Highlight from a 850K forwarded email from Juicy

Thanks Amy, Mum, OneWay and Flash for the congrats. I pick up me camera on Monday.

If you´re wondering where I´ve been and why the hell I aint been posting these last few days, check out the latest Day of the Dead related several hundred pictures on Flickr…

I saw this nice little animation about what Skype is and how you use it. I got the English accented one, maybe ‘cos of the settings on my computer, or maybe it’s just standard issue. Anyway, if you haven’t got it yet, you need:

• A computer, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux
• ANY internet connection (ideally broadband, but dial-up’s fine too)
• a microphone (cheap from Radio Shack or Target or Tandy o Gigante) or maybe your laptop has one built in somewhere…
• Speakers/headphones
• OPTIONAL: A USB webcam for the full-on Livin’-in-the-future-OMFG!-I-can-like-totally-see-you-talking-on-my-screen
  experience

Then you head over to skype.com, download the appropriate version and follow the simple instructions. Add contacts, such as “gwynfisher” and you’re away. No excuses now. You know who you are. And are generally Mac users, strangely…

So back to the minutae of my life, let’s not forget what this blog’s all about after all…

This is our letter box where we receive our bills and letters from banks, credit card agencies and Interpol addressed to Carmen Malagon (previous occupant shrouded in mystery… apparently wanted by every financial institution in Jalisco. When the phone rings, if it’s not someone requesting a song for the Top 40 Radio Show whose number’s one digit off of ours, it’s a bank trying to catch Ms Malagon by surprise. I’ve told them she doesn’t live here anymore, but they’re determined to catch us out and have her answer one day…)

Here’s our spanking new barbecue, $10 or 5 pounds 70 pee from Soriana. Note the charcoal is actually charcoal, practically log-sized pieces. None of your oh-so-dainty briquettes in Mexico, nosiree. Gert big chunks of trees they be. And I didn’t even use parafin nor firelighters to get it going. It’s nice to be BBQing again and it keeps me away from the interwebs and channel 40 for a while. Only the onions (‘campay’) were bought for cooking, the rest are objets trouvés from the fridge/freezer defrosting session.

Yesterday evening was going to involve doing some filming for Propaganda but we’ve misplaced our video camara. Which isn’t good but it will turn up somewhere. It’s a big house and though we’ve few belongings there’s a couple of places still to go. Jose’s sort of on his Semana Santa break so the plan is to go and film on Thursday and if we’re lucky there’ll be lots of people nailing themselves to crosses and whipping themselves. Seriously. Some people go to doctors who tell them whereabouts on their hands they can ‘safely’ put nails through without smashing your bones apart. Then they use sterilised nails and hang from crosses (using string). And I thought Easter was all about eggs and bunnies. You live and learn…

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…

So today I thought I´d hired someone to turf the garden where Atticus had dug his trench, turns out I just bought the turf, well it was only 175 pesos, what did I expect… anyway, I used to do this kind of thing when I was a landscape gardener back in the day. Turns out I´ve lost the knack, but lets see how it goes. At this stage of the year things grow out of concrete. If all else fails we´ll spend another 8 quid getting the pros in the day before the house inspection…

Antes:                      Después

There´s a whole US-UK mismatch in language for turfing. Possibly because of the confusion around the word “sod”.

It should in fact have been called the Mystery of the Trullian in UC Davis. I was on the ever-marvellous flickr.com and saw he’d posted a photo of a chair just like the one I was selling so I pounced on the chance to comment. He wrote back, his name’s Chris Lewis. He’s from Trull, he went to Richard Huish 6th form college (as did I), he’s at Bristol Uni but is on his year abroad thing and has an American girlfriend. He chose UC Davis over UC Santa Cruz because Davis had a better website (D’oh!) and the Taunton photos he posted originally were part of a web design assignment at Uni. He rates Taunton over Sacramento for entertainment (Agreed). He also owned the same (OfficeMax) chair as me, but only got $20 when he sold his as opposed to my $25, but the cost of living is different in SC… he now owes me 1 x Milk Chocolate McVities HobNob and our paths may cross in the Wetherspoons pub in East Reach… It’s a funny old interweb