It takes a while to get used to…

But here’s our Xmas card to YOU! Don’t forget to turn your speakers up full Click HERE (380K, may be slow on dial-up).
And ask Father Christmas for broadband…

Still waiting on contracty people for the house, so in the meantime, I’ve been designing meself business cards, making a few changes & additions to the nutrition site I’m doing, and how’s this look for my new sublegal Mexican enterprise: Diseno Web Agave?
Agave’s the plant they make tequila out of, and for the record, Fionuala, its sap is said to have similar healing properties to aloe vera.

So now that’s 3 successful Fototours. We started off at 10:30am in Tlaquepaque’s town centre and ambled over to the Centro el Refugio. There;s a torture exhibition on at the minute and we all went in but cameras weren’t allowed. An inauspicious start, but the building has plenty to offer photographically. The torture implements were suitably grim and well presented. What stood out most was man’s inhumanity to woman, that the Spanish inquisition employed much worse things that the comfy chair, and that out of a lot of nasty ways to go, being strapped upside down, legs apart and slowly sawn in half has to be about the worst. It takes a while to die from it because the blood runs to your head or something. Anyway given that I hadn’t had breakfast yet it fair took my appetite away for an hour or two.

Next up was the Pila Seca administration building where we took the first group photo and admired the bright orange arches while the temperatures slowly rose and shade became non-existant. Wandered around the boutiquey overpriced craft shops and into the ceramic museum where they had some nice miniature scenes of mexican life. Then on to sample fresh tejuino and ceviche tostadas from El Cables, street seafood purveyor bloke, and finally a few cold beers in the Parian. Lovely. The next tour will be governed by whether it’s bucketing down with rain or not. The rainy season is estimated to be 2 wks away and I, for one, will greet it with open arms…

Here’s my favourites from yesterday. All the photos of Tlaquepaque and Gwod from yesterday are at Flickr… or click the “more” link below for a Flash slideshow.

Read More “Tapatían Fototour #3- Tlaquepaque”

This will take about 10 minutes if you fancy it yourself… fill in the blanks for 80s lyrics. Slightly US-centric but i’m not bitter. Can you beat 79.5? … Matt, I throw down the gauntlet…

just watched a bolivian film called American Visa review coming shortly in the right hand column… It might be time to move this computer upstairs, i’m writing far too many entries of late…

Just to follow 10 days of a common cold and a bang on the head on Sunday, last night I experienced one of the worst gastrointestinal traumas I’ve ever had. Truly, truly grim. I’ve been on the Pedialyte (fruit flavoured electrolyte and water concoction) all day and been trying to catch up on sleep, but it was a real shock to the system. The only thing I ate yesterday was tacos from a popular local stand that I trust implicitly, but I’ll not be going back for a while.

I didn’t feel up to working today so I finished season 1 of Arrested Development and watched Nacho Libre properly in between naps. I think I’ll be up all night finishing some fairly urgent projects tonight though…

Other stuff accomplished: I booked me flights to Blighty for December. I was feeling right homesick today, not just for friends and family, but real bread, Ribena/ Robinson’s Black Currant and Apple Juice and the NHS… I also made a fair dent in Neil Gaiman’s ‘Anansi Boys’ between crawling to the bathroom and back a hundred times. Looks like our Morrissey tickets have been purchased for November and also a plan is forming to see Julieta Venegas next week or the week after. Good times…

Went to a conference today about an hour away, near the bridge thing on the way to San Francisco. Pretty informative, PAPAS appears to be doing it right on helping get dads involved in their families and got a few ideas about how to recruit more families… “Door hangers” is one strategy used which i’m presuming is adverts you put on door knobs on people’s houses, like in that episode of The Simpsons where Bart delivers flyers in a Matrix stylee, and also asking for help from rotary clubs, who’ve been generous enough to Musgrove Hospital Children’s Ward in the past.

One speaker was a little scarey, going on about Wedlock and Marriage and God whispering into the baby’s ear in the womb. He was, rightly, heckled afterwards, but we’d had to hand in our evaluation forms before he graced the stage which was a tad annoying. His grand finale was a little too close for comfort to David Brent’s “Simply the Best” exit. I saw him skulk away from the building afterwards… Granted, we share the same ideas about helping dads who want to be more involved get more involved… but the door should definitely be open for parenting help for father figures in general, non-biological fathers, same-sex couples and all kinds of non-conventional family structures. Hmmm. Well, you can pick and choose what you take away from these things even if you have to put up with a lot of conservative crap along the way. Nice dessert, mind.

Anyroad, just got back and Sita’s nowhere to be seen and her folks are arriving in a few hours so I shall busy myself for a bit around the homestead. Ooh, and while I remember if anyone can recommend me some episodes of This American Life to download I’ve got a long car journey coming up soon and would be glad of advice, cos you get the occasional crap one… comments welcome.

See you later, or “Vi ses s?nare” as they say in Sweden,

Cheers,
“Gywn” (according to my pre-printed conference name sticker)