Please note ironic use of Papyrus font… Photos are from the coast north of Wilder Ranch, but south of Davenport… I have a new photography techinique which involves tying a dog to your arm and having him pull at you erratically while you try and frame your shots. If you like the collage (above) pic, it was made with Picasa 2, free from Google. Thoroughly recommended little app, that one.
As per usual, Monica’s beaten me to this post, but I’ll try and compete all the same… It’s getting harder to do now she has a new camera and is getting the hang of Picasa…
The last time I went to the Mercado de Abastos (wholesale food market) it was closed down for the day what with it being Good Friday and all that and I’ve been meaning to go back for ages, so today, on a whim I said, “Once you finish that game of Pacman, Monica, let’s go on a mini phototour”… So 65000 points or so later we headed off and the first thing I saw was another carro cameleon…
The majority of the market is burly Mexicans chucking fruit around from lorry to stall but they were well friendly, posing for photos and suchlike. Then there’s a covered part where we stocked up on spuds, bananas, mangos, strawbs and a lone pitaya (“Dragonfruit” which I couldn’t bring myself to eat as it looks like a tightly packed ball of coloured maggots and seeds wrapped in a spiny skin…) The heat got too much after a while and we withdrew to the house and made smoothies for everyone (except Atticus, who just got ice chucked in his water bowl). Anyroad, here come the photos:
More Mercado de Abastos pix over at Flickr.
Kitten CanonSept 19th: Talk Like a Pirate Day. Me timbers.
I also have to recommend Penn and Teller’s Bullshit series which has found its way to google videos. Your one-stop shop for libertarian and atheist common sense diatribes. Very handy to have if you recently cancelled your cable for example… Avast, me hearties.
One many new words I learnt today was Palomear.
A paloma is a dove or pigeon as you probably already knew thanks to crimes-against-music like this. And in Mexico, a paloma is a tick (or check mark I think in US parlance) because it looks like a bird in flight, I presume. As drawn by a 6 year old.
So palomear, to tick. At least I think so because the other option “to devote a great deal of time to raising pigeons” really didn’t seem to work in the context of a technical manual…
A n t s found my desk today so i went to the local chinese 99 cent store and asked if they had any insecti cide, sprays, powders, or chal k maybe? He asked how many, I said 5 (cos this stuff is hard to source) and he solemnly reached into the depths of the area behind the counter and quickly put them in a black plastic bag and took his 4.96 +tax. This chalk stuff is incredible, ants sniff it and fall down dead. I’ve always been amazed that this ‘non-toxic’ mix of homeopathic herbs and lemon extract could do that… Maybe a little naive on my part… Anyroad, I read the label and this time, instead of ‘non-toxic’ it says low-poisonous which was a little concerning… so I googled it and here’s one of the articles about it. Not quite as homeopathic as I’d thought…
On the other hand, the active ingredient, deltameethrinee is a common insecticide, the D E A seems to have issues with it being in handy chawk stick form which kids might eat/use. Which is fair enough, but we don’t have kids. just a dog and rabbits and they’ll be kept well away.
What do you reckon? Comment me your thoughts…
In other news. Une autre jour infernale chez CA 95076.
Just to another part of the city (near Plaza Bonita) but after a hastily put together excel spreadsheet of cost-benefit analysis decided against it… taking into account cancelling/recontracting services, removal vans, deposits, and the all important 4 extra flights of stairs it would have resulted in a grand saving of 30 bucks a month. Also there was no area for a BBQ, it would have been nice to have a bath though. Especially with waterjets. Oh the luxury. I would have needed to figure out how to waterproof the laptop though.
Anyway, deciding not to move, this month at least, is a HUGE weight off my mind. I’ve only got one more week in the big city before the US, UK jaunt kicks in which pretty much puts me out of action for a few weeks and after all the fun with plumbers, cleaners and fridge repairers in the last week I’ve learnt not to go making plans that involve short periods of time and heavy reliance on the Mexican service industry.
Today I’m working on some translation and shall also be hitting the travel agents trying to find hotels for Mum and Dad’s visit in Feb. We’ll all be flying into Cancun and from there on in it’s unbounded adventure.
Also working on Amour Fou’s website. I’ll not link to it cos I don’t want it indexed by search engines yet. But if you fancy a look (there’s only 20 dvds in the catalog for now, (Allen – Almodovar) it’s presently at agaveweb.com/amourfou with the blog at agaveweb.com/amourfoublog . I think the design stage is almost over, but the uploading of 500 odd dvd descriptions has barely begun…
Tonight, fiesta round Meghan’s. Tomorrow was going to be josé’s house warming but the Mexican Electricity Board had other ideas, so that’s off, Sunday… Bulls? Hope so because it’s been a while since I went out with me camara. Apologies in advance to vegan/vegetarian readers. And Morrissey…
Spanish Word/Phrase of the week:
“Me sale mas caro el caldo que las albondigas” roughly: The sauce is costing me more than the meatballs.
To use when you’re being shafted by service charges and such like. Eg when you’re sending a 5 peso keyring to California and the postage costs you 70 bucks.
Since I left Gwod the cows have arrived, 50 odd of them I think. Just snapped a fraction of them today with my PDA so the quality’s not grand, but so far they’re an impressive bunch. We’ve now seen cow parades in Geneva, Atlanta and somewhere else that escapes me now… Chicago? Anyroad, little by little things are approaching normality round here.
No word from M & D as of yet… Hope they didn’t turn around and go back to L.A. to check on the cats.
