobbled back to the clinic to find that there was still no doctor, so Nurse expressed a bunch of nasty stuff, cleaned it more thoroughly with nasty stinging things, and recommended that I continue expressing it on a regular basis. I called Celeste. I had made arrangements to go into Zamora for the day Friday, to see her and my other friends and attempt to obtain the guard for the mower, so we added a look-see to the agenda. Her three-second assessment resulted in us visiting her boyfriend at his clinic, where they excised some stuff with a scalpel, expressed another ton of something, applied more stinging shite and fed me pain-killers and antibiotics. So, whilst all this was going on or about to go on, I got a call that Enrique's brother, sister-in-law and Rick were at the ranch wondering where I might be. As they'd collectively failed to call or e-mail or message me that they were on the way, I was already in Zamora. They did manage ingress, and all was well. My impromptu surgery reduced the size of the swelling considerably, but, unfortunately, increased the level of pain to where it has been almost manageable to walk around the place to feed the chickens and tether the sheep. We had a good time in Zamora anyway, even though it took me hours to walk anywhere. I've resorted to actually ordering the missing lawn-mower part.

Adam has begun to get a bit feisty. Not only is his head itching from the emerging horns, Eve is approximately in estrus. She still runs faster than he, so she's not actually in estrus. I don't think. If she is, she's a bloody tease. I have taken to tethering her, as she was the instigator in most of the forays into the patio flora. There has been mixed success, especially as Adam is not interested in being steered away from trouble. The Canine Contingent has, however, acquired some respect for his ability to get them airborne, and therefore are less likely to attack from the rear than before. The cats are still behaving quite well, and very cuddly as the lows edge into the teens (fifties). We've had very little rain, so I've had to water more of the deck flora than before. The blood-sucking parasites, however, are still thriving on the condensation on the grasses and eating healthily of my diminishing blood. Miss Kate is still bucking to be stewed, but the chick is very cute and the others are plump and fairly happy. Still no eggs. No open warfare between cocks.

One of my friends, when we were spending some time alone together, shared some of his history with me. He was born and raised in Guadalajara. The job his father could obtain is in Leon, at least a couple of hours away from here, so probably four or more away from Guadalajara. The job he could obtain is in Zamora. He lives with his mother and two younger siblings, whom he supports. He works seven days a week at his main job, and in the evenings of several days is a sort-of messenger for another company. He is unfailingly cheerful and courteous and respectful and very very funny. I need my dictionary a lot when he's around. He will be 22 years old this Monday.

OCD Spaghetti Sauce

First, buy hand-fed Japanese beef calf and import to your location at great expense. Or, if you live in Alberta, walk out the door and grab any old calf you see. Pasture animal on specially prepared plot of organic grains and grasses, supplemented with vitamins and minerals. Or, if you live in Alberta, tether animal in back yard. When calf is approaching its pre-determined goal weight, plant two square yards of high-quality Italian durham wheat in imported Italian dirt. Or, if you live in Alberta, use the other half of the yard and any local grain will be of sufficient calibre to serve. Plant organic onions, garlic, four kinds of tomatoes and carrots in hydroponic gardens. Import hand-picked, hand-bottled olives and hand-pressed olive-oil. By the time the animal is ready for slaughter, the specially-trained Japanese butcher will have cleared immigration, and by the time the meat has aged, the grain will be ripe. Plant herbs. Select cut of meat and have butcher hand-grind to ensure that fat content does not exceed 5.67%. Harvest grain by hand, grind using mortar and pestle, chanting as appropriate. Follow recipe for choice of pasta and allow product to dry naturally. By the time pasta is ready, oil will have cleared customs. When pasta is ready, begin boiling pot of Vichy water. Heat hand-made cast-iron skillet with a small amount of olive-oil. Lower heat and gently add ground beef to skillet, taking care not to bruise it. Stir gently at regular intervals to ensure even browning. Harvest tomatoes according to ancient Druid ritual, and separate them into to exactly equal portions. Blanch one such portion in boiling Vichy water and remove skin. Discard water and begin boiling a new pot of Vichy water sufficient to boil the pasta and add thirty-seven equally-sized grains of sea-salt . Gently mash tomatoes in glass bowl. Select second portion of sorted tomatoes, core and chop finely using surgical scalpel so as not to bruise the fruit. Harvest onions and garlic. Harvest carrots. Slice onions into precisely 3 mm-thick slices, and then dice into 3 mm. cubes. Discard any bits that don't measure up. Gently peel garlic, press by hand using new mortar and pestle. Combine onions and garlic with browning meat. Continue to stir at regular intervals. Gently grate carrots and add to tomato mix. Harvest perfect herbs using surgical scissors and gently finely-chop using scalpel. Mix gently with mashed tomatoes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Remove olives from packaging, preserve the water in which they were processed. Again using scalpel, cut into small cubes and return to package water. Add entire contents to mashed tomatoes, and then add the mashed-tomato mix to the browning meat. If necessary, add small amounts of Vichy water to make sauce slightly runny. Maintain medium heat, stir often and thicken to desired consistency. Add a tablespoon of olive-oil and pasta to boiling water, stir gently. Add chopped tomatoes to simmering sauce. Cook pasta to desired firmness, testing for done-ness at 40-second intervals. Gently stir sauce. Test and add salt to taste. When pasta is cooked, immediately rinse with tepid Vichy water, add to pre-heated bowl, gently stir in spaghetti sauce and eat.

I have to go re-dress my oozing flesh, now.

R

* Has anyone looked that up yet? It truly is a Spanish word, at least here.

Quiringuicharo Times-Herald 2008 09 21

We have a mystery, and sad news. Manchas bit Preciosa on the nose Friday morning, requiring that I spray antiseptic on it because he actually broke the skin. They settled back down, and Preciosa accompanied me on my evening rounds, giving chickens their snack and putting the sheep into their house and tying up Manchas so he won't terrorise the neighbours' garbage. When I got up Saturday morning, she was not around. She had done this the week before, so I wasn't all that worried, but she is still not back a week later, so I've decided that she has run away from home. I hope she's alright but have no way of finding out. I miss her, she was beginning to be fun.

I don't' know about you, but I like to be thanked when I do nice things for people. Adam needs to learn this lesson: I made a lot of chopped tomatoes for dinner with friends last weekend, and I thought that the chickens, who also don't say thank you, would really enjoy having the left-over bits. On my way to the chicken coop, Adam and Eve came running up to me, so I thought that I would see if sheep will eat tomatoes. As it happened, I am not sure whether they do or not. I held out a piece for Eve, and she turned up her nose, so I moved my hand towards Adam, who licked it up. As I turned to continue on to the ungrateful chickens, he stuck his head between my legs and pulled. Plate of tomatoes and I went ass over tea-kettle into the north lawn, spreading bits of veg far and wide. I was damned if I was going to pick up bits of tomato from the grass, and it was gone the next day, so someone around here likes the tomato bits I won't eat.

Alert readers will remember that I broke the blade on the lawn-mower a while back, and the adventures we had trying to fix it were ... boring, so I don't think I wrote about it, come to think of it. Anyway, as the piece of blade exited the machine, it took out a piece of the chute thingy where the cut grass is supposed to fly out to the side, as well as slicing a little into the housing of the machine. Well, said thingy was then held in place by one bolt, which didn't seem sufficient, given the number of small rocks of which our lawn is composed, so I was strengthening it with duct tape. My make-do finally didn't, and the whole chute thingy is no longer attached to the machine. Without the chute, the cut grass flies into my face, which, given the rocks, etc. So, I went to town Friday to try to find a replacement chute and to pick up some mosquito netting. I went first to the place that had the replacement blade, because they seem to specialise in parts for small machines, and struck out. They recommended I try a place a mile away near the cathedral on Avenida 5 de Mayo, which place recommended another place on the avenue a couple of miles further away which place in turn recommended a place down the street and around the corner, which turned out not to exist. So, wandering back towards the cathedral, which is actually the part of Zamora with which I am somewhat familiar, I stopped in at a couple of places, all to no avail. So, after walking a hundred miles, I still neither have a replacement chute nor do I have any idea what it is actually called in Spanish. I got the mosquito netting without any adventures whatsoever.

I may have mentioned that some friends came here for dinner last weekend. Paul requested "Canadian food", a discussion about the lack thereof we've had here before, and I therefore had a bit of a quandary. So, I ended up making French food with Italian spicing: pork pot-roast with potatoes, corn, onions and a bunch of other stuff with herbs and spices, and a Greek tomato and onion salad in balsamic vinegar. It was all a big hit, very flavourful, actually. I did, of course, supply levels of salsa from barely tolerable to breath-of-fire, knowing that my guests are not used to eating without pain, but no-one much used them, which I have chosen to interpret as a compliment. Also, I made my lemon water, which was less of a hit, even after they shoved a bunch of sugar into it. Oh well, can't win 'em all. There seem to be things called lemons here that taste and look like limes, until they turn yellow when they only taste like limes, so I don't think they were expecting the tart juice we get from the lemons from the lower forty. We had fun, as it was a lovely warm day with a touch of breeze, and a lot of them had gone home before suppertime, so I didn't have to re-feed any of them.

The rest of the menagerie is doing fine. Miss Kate is still attacking all her coop-mates if they get too close to the food she has designated for her chick, and the roosters have yet to tear into each other, so all seems to be well there. No eggs yet, but the Barred Rocks are just now over six months old, so we're not worried about that yet. The cats are still complaining bitterly that I won't let them out, but it is getting a little cooler in the middle of the night, so they are wanting to be as close to me as possible and so still behave when I yell at them. We'll see how long that lasts. The dogs are their usual idiotic selves, we seem to be reduced to nothing but sparrows for avians, there are some really pretty butterflies still around, and some trumpet flowers in bloom. I can see little white things that look like hibiscus flowers on the unidentified tree outside the window of the flat. The rocks the neighbours laboriously placed in the street are still rolling down the hill in the rains, the which have left furrows a foot deep down the sides of the road. This leaves two tracks where the vehicles sort of compacted the gravel, but the younger wife in the compound is afraid to drive up to the house, so she is parking at the end of our concrete and walking in from there. The internet through the cell system is consistent but slow. Some more of the locals have decided that I'm must be here to stay and have started talking to me. I've been to Zamora so often lately that the driver of the bus recognises me. The goats are back in the upper pasture, so we get the Canine Chorus again on a regular basis. I've had to mop up so much water in the main house that I'm developing shoulders. Thankfully, the flat appears to be remaining waterproof. We are still plagued by mosquitoes, but the wasp population has abated a bit. I think I have finally found all of the hiding places things moved to whilst I was in California.

And that about covers it!

R

Quiringuicharo Times-Herald 2008 08 17,24,31 and 2008 09 07, which catches us up to this week.

I don't recommend you fly Delta; my flights to and from Oakland were less than sterling. Well, the actual flying bit was okay, it was the totally inefficient way they did everything else, from check-in to boarding to which gate the flight would be using, that was truly irritating. My friend Paul looked into all the details for me, and here's how it all played out. Wednesday afternoon, I caught a ride with Josefina, the nurse from the clinic, to Zamora, where she lives, and Paul met me and we drove around town a bit and then had supper with Celeste and her partner Fernando. The only bus that would get me to Guadalajara in good time for my 06:00-ish flight left Zamora at 02:00, so we stayed awake and talked and watched some of the gymnastics from the Beijing Olympics. I caught the bus, which takes 2.5 hours to get from Zamora to Guadalajara Airport, but for $15 US they supplied one's choice of water or juice and half a sandwich, more food than the airlines can manage. The check-in at the Delta counter is nearly as inefficient as it is possible to be. First, one is required to check-in on a computer, which tells one that it can't fulfil its duties because one's flight entails crossing an international border. Then one queues up for hours in an attempt to check-in with one of the two live people at the 500-metre long counter. Impeding this process is an inspection of one's bags, by hand, by 700 locals in the space equivalent to a decent-sized bathroom. Need I mention that the locals think it's cold at 04:30 so there's no air-conditioning? I thought not. The Untidy States requires that carry-on luggage from Mexican locations have a silly label attached, which is another time-wasting occupation for some of the 700. One finally obtains the services of an agent, who produces one boarding pass every ten minutes regardless of the number of persons flying as a unit. The security gates, about 7 kilometres to the left of the check-in counters, are again manned to the hilt, but slightly more efficient, and all the carry-on luggage is once again felt-up by gloved hands. One ascends by escalator to the second floor and follows signs for one's gate. About 8 km. to the right, as it turns out, and up and down another set of stairs, eventually returning us to ground-level. The flight is finally called, and boarding begins. One's ticket includes a zone designation, which is a feeble attempt to streamline the herding of passengers onto the plane. It works a little better when the plane is actually at the gate, but in this instance, we were herded onto buses that were to take us to the plane. After once again having one's luggage felt up by gloved hands, one sits in a bus for a year or two and then gets the opportunity to walk up two flights of stairs. Behind a woman older than trees being dragged from her wheelchair and forced to walk up the very same stairs. It was a pretty full flight, so the entire loading took forever. When we finally taxied out to be third in line for take-off, we were almost half-an-hour late. Flying east to west though, we made good time, landing in LA at 08:30. Also known as a half-hour before Customs opens. So we sat, until precisely 09:00, before being allowed off the plane. To spend the next 28 minutes walking from the landing point to the Customs lounge. I am not making any of this up, in case you wondered. Customs was relatively cool, and the seven months it took the two available agents to process 400 Mexicans, including digital photos and fingerprints, and one Canadian was infinitely more comfortable than it had been in Guadalajara. I was processed and finished with the agent in about three seconds, once I finally got there, and proceeded to find a bathroom and my next gate. The flight had changed, it was not popular enough for a real plane, so we'd been down-graded to one of those three-seats-in-a-row jobs. At a different gate, about twenty miles from (1), Customs, and (2), the original gate on the ticket. I had one of the single seats, which was nice, but I could neither stand nor sit up-right and had to lean to the right for the entire flight.

I had a good time in California, saw my friends and ate sushi and hung out with my honey and ate sushi. Then I had to fly out again. Only this time, I checked a bag as well as having my carry-on. Same inefficient Delta "service" in reverse. mostly, only through Salt Lake City, so the airport was even more spread out. Okay flights, and then we landed in Guadalajara and I had to attempt to reclaim my bag. It took two hours. Three flights had landed at the same time, and it seems that there are only two baggage handlers for the entire airport. Customs again and I'm legally in Mexico for the next 180 days. Taxi to bus central, bus to Zamora, more food with Paul and home about 22:00. I wake up to the crowing barking chorus of morning in the country and start to try to get back into the swing of things. The woman who looked after the place whilst I was gone left her little dog when she left, so the menagerie has increased by one apparently female spaniel sort-of named Precious. I haven't figured out yet which behavioural problems got her banned to the country, but she is learning English and so far seems pleasant enough. The chick feathered in completely whilst I was gone, and now looks like a miniature of her mother, with slight variations in colour. The one I thought a rooster is definitely, and the hens are all plump and seemingly happy. No eggs yet. The hounds are the same only they've forgotten how to sit. A lot of weeding and cutting of grass took place, so that's a load off my shoulders. My back is recovered, so I should be able to maintain a little less jungle-like surrounding until my honey gets here to take over the lawnmower. Adam and Eve are ripening nicely: Adam has sharp little bumps on his head that I assume will turn into horns, and Eve has become a red-head in my absence. They came bounding right up to me, so they apparently have better memories than the dogs. Five birds of paradise are in bloom, and the lemons are as delicious as I remembered. The ants are still digging up the entire yard, but I've got the remedy for that, if it stops raining long enough to apply it. The cats have forgiven me for abandoning them and are back to sleeping as close to me as they can get, which can prove inconvenient. The wireless internet has been acquired and installed, and while not blazingly fast, it seems to be more reliable than the shite dial-up, so that's my primary concern addressed. And the modem is soooo cute! Gary has his visa, so can live here legally, and is making good progress getting out of California. I'm acclimating to the elevation again, and actually had some energy today. I ate menudo for the first and last time with Enrique and some of his family on Sunday. The English know it as tripe, but I call it taste-free rubberised crap-in-broth, frankly. However, I will try anything once, and now I know. The replacement for the replacement for Celeste has moved into the clinic, and has proven a disappointment. However, his English is good, so there is another opportunity for me to improve my Spanish, if I can ignore his attitude long enough. Speaking of things health-related, my lungs are not yet completely useless, my LDL cholesterol is under control and I don't appear to have broken anything in my lower back falling in the rocks. I have more evidence of arthritis, however. I saw a dentist in Zamora, and we've started a conservative approach to dealing with the pockets in my gums that have been bothering my California dentist. I may still need surgery, but we're starting with the least amount of interference and working up. The incidence of rain has slowed a lot, 'though we had three or four dry days which were just off-set by about 35 hours of rain.

And that's about it for this edition. Good thoughts to Shannon, who is ready to be no longer pregnant but not sure she's ready to be a mother, and to Carla, who's having medical stuff, Goodnight, John-boy.

R