Stuff

One year late I finally got round to watching the last three (brilliant) episodes of Doctor Who series 3, with Sam Tyler and all that. Now “Here come the drums” has displaced Fleet Foxes in me head. Which means I’ll probably get more done given its frantic pacing.

Spoilers contained in this here youtube…

Righty, I’m off to walk the dog then we’re taking the ferry from Alameda to SF for a wander. tara

if these red sweetcorn things don’t poison us first… I’ve seen them used decoratively, but Drsita just picked up 6 from Lucky’s and 4 of them were red.

Wish us luck.

(Post-prandial EDIT)

They’re not as tasty as the yellow ones, but apparently according to several wise Mexican friends on flickr, they make great tortillas…

Abuela desde Guanatos sent me a whole myth about them, I’ve been translating all afternoon so while I’m in the mood…

It all happened before the Spanish arrived, when the earth belonged to those who worked on it, when nobody fought to live, because living was easy, and men were happy just to sleep, eat, love and grow.

In this particular year there was much happiness. The rains had fallen in abundance; the moon had illuminated the crops.

The Indians sowed the grains of sweetcorn, as white as a girl’s teeth on the well-ploughed earth

A few days later, the ground was covered with little green shoots which grew and grew as they drank up the water.

The goddess Sucuxi, so beautiful, so pure, so good, pondered the work of the Indians from the hill and wanted to reward their efforts by giving them the biggest harvest.

Susuxi came down from the hills to the sweetcorn fields, whose leaves blew in the wind. Thorns pierced the brown soles of Susuxi’s feet and from them fell red droplets of blood.

The goddess fled back to her house, dripping blood onto the kernels of a sweetcorn cob.

The kernels drank up the blood and turned red, as red as the blood they had drank.

Days passed… and the Indians harvested…

The strangest thing: They found a sweetcorn with red kernels.

Spanish source

The story lacks closure. Like then the next day the conquistadors arrived or something… and also maybe kernel’s not the right word, but I’ve been installing ubuntu all afternoon on my laptop…

Anyroad, there’s a blog post for you. They’ll be scarce again this week, no internets yet in Downey we’re told.

…and it looks like it’s going to be just the right weather for it, 97 degrees and scattered thunderstorms.

Normally I’d warn you that I’ll not be blogging much, but given recent posting rates you’ll probably not notice anything amiss.

Took the car for a checkup today. Should be ready any minute along with the bill for 360 bucks. Deciding whether to drive there or fly involved some complex maths with factors such as mileage, price per gallon, car rental, flights and schipperke boarding costs. We’re driving, staying with Sudarat and ‘Cus is coming with us, for the record. Email’ll be checked occasionally. See you in another ZIP code…

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Yesterday we had an open house to try and find renters to take over our Alameda digs. About 15 couples passed through here and 10 of them left application forms so I’ve passed them on to the landlord and hopefully he won’t take long to choose one of them to take over the place come August.

Doctorcita took Atticus on a 3 hour walk in 95 degree heat (35ish celsius) while I was showing people around so that he wouldn’t try to strike up lasting friendships with any of the applicants. Atticus has also now been through a drive through car wash. I wanted to be there for that, but didn’t get to see it. You park in the middle of the machine while all kinds of jets and foam and detergents get blasted at you, everything goes dark… then after 8-10 minutes of craziness industrial dryers blast you with hot air and you’re good to go. Apparently as the first jet started Atticus jumped onto Sita’s lap and stayed there for the duration… Anyroad, all in all a very successful day.

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The sunset was spectacular yesterday, it gave a gorgeous golden light and I took advantage and headed out with me camera. Here’re some of them on Flickr. I like the ones with the seagulls… If there’d been a few more clouds to the west it’d’ve been even better. Maybe this evening.

This week I’ve a few projects on still and there’s another visit to Santa Cruz, then some time next week we’re going to go house hunting in Portland. Anyone want to look after an American Eskimo/ Schipperke mutt for a few days?

…this afternoon. From this point on in the blog, and the real world, she’s Dr. Sita.

Sally & Martin are down at the minute and we’re off for breakfast in a moment. Lots of pictures coming this way in 24-48 hours.

Hasta pronto!

EDIT:

THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR THE CONGRATS. We’re still celebratin’ more soon, including this photo…

Friday’s trip to SCruz went great, lovely to see our sociologist/non-sociologist friends again in what might be one of our last visits (except in we’re going again in half an hour and there for graduation on Friday…). I didn’t sleep so wonderfully due to a heady mixture of garlic bread and a sweltering hotel room, so I got up at 5am and managed to catch the sunrise and greet the sealions dozing by the pier.

Here’s the set of all the pix and if you hover your mouse over the picture above, you’ll see the picture Elias’s watercolour is based on (painted in less than 90 minutes if my calculations are correct). He’s the artist behind the butterfly a while ago. One of these days I’m going to have a go at this watercolour thing and if I’m only a fraction as good as Elias I’ll be very happy.

We’re off to SCruz for the night and I just left Atticus at the boarding kennel place. They reckoned he might have American Eskimo in him, and they might just be on to something. Here’re a couple of American Eskimos:

CC photos by Mendrakis and Rocker’s Generation

Atticus would, for obvious reasons, be rubbish at hiding in the Alaskan permafrost.

I’ve just downloaded 200 megs + from gwynunlimited.com (my old corner of the internet) with a view to shutting it all down. It’s got so much stuff there though. Downloading it was like finding a box of badly sorted photos and letters from several years ago.

I give it another month before it disappears completely.

For now, here are some highlights from memory lane circa 2004:

How we used to look…

Dawn of the ‘Cus… Day before , Day he arrived, December 24th 2004 (black Thursday) , Our first small fortune at the vets …

Stu and Anne come to California

Look it! I used to read books.

Crunchy nut cornflakes disappeared off the market in the States, and all I have left of them is this scan of a limited edition packet from 2004… No photoshop. That’s the uberpatriotic packaging. This was in the days before Steven Colbert.

And finally for today, I discovered the wonderful world of javascript rollover effects.

If I find more stuff I might salvage it and put it here.

Daniel can’t get enough of the Mexican handicrafts…

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Breakfast in El Colibrí, once again molletes… They’re bread rolls cut in half with cheese and frijoles on ’em with the option of salsa mexicana and chorizo. José went for some kind of egg based thing as you can see. Then he went to work and I went to complete the orders received for artesania from Tlaquepaque.

You’ve two options if you’re after Mexican arts and crafts, one is go to Tonalá right on the outskirts of town where everything’s made and there’s lots of cheap shops selling less than perfect stuff, or Tlaquepaque which had its centre recently renovated and is awash with pricey boutiques. I went to t-paque because there’s a bit more to photograph, involves less walking, is slightly closer to the centre and also has a tequila shop where I knew I could get Sita’s 7 Leguas Blanco. I got some jewellery, and something that conformed to Monica’s request for “something metal you can put on the wall”.

I stopped by at la Mata Tinta, a cybercafe/restaurant run by a Scottish bloke (and his wife) who I met last year. He seemed to be thriving, getting the place ready for the forthcoming rainy season. I also took a taxi to the DIF (social security place) to catch up with a mate of mine from my photojournalism course. Nice to see him too and discover a different part of T-Paque, I couldn’t wander much because now it was getting to be the hottest part of the day and I was carrying me camera and lenses and awkwardly shaped wall hangings.

The taxi from Tonala to the centre took forever due to the construction of the Macrobus (or was it macrocamion) that’s causing delays all along the Calzada de Independencia built ready for the Panamerican Games in a few years time. Luckily the taxista had given me a price rather than have the metre running. I still got out of the taxi half a mile before my destination partly because of the heat, partly the traffic, but mainly because he’d started telling me jokes to pass the time… (¿Cuántos chinos hay en China? Ninguno, ¡puros lacios! Don’t even ask for a translation…)

So I checked to see if Anel and Claus were about at Amour Fou, sure enough they were. AF has now closed business but it’s still as hospitable as ever. We went for a swift pint in La Cava and then the plan was to head out to the middle of nowhere to see Aldo’s band plays some covers at the offices of Hewlett Packard, instead everyone’s plans changed and we met up with Jose, Javier, Hugo and co at Los Famosos Equipales and after that to a nearby fiesta on a roof.

And thus was last Friday. Good times. I’m having issues with uploading to Flickr with tags and suchlike, but here’s some of the set of Dia 3.

Sita’s birthday dinner last night was great btw. Shall put a few photos up soon. Thanks for the wellwishing

So I woke up on Javier’s sofa, he’d already made it to work and I had a wander round the Seattle area of Zapopan, it’s all huge mansions and pebbled roads. Gorgeous in the early morning light, then I ambled round the centre of Zapopan, I only had my little camera with me, so you’ll be spared more fisheye photos for now. Saw a chameleon car or two and also snapped a photo of a sign saying something like Beer for the same price as a bus ticket and such and such restaurant, established bloody ages ago… did a bit of email checking and shopping and then met up with Javier again for a torta ahogada near CEPE.

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I also made it back to our old house in calle Garibaldi, now completely refurbished/painted and the home of Juanita and her estetica. Me agave plants weren’t there any more and the garden looks a lot more Zen without the schipperke landing pad… I nipped into Waldo’s mart (everything for a dollar or 12ish pesos) and got some of their surprisingly good Polish dark chocolate for old times sake. Juan de Bonafont was even in the neighbourhood and greeted me with “Y dónde está el Atticus?” (so where´s Atticus?” which was brilliant. I said hello in the corner shop too just for good measure. The old barrio looked good.

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I had a quick siesta, went for a few tacos (chorizo was all they had cos it was early) then ambled to the cafe Fenix in front of the expiatorio where I’d announced I’d be to the Flickr folks. Many were already there when I arrived so I had a really warm greeting and passed out a few pressies and other requests to the crowds. It was great to see everyone again, there were also some peeps I didn’t expect to see from Flickr and elsewhere so though there was no official count of the numbers I had the rockstar treatment. Fantastic it was. Muchas gracias to all of you who made it. It was one of the many highlights of the week for me. And if you promised to visit us in Portland, we hope you’ll make it 😀

After the flickreunion I went back to Abuela desde Guanatos’s house with her and Fabian and had wine on the roof looking over the cityscape from the 5th floor, and listened to some esoteric records from the collection. A very nice way to end the day all round.

Here’s the link to Day two’s set on Flickr since putting them all in here ruins Flash‘s day.

It’s Sita’s birthday today and so I shall acquiesce to her request:

Personal Message
could you post this on your site?

They’re all as bad as each other if you ask me, but at least Obama can roll his Rs convincingly.

I nudged Josh and Liz in the direction of kittywigs the other day. Josh just alerted me to this, arguably better, site, in an email entitled “To Hell with kittywigs”. You’ll visit for the photos of cats dressed up, but you’ll stay for the brilliant Engrish:

It is spring new work! They are frog transformation goods!

Do you also attach to a cat and do hair? It is the costume play of a masterpiece “Anne of Green Gables”!

Cats to become a rabbit should gather immediately now here. This is the hat and shawl for disguising oneself.

You’ll probably have to wash them when they get dirty though in coleslaw.

Hover your mouse over the above image to see Elias‘s beautiful watercolour rendering of my butterfly pic. And if you’re feeling brave, click through and leave a comment in Spanish 😉

I wish I could draw.

I’m chuffed when I score over 400 in a scrabble game. In this game the tile fairy came up trumps and I got zincs on a triple with the z on a double letter netting me 110 odd, then a couple of bingos. My tiles are blue… Final score: 504

Dubious words include: goral, maes, skaw and ala, but they’re all valid.

This blog’s been a bit abandoned of late more due to an overload of work and little time to update it but in brief, saw Carrie Fisher’s show Wishful Drinking last Thursday. I hope to get round to a review. Not impressed would be the gist of it, but at least she put on the Danish pastry wig and recited the Help me Obi Wan Kenobi ‘monologue’… Almost finished Life on Mars series II and am looking forward to Ashes to Ashes. We’re off to Portland for a bit and have found a dog/housesitter. Yahoo!’s on and off… And some new sites to show off coming soon. Hasta pronto!

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