Los cumplio in style

I just heard on Saturday evening that my other grandmother, Grandma, my Dad’s mum, Lillian passed away peacefully and altogether unexpectedly in her sleep. She was 89 and to say she had a good innings would be an understatement. Nonetheless we are all pretty shocked and still coming to terms with our loss of a much-loved, fantastic, kind, generous person in our lives. I’ll attempt some kind of eulogy in these pages soon, but in the meantime, I just wanted to share what was going on.

Here’s Grandma last December haggling over gourmet cheeses in Taunton’s Saturday morning market:

My new favourite beach town for those on a budget…

Chacala, is about 10 minutes beachwards from Las Varas and 3 hrs from Guadalajara and is absolutely gorgeous. We rented a house for the 7 of us with a pool and everything. Brought the BBQ and had 48 hours of no internet (though it was available), sun, sand, seafood and Pueblo Viejo. We arrived late afternoon on Friday, stayed in the pool all evening, cooking up a storm of hamburguesas and suchlike. Then Saturday, arranged to have people come and cook camarones al mojo de ajo and a la diabla around the house in the evening and explored the town on foot and by boat. Monica clandestinely baked sita a delicious chocolate cake and all.

On Sunday we came home and went to the Lucha Libre in the evening followed by the Famosos Equipales cantina and yesterday (Sita’s birthday) went out for breakfast, then Tlaquepaque then (and I’m going to spell their name wrong in protest of them not allowing cameras) a FANTASTIC Mexican/Thai fusion meal at Annnitttta liiii followed by imported Californian wines chez nous. Plenty of Chacala photos on Flickr, and as per usual my favourites below:

as per always, but I’m trying to fit in as much day of the dead nonsense as possible in our last few weeks. So today I went for a wander round the Mezquitan cemetary and am off in a matter of seconds to a display of altars in Casa Vallarta, then tomorrow morning bright and early I’m off with Javier and Ofelia to Patzcuaro to get a taste of the day of the dead Michoacan style. It’s non stop and I’m loving it!

Then to cap it all, I just won a camera for the aforementioned photo competition (see below and comments). Suffice to say I’m smiling even though my laptop’s about to give up the ghost. Aptly enough.

There was a “here comes the science” explanation of the algorythm used to calculate this, but I just kept clicking around the site trying to find out where I can redeem this voucher.

I tried phoning me family in Blighty, but no-one’s home so I’ve resorted to the interweb again to spend a while catching up on the news 6000 miles or so away. Naturally, I soon got distracted and found myself on this here site: www.infinitecat.com Recursive felines, just what you need on a bright and sunny Saturday morning.

I didn’t catch all of the presidential debate last night, but in the half hour i did see I got to see Bush shouting like a spoilt child at the moderator and talking about the Internets (sic). A search on the new engine www.a9.com has a snapshot of the front page of Gwynunlimited with the bloke with the “Bush is crap” banner from the peace march in SF last year, which tickled me, probably better than the Easter Rabbits one. Anyroad, there’s no chance of me ever getting to vote in the US, but at least I managed to register to vote in Somerset in my short stay over last month.

Is it so wrong to post my site statistics like this? I find it immensely gratifying that people surf by from Algeria to San Jose searching for information on schipperkes, pictures of bunnies and Michael Jackson Dance moves. And talking of searching, S**ita’s name’s been searched and replaced with Sita in all previous entries, just have to wait for a reindexing by all the major search engines to get her web anonymity back. And to break into Mountain View and wave large magnets around next to Google’s data bank of cached pages. Maybe tomorrow on the way to Berkeley…