Jesse’s students’ loss is our gain…

I believed this story for all of 5 minutes… Beached Whale in Taunton. Taunton, Somerset, UK is my home town for the record… and my sister and Ali often walk their dog in French Weir… I nearly rang them to warn them about the potential dangers.

Grand chat with Bert, Stu, Anne (& me and Sita, hence 5) today via the interweb. It involved bert using his headphones as a mic, having Anne and Stu on speakerphone and bert with his head I’m not sure where. A webcam was involved for a bit too. 2005, who’d’ve thought it? Jet packs and protein pills tomorrow…

I hope you get your head around the 7 hour or so time difference, Annelise and thanks for the shout out in yer blog and all the encouragement in the comments. I’ll probably never make it to Oklahoma, because I couldn’t deal with having Oh What a Beautiful Morning buzzing round my synapses all the time…

Yesterday night Jose (driving) and I got pulled over by the police for no reason at all. Long hair, probably… Can’t they just leave us kids alone? No breathaliser or nowt, just flinging accusations at us and going through our pockets, frisking and all that. They found my PDA stylus in my wallet and were convinced it was a hash pipe of some kind. Mais non… Anyroad Jose talked his way out of everything and all was well with the world once more. Probably won’t be the last time. I used to get searched occaionally walking the 30 blocks from CEPE to the Casa Internacional when I was here last. They used to be concerned about my dictionary in me backpack, and my lack of photo ID. This was way back when when UK driving licences were scruffy-looking green printouts with a signature as proof of ID. The way things should be, I reckon… but I digress… luckily I’m such a clean-living example of humanity they can’t pin nowt on me. (please do not abuse the comments section)…

Today found us at the Tianguis Cultural, a hippy market full of Batique, bongos, tie-die and pirated CDs/DVDs. I got some Cure stuff as they’re enjoying something of a renaissance in my affections, then on to Expo Venta Guadalajara 2005, where Sita made valuable new Tequila contacts. As far as trade shows go, it was a bit pants, erring on the side of quantity over quality, but at least Sita got to pose with the Panqui man.

Had a bit of a nap, did some designy stuff, guitaring, went out for tacos al pastor at the “Santa Cruz Taqueria” (Always end up at the Holy Cross, Seville, California, Gwod…), and then scrabble, vino and more El Rival Mas Debil. We’ve found an online classified ads for students in guadalajara and might be off chasing up some leads on shelving tomorrow too.

Yeah, this is an advert for Microsoft, but it’s funny and stars Amy Sedaris…

Office 2007 is a pretty good product too…

Today I drove Sally & Martin’s automatic car round the block, my first time ever successfully driving a non “stickshift” car. I don’t know what I’d been apprehensive about all this time. Now if the need arises to drive down the Chilean Andes from El Transito to Vallenar in an automatic in pitch darkness down a one lane unpaved road with sheer drops and wild animals on either side, Sita won’t have to be the one who takes over the wheel from her narcoleptic uncle.

The electric bug zapper I ordered (1 buck off of Ebay) for Sally & Martin arrived yesterday. Imagine a high voltage badmington raquet and you won’t be far off. On contact with the mesh you hear a loud crack and the bug falls out of the air, moribund, clutching its little insect heart with a look that says “Why?”…”How?”. V. Satisfying.

Started our journey through the Sopranos Season 5 last night. Even Sally’s into it. Seems a bit slower paced than previous series, but none the worse for it.

Off intersurfing to investigate prices for car rental in Geneva next, the DSL’s gone to dial-up speed today for no apparent reason so it may be a long process.

Cheers for the e-mails, Mark & Annelise. Off to play scrabble now will write soon…

I was browsing through B3TA.com’s weekly newsletter and they had a picture of a l33t road sign painting. Not too amazing in itself, but it got me to thinking about another US/UK difference. Obviously there’s the left/right side driving thing (It’s easier to use your lance if you’re driving on the left, or deliver milk, or something…) but another thing is that you read US road signs (in California at least) up the page, so to speak and UK ones from top to bottom. Ie. in the UK it’s “Slow, All traffic turn left”. and in the States: “Turn left, traffic all, Slow”. I’m pretty sure about this one but keep an eye out in case…

UK signs

Artist’s impression of US signs (it’s too early to be photoshopping…)

I remember when me little sis was in Oakland for sita’n’me’s wedding and she saw XING painted on the street and assumed it was Chinese. Each language has its quirks. Pelican crossings, anyone?

Anyroad, last night’s meal was wonderful once again even though we had to wait half an hour for a table. I’m scared to order anything which isn’t caña de lomo though, which has to be the best cut of beef in the world. I was so tired afterwards though I managed to fall asleep half-way through one of the last two episodes of Lost. Which says more about how tired I was than the quality of the episode. I’ll watch it this evening while Sita’s at her last *sob* tequila class. Tomorrow we’re going to Tequila again to visit a friend’s agave ranch/farm/plantation. I’m really looking forward to taking photos there.

And our water’s working again. It ran browny/red for a minute or so then back to normal. I’m thinking twice about carrying on drinking the tap water now. Hopefully the tank will be full in 10 mins or so and I can have that shower I wanted at 7:30 today…