Da Vinci code update

Via Newark…

It doesn’t half take it out of you, being ill. I’m way past the worst of it but still have a slightly green tinge to my complexion and all the abdominal muscles I used recreating scenes from The Exorcist on Saturday night are aching like buggery right now. Still that’s one more strain of gastroenteritis to which I’m now immune, and one more torta ahogada vendor to strike off my list of suppliers… I made it to work this morning and got a fair bit done but when the internet disappeared I came home to carry on working.
Anyway I’ll try to stay clear of the subject just in case you’re eating, or thinking of eating.

Friday night we went out to Polibio again with an increasingly drunken band of folks. Had the same dish as last time and t’was delicious. Saturday was spend on web designery and paying bills in TelMex and Oxxo. TelMex have a handy machine that puts your balance on the screen and then you feed it bank notes/bills until you’ve covered your debt and then it spits out a receipt. If you’d like to collect Mexican swearwords, hang out in that area for half an hour with a notebook and you’ll hear more variations on chingar than in your average cantina, as everyone from business types to little old ladies try to get the machine to accept their money… Jose came round early evening for a photo trip to El Retiro and other barrios. I’m not sure how I’ve managed to be here without seeing this really old part of town. Definitely worth a visit. The light wasn’t perfect for the photos but there’s a few nice shots I’ll publish to flickr presently. Then we had a swift pint in La Fuente, then the aforementioned torta ahogada and tostada de lomo in La Alemana. We headed back and Sita had made cookies. I’d complained to Jose that there are no bars in Santa Teresita (the barrio next to where we live) nor El Retiro so he set out to prove us wrong by taking us to a bar called El Oso not far from our house. There was a football play-off going on there and one of the clients at the bar’s son/nephew/summink was the goal keeper and the atmosphere was grand. Unfortunately at this point I started to feel ill, and after demanding to go home things got worse. We watched the Eurovision Song Contest on telly on the Spanish Channel, TVE, I already knew who was going to win because of Flash’s blog, but Sita didn’t so there was some tension. It’s not the same without Wogan prattling on, but the fact a Finnish glam/death/metal group walked away with the prize was fantastic. Ireland’s entry “Every song is a cry for love” coincided with my first bout of gastric unpleasantness though. Coincidence?

We had a nice old evening round Joop’s last night. Barbecue, guitar, office gossip, fine wines and house prices. Anyroad, went to town this morning to pick up tickets for star wars and sell some books and the streets were deserted ‘cos there was to be some parade or other. I wished I had my real camera with me, but I took a few snaps with me PDA. Sudarat and friends are coming round any second and I’m in charge of rice. Oh, the responsibility. Might manage some proper blogging tomorrow. Feels like it’s been a while and I think we have some dates for the next few months’ plans… The Gaytán-Fisher World Tour 2005-2006 should be passing through: L.A., Zummerzet, London, Brissle, Bournemouth, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Zummerzet again, L.A., Nevada, Guadalajara… anyroad, as i said last time, still have to buy the tickets. The selling everything we own has so far netted: $15 for a guitar, and $27.50 for some books. Hoping to get a fair bit more and buy a superlight notepad/lappy for freelance webdesigning and suchlike. Blogging from the beach…

TelMex saw fit to block the internet tubes to our house yesterday, hence today´s early morning location. It’s always when you’ve got lots of work on that the interwebs stop. Hey ho, it means that yesterday I got to finish a novel for the first time in ages, Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, which was alright as a novel but a tad grating due to his (characters’) overuse of similes. It’s like when you’re watching a daytime Antiques program on BBC 1. And all they do is use puns. But in the long run, it’s like you appreciate it. But sometimes, puns are like a comfortable cushion. Etc. that kind of thing. On the plus side it means I can finally start The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which after 10 pages looks like just my kind of thing. Atticus * also got more quality time than usual. And I spent a while strumming away at the gee-tar. So every cloud etc… And I love Starbucks’ burnt coffee too. So swings and roundabouts are the order of the day.

Ever wondered how to count to 1023 on your fingers? Cesar’s put his vast intellect into creating a demo. My fingers aren’t quite that flexible… The real challenge would be combining counting to 1023 while performing this Daft Punk track (it gets good at about 1 minute in).

Alrighty, back to my research y chamba.

* ‘Cus looked starving at 5.30 yesterday and Sita wasn’t back from the gym yet so I made him a gourmet meal with leftovers from Sita’s steak on Sat night. A couple of hours later and i remarked to Sita that the dog looked chubbier than usual, then I asked her if she’d fed him and she said “Of course, with the leftovers from Saturday mixed in”. So he’d had two huge meals. Anyway, several miles of running up and down the garden later and he puked like a good’un in the living room. There’s a lesson in there somewhere… We need some kind of “Dog has been fed” system in the kitchen. He’s full of beans today though. Not literally.

Quite a late one last night and hence a late morning too. After watching streaming episodes of News Radio (90s Phil Harman US Sitcom) on WinAmp for a bit and copying my favourite tracks from DJ Randall’s 80s mp3 CD I headed off to downtown to pick up some DVDs, I got Crash (The oscar one, not the JG Ballard adaptation), Bandidas (Salma Hayek and P. Cruz are cowgirls), Firewall (Harrison Ford pushing his acting skills to the limit again) and Final Destination 3 (which I watched this afternoon (3 Lulus)). I ambled over to the park had a banana milkshake in the shade, then got the wrong bus, then got the right bus.

I didn’t see Sita till late in the afternoon cos she’d been off on a tequila tasting (called a Cata) followed by jewellry shopping (the cheap stuff). She swears she didn’t swallow a drop though, and spat it all out in an expert stylee. And who am I to question her? By all accounts it’s a fascinating process, shame she’ll not guest write for this blog. You’ll just have to wait for the dissertation in X years time… This evening we had a head-to-head sudoku contest. Sita won all three (the first on a technicality mind). Did I mention I won the Scrabble yesterday, though, in Chop?

Right now it’s 10:25pm and Fernando just rang to see if I’m coming to this gig or not. I’m tempted but still a little groggy. I’m going to toss a coin in a minute and see where that takes me. Sita’s already decided she’s not going anywhere… But I’m buggered if this saturday evening is going on the record as sudoko, watering the lawn, and cauliflower soup…