I’ve officially given up on the Tapatian Scrabble Association

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Ducked out for an off-peak excursion, grand to see snow again. Had the AC on yesterday…

A post shared by Gwyn Fisher (@gwynfisher) on May 20, 2020 at 3:57pm PDT

In about 9 minutes, I’m being interviewed on a local radio station about PAPAS. My nerves are starting to go… I’ll blog whether I survived the experience later. Let the record show that 5-6 pm on a Friday afternoon is not my optimum mental functioning time. Hope the coffee kicks in…

Update: Saturday 10:30am
The coffee indeed kicked in and I found myself able to answer questions pretty completely on all kinds on father involvement topics. No one was around in the office, so I could pace around with the cordless phone as is my wont. All in all it took about 15 minutes and I remembered to give out the phone number and website. That said, the website hasn’t registered any more hits and I tried to find 1040am on my radio all the way home and couldn’t get anything on the car radio, which is a little odd. I’m fairly sure it’s not some elaborate practical joke and KNRY– Your Town has listeners somewhere… But still, you live and learn and the tangible sense of relief as I hung up lasted most of the rest of the evening…

Just checked the KNRY website- I had the wrong frequency by 200Khz. D’oh. Ah well…

Scott and Tanya came round after and we cooked several veggie dishes of varying quality and then played one of my worst games of Scrabble in living memory. My average score, 8, my average rack of letters, IIIIOOU.

Phoned me grandmothers this morning and they’re doing OK. Neither is enjoying the dark evenings and grotty weather, but Nanny was relieved that no one had come round trick or treating or penny for the guying. There are too many leaves falling though, apparently. Bless’em. Beth’n’ali weren’t about, and me mum’s in cardiff living it up with her friends from her Swansea school days.

Yesterday was Mother’s day in Mexico. It’s a huge thing. First off, everyone made their excuses and left work at middayish to head off to crowded restaurants all over town. No one was without roses they’d either received or were about to give. In Gigante the usual musak was replaced by someone urging everyone to buy mother-related goods (tortillas, white wine, cleaning products…) and businesses closed up early. I didn’t even have to stand on the bus home for once. One of these days I’ll post about Mexican phrases involving the word “madre”, but first I want to dig out El Laberinto de la Soledad, cos Octavio Paz has some pertinent things to say if I recall correctly.

Last night I barbecued again cos Sarah was coming round for some webdesignery advice. For some reason it didn’t turn out that well. I should pay more attention in the meat isle to what I’m buying. In fact they should have pictures of what your meat should look like when you’ve cooked it on the labels, to help men choose whether they want arrachera or milanesa… Never mind. Sarah brought us a bottle of diamante negro tequila, which is potent but fragrant with the agave. As a digestif it did a good job of cutting through the culinary dubiousness we’d eaten.

My Aguascalientes photos got linked to by an Aguascalientesian (made that word up, hidrotermico?) and he let me know. Which is nice, so in the spirit of reciprocity, here’s a link to his blog.

And finally, just for Sarah who can’t make embedded video play on her laptop, here’s a “mamada” I saw on the internets about Star Wars’ emperor on the phone… You come for the self-absorption, but you’ll stay for the lo-res comedy…

Cherry coke, indeed.

Hello peeps, my favourite bit of the b3ta newsletter this week is this link to an explanation of what psychiatrists are up to when they administer the Roschach test- the one with butterflies and all that and, to quote Roy Walker, you say what you see… One part says that if you can’t see anything in the ink splodge, it indicates neurosis. I dimly remember taking the colour blindness test aged 7 or so, at Kingston St. Mary primary school and saying i couldn’t see any numbers at all and getting concerned looks from the nurses who were administering it. I think, for some reason, that year I really wanted glasses and hadn’t quite understood the purpose of the screening and i was probably quite a neurotic child too. I’ve still got 20-20 vision though, and when i was renewing my license in the DMV t’other day the only mistake I made on the ‘Read the 5th row of letters part’ was pronouncing ‘zed’ the correct way rather than the Sesame Street way… and blinking when they took the photo… I think.

In other news, my Zire-72-mother-of-all-mid-price-palm-pilots has arrived, so expect more mundane photography as I’ll always have a camera with me… And this is me in the queue at Trader Joes, and here’s me at the bus stop, and this is my office, so’s this one… etc. it’s grand and i can now play scrabble in full colour, record sounds, take pix, listen to mp3s, and much, much more.

I even danced. And I never dance… A v.v. fun party last night and no mistake. Even spoke a fair amount of French which was pretty impressive considering the decibels. Fave bit: jumping around in the kitchen to Cafe Tacuba’s Ingrata with new found mates.

Today has been low-key, but all the same I just had a successful meeting about various sites’ progress and have another one in the offing for a herbal organic homeopathic remedy online store, which should prove interesting… On the way back from the office I saw Los Arcos (huge Tapatian monument) was open and went up the 80 odd stairs to have a gander at the city from above. It was free except for the 1 peso binocular machine things. I now understand where they’re hiding the 4 million odd inhabitants. I took a few photos with my PDA while listening to podcasts on it (that little gadget never ceases to amaze me). I’ve said it before but Gwod doesn’t feel like a city. Just wandering along today I met three people in the street that I knew.

So tonight we’re meeting up here for a few chelas (tinnies) before seeing what the centre has to offer. After the grito de dolores “Mexicanos, ¡viva México!” there’s another fiesta hosted by some Germans we’re going to crash if I have the stamina, as like I said, I’m on a pretty punishing schedule between designing stuff and socialising and I’m starting to feel my 31.666666666 years… More “news” as and when it happens.