95%

Well Xmas eve was grand… lots of nice pressies given and received. Daniel & Monica came round and stayed the night. Atticus behaved himself for most of the evening. But, in retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t have given him leftovers, and Dominican Republic egg-nog, rompope, after he’d already finished off the brie. It played merry hell with his digestion and Sita has finally got around to cleaning up after him. I got Sita a gizmo called “BowLingual” which is based on bleeding-edge Japanese research and after configuring it for “Schipperke” and entering his name we tried it out by getting Sally to say 3 words and thus put him into a frenzied barking rage. The machine started applying its algorithms and condensed wisdom of the generations and it turns out that far from being a murderous call-to-arms, Atticus was merely saying “Let’s Play!”. Who’d’ve thunk it? Then Daniel sneezed which meant “I’m misunderstood!”. Suffice to say I’m glad I kept the receipt…

I woke up at about 3am not sure where I was (on the sofa in the living room), and after locating the Pepcid antacid stuff, ibuprofen and drinking 3 pints of water, i couldn’t get back to sleep and grabbed me coat and set off to explore the Santa Cruz coastline. I walked for about an hour heading towards the barks of sealions and ended up being confronted by either the most bellicose urban fox this side of the zoo or a mini-mountain lion. Having studied the sign for preparing for mountain lion attacks, I made myself look big by stretching my coat over my head and waving me arms around making loud shoo noises while slowly backing off. The animal started coming towards me, then a car went past and scared him off a bit and I walked away (backwards) v. fast. They tend to go for joggers, so I wasn’t going to run anywhere. So I couldn’t go back that way and wandered off to the pier where there wasn’t a soul. Just hundreds of seagulls doing their best Alfred Hitchcock impression and staring at me with their unblinking scavenging eyes. So I had a bit of a sit down and watched the moon reflected in the waves for a while. All very calming and I was having a think about what was going on in Blighty (see me dad’s blog for pix) then mosied on down towards central Santa Cruz and then back to the house. Sita had woken up 30 minutes before and was worried enough about my whereabouts to have woken her mum up. Lucky she hadn’t been up for all 3 hours… Sita appears to think there’s some kind of curfew in operation and I should have brought my ID at the very least. And I could have been assaulted or summink. And me, a veteran of closing time on the Kingsway, Swansea. Say what you like about the states, but I’ve never felt threatened by people on the street, unlike late Friday/Saturday in any UK town you care to name. Anyroad, I’m glad Sita didn’t call me mum up to worry her like when I went for a nap in the basement once at a hallowe’en party and she thought i must have had an onset of schizophrenia and was a danger to others and myself…

Anyroad, got back to sleep eventually and was woken up by a nice phone call from me folks but i hadn’t had enough coffee yet. so made coffee with me new grinder from sally, and headed off to that building with the pointy roof and the men in dresses who chant songs with words that don’t make sense or rhyme and play with incense and children. The mass was mercifully brief and then breakfast and the rest of the afternoon was spent with more pressies and working out how to convert PAL DVDs to NTSC format (“Never The Same Colour twice”, according to me Dad).

Sally’s cooking away right now and we’ll be dining in style again in a couple of hours. Anyroad, I hope you had a lovely Christmas, dear reader, and will check back again to see how the obedience training’s going. Also, another pressy for sita was a harness & lead for bunnies. We’ll be test-driving that one soon and may well be a photo-op. Stay tuned & nadolig llawen (mispelled Welsh for happy xmas) and bloywen newith dar (phonetic welsh fer ‘appy new year”)

Atticus channels his inner huskie (a video experiment, let me know if it works)
The battery in me little camera doesn’t do well at the best of times, but the cold and ‘Cus managed to shut the video down at 45 seconds or so. The bit when it jerks away is when his lead went tight as he tried to maul the sliding car…

I’ve 3 days worth of internet to catch up on cos I’ve either been out with the camera or recovering from being out with the camera.

Photos abound over at Flickr…

I liked this but not the airline itself.

(should be a moving gif)

Posts in my native tongue to return “pronto”…

Estaban dos nios jugando fútbol en un parque en Guadalajara cuando uno de ellos es atacado por un feroz perro “Rotweiller”.

Pensando rápido, el otro nio arranca rápido una tabla de una cerca y le da un golpe en el cuello del perro, matándolo instantáneamente.

Un reportero que se encontraba cerca observa la escena y corre a entrevistar al valiente nio mexicano y escribe en su libreta:
“VALIENTE FAN DE LAS CHIVAS SALVA A SU AMIGUITO DE LAS FAUCES DE AGRESIVO PERRO”

a.. Yo no le voy a las chivas, replica el pequeo héroe.
b.. Perdona, como estamos en Guadalajara asumí que le ibas a las chivas.

Entonces escribió: “VALIENTE FAN DEL ATLAS SALVA A SU COMPAÑERO DE TERRIBLE ATAQUE”

a.. Tampoco le voy al Atlas le dice el nio…
b.. Asumí que estando en Guadalajara le irías a las Chivas o al Atlas. Entonces, ¿A quién le vas?
a.. Le voy al América le dice el nio…

Entonces el reportero escribió: “CHILANGO MANIATICO ASESINA A INDEFENSA MASCOTA DE FAMILIA JALISCIENSE

Had the best flight yet back to Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico yesterday night. Since I’d flown the week before I knew all the vaguaries of what to do to / bring / not bring at the airport. Whether to take me shoes off, take the laptop out of the bag, bring liquids etc. On the way out from MX I had a bottle of tequila in me hand luggage and though they confiscated my bottle of water, they let me take the agave juice on board with me because, hey, it’s just tequila… Flying over Northern Mexico we had to divert around some thunderstorms which I’d never seen at night from above. It was spectacular, several flashes per second lit up the clouds like so much electric candy floss. My iPaq wasn’t up to the task of filming it though due to the light conditions and being asked to film stuff after several hours of intense scrabble playing on it. Mexican immigration didn’t even ask me any questions, stamped stuff and let me go on to get me luggage. For the first time I got the “Red Light” at customs. They have a traffic light system where you press the button and it either turns red or green. Red means a hand search of your bags. After the most cursory of frisks before I knew it I was back at the house. Just the way things should be.

Had a bit of a nap and went to ‘rent’DVDs from Santa Tere. I got Almodovar’s new one, Volver (which has been conspicuous in its absence from Mexican cinemas), Thank You for Smoking (which I watched yesterday, 3.5 Lulus), The Butterfly Effect (recommended by El Cala) and, to get the bargain 4 for the price of 3, Reservoir Dogs (it’s been a while). Tacos from Tacos al Pastor on Av. Mexico just to get back in the groove and a quick visit to Starbucks because you don’t want to know what happened the coffee maker over the last 11 days…

I’m trying to find out what’s going on on next Sunday’s Shakira front. There are plenty of tickets left (due to the extortionate price) but I’m not sure who else is going any more. I’ll go on my own if it comes to that…