I have a 3-day weekend which started 10 minutes ago courtesy of the presidents of the united states of america. Which is the first nice thing they’ve ever done for me, frankly. I am pitifully grateful. Not just a 3 day weekend, but also a four day week. What are the chances, eh? Shall fill every waking minute with soul-nourishing activities. I promise. Mind you, I fancy seeing that Constantine film too, I’ve not read any reviews of it yet though… and i have to watch anchorman first before i take it back to blockbuster. despite the “end of late fees” they’re trumpetting, if you don’t return it in time, you’ve just bought that DVD and its crappy yellow case. harumph.
My new driving license arrived today with the cheesiest of grins on it… 10 out of 10 for speed of processing, bugger all for pressing the camera button at the wrong time. I refuse to take any responsibility for how I look in that photo. Someone at the DMV owns a copy of photoshop and has too much time on their hands.
A couple of new signees on the guestmap- let’s give it up for Tash and ‘Naridu‘ from blighty and oz respectively. It’s quite fun to surf around the world via people’s guestmaps. 7 degrees of separation and all that.
Seems like everyone’s gone or is going to the beach. Anyroad, not complaining, I’ve had my fair share of holidays of late. Still waiting for various projects to materialise. Next week should be busy if the people who’ve said they’ve stuff for me to do give me stuff…
So today I played a lot of Scrabble, getting back in the 1000s again. There’s a shake-up of the SOWPODS (UK/international -USA version) allowed words in a month or so so that’s going to throw me off for a bit if they mess with my 2-letter words. I’d like to put in a request for “Zot”, Sita assures me it’s the sound anteaters make and it must have been an oversight when they wrote the dictionary.
Also got inspired by a comment on this flowery photo saying that they look like Trollz so I did meself a photoshopped hybrid monstery thing:
And also I started buggering around with the e-commerce plugin for wordpress. Seems alright, i’m having some issues with permalinks and .htaccess, but nothing insurmountable. They hard part is thinking of products. Vaguely considering some framed photography with frames from Tonala. Very, very much in progress here don’t be surprised to see an illegible mess… And if things stay quiet this week, then I’ll be rejigging this blog page yet again, cos I can’t get it to display right in (accursed, plagues be upon it) IE 6.
Other stuff… Spanish phrase of the week, courtesy of the taxi driver from the airport: Una lluvia mojapendejos. A type of rain that only idiots* would get wet in. Ie. short and sweet.
* insert regional slang of choice here. Twunt for example…
Late News: My cousin Ian and his missus, Yuri, had a baby boy, William James Fisher, weighing in at 8 lbs on Wednesday. He will be the first Fisher with an American accent unless Ian keeps his videos of Jeeves and Wooster on permenant rotation. Also, as the product of two of the finest minds in the county he’ll probably be up for his first Nobel prize by his 4th birthday. Congratulations to the pair of you.
We handed over the keys to 629 last night. After all the sweat and tears of cleaning that place (& thanks for your help, Tanya) I was hoping for a “Dude, you guys like totally cleaned this place. Damn! Awesome job!” from the official UCSC bloke, but nope. So it ended not with a bang, but a whimper and an overpowering smell of disinfectant. It was a nice little house, but we’re up for bigger and better things now…
Scott & Tanya came round again and we ate, drank and played scrabble again. and i fell asleep on the sofa before they’d left again. I really have to work on that. Tanya got a ‘bingo’ in scrabble as they say, all seven letters with the 50 extra points. I got 121 in one go on my palm pilot scrabble t’other day. Still not enough to beet Scott’s 123 with QANATS but I’m on it. Oh yes. It had been a long day though.
I recently discovered the joys of bittorrrent and more specifically the site target=”_blank”>YouKayNova.com which has all kinds of UK telly torrrents on it. I was happy enough just to be able to find tons of radio programmes to burn to CDs, but it looks like last night I went one step further and can now burn pretty good quality DVDs of programs like Room 101, Have I got News for You, Ivor the Engine & much much more. I’m still wary of getting slapped with a law suit if I downloaded full-on films so I’ll just stick to renting those, but I can’t see the BBC going after people for sharing files. The Beeb was talking about using bittorrrent to distribute radio programs fairly recently. So…
One of the many things I miss about the UK is the quality telly. And I never even had cable over there. You can peruse the back page of Guardian Two and join the dots between programs to keep yourself entertained for a good few hours every evening. Ad free on BBC 1 & 2, and on the other 3 channels even the adverts are occasionally amusing or intelligent. And they don’t run for 5 minutes urging you to ask your doctor about the “Purple Pill” or somesuch and then 2 minutes spewing out a list of side effects like nausea, sexual disfunction, boils, and premature balding as men and women dance around a beach at sunset and some brandname with a couple of ‘X’s and ‘Z’s lights up the sky. Which is nice. The US program Jeopardy has about the same type of audience as Countdown in the UK. Both last half an hour (last time I checked). Somehow Jeopardy fits 3 spasms of adverts into its running time. The show itself lasts 20 minutes all told. With Countdown you’ve got a short break in the middle with about enough time to make a nice cup of tea and settle back down for the second half, at worst you may catch a glimpse of Thora Hird selling Stannah Stairlifts from beyond the grave as you head back from the kitchen, but I know which I prefer.
I can’t watch a film on TV in the states, neither. First off, because they’re a) censored beyond belief and b) rarely worth watching. But mainly because in the event you do get into watching a film, the bloody adverts keep coming at you faster and faster until in the final half hour they practically interupt every other sentence uttered. I think there’s an inverse relationship between climate & winter hours of daylight versus general TV quality but that’s for another day.
So that’s my rant. Thank Jeebus I have my interweb to keep me entertained. Might be time for a coffee now… cheersy- gwyn
We’ve been accumulating coins for a fair old while (4 years). And since we’re selling everything I thought now might be a good time to get rid of them once and for all. I went through it to make sure I’d taken out the pound coins, Romanian skiing proficiency badges, pennies with the Golden Gate bridge squeezed onto them and plectrums and spread ‘em all out on the table…
Anyroad, there’s this machine round the corner in Safeway called the Coinmaster. You dump your coins in it and it sorts them and gives you a total (minus 8% for the service). It’s one of the best machines I’ve ever played with, combining the thrill of free money, with fruit machine payouts and penny fountain things at seaside arcades. Little by little the total rises as you push more coins into its mechanical guts. Things whirr and whine and lights flash around. I wish I could do it again…Here’s a blurry picture of the machine:
Friday was a latish night, Jose, Sarah and Fernando were round to see what it was like living in a house with 4 bathrooms and no water. I’d spent the best part of the evening trying various raindances and even having a go at getting the hose pipe to reach the water tank on the roof and then the kitchen sink. With zero success. Anyroad, apart from the drought t’was a nice evening that ended a little late (02h30) given that we had to get ourselves to the meeting point near Plaza Galerias for 09h00. We were second to arrive there after Sarah and could easily have had another hour in bed as we waited for everyone to arrive. sometimes I forget we’re in Mexico. We got the directions and organised the purchase of essential supplies (beer, tequila, quesadilla/taco ingredients) and headed on down the road to Tequila.
On the way, as I mentioned earlier, I was well chuffed to see my designs on billboards and the like, although they seemed to be outnumbered by other candidates with slogans like ‘Together we can do it’, ‘Trust in my decision’ and ‘Zero kidnapping’. Reminds me of the recurrent Monkey Dust sketch with Tony Blair intoning ‘A bicycle for every baby. multiple cures for cancer. an end to all suffering… etc’ over it. Anyroad, we couldn’t find Dr. Jaime’s farm so we parked and called for help/directions. 45 minutes of poring over Sarah’s celebrity gossip magazines later, the reinforcements arrived and we convoyed (our recently washed car) down a dirt track to the El Columpio tequila factory that’s jumped straight out of the 18th century. A bloke was outside cutting wood with an axe to fuel the ovens and inside they were unloaded the roasted piñas into the tahona. Hang on, here’s a quick Tequila Production 101:
Agave plants take a good few years to grow. Some tell you 7, some 10 it all depends on who you ask. When they’re ripe the jimador comes along and cuts off the leaves (pencas) with his coa (sharp knife thing on a stick) leaving you with the agave pineapple (piña). A load of piñas (that start of white then get honey coloured) are cut into halves or smaller and slow-roasted for 24 hours in the aforementioned ovens. After that they’re usually shredded in a machine and squashed and the resultant mixture is fermented, then distilled, then barrelled.
In the past, rather than putting the roasted agave through an industrial shredder, they were shoved into a circular mill called a tahona which has a huge stone grindstone dragged round in circles by a horse or donkey. Well this Columpio place (I looked up columpio and it means swing, not trampoline as we first thought. which is a shame.) uses the olde worlde tahona and horse set-up and looked fantastic in the medieval glow of the ovens. Dr. Jaime and the owner of the place gave us a guided tour of the room and then we tried the 100% (not-yet) tequila straight out of the still. It tastes of alcohol more than anything and needs to be mixed with a bit of water to let the agave taste come out. Still, it’s a great mouthwash and takes the edge off your hunger.
Next up over to Dr. Jaime’s agave plantation where they’ve been building a house, folly and dining patio. El buen doctor explained what the various varieties of agave were that he had growing there and took us on a tour round the fields pointing out the hijuelos (little clone plants that the agaves put out after 3 years of so, Sita took one home, ready to plant), telling us the local legends (ghosts of hanged men who didn’t want to fight for Santa Anna protect certain parts of the plantation), and identifying the colourfully-named weeds (tumbavaqueros, a local bindweed). All during this little tour we were sipping on the good stuff with the occasional beer for quenching thirst.
The next stage involved hopping in the back of el Dr’s 4×4 and heading off round the incredible little local villages to see the ruins of old tequila factories. A highlight for me there was seeing the women washing their clothes in the stream. The photos probably tell this part of the day best. We headed onwards through the fields and had another tequila stop under the shade of a huge tree and took a few photos, then on to more factory ruins. In the ruins there were tons of chile plants, apparently started from seeds in the salsa people eating tacos there.
Back to the dining place and we feasted on quesadillas and carne asada. Plus a bit of tequila for good measure. As the sun set, Dr. Jaime produced a rifle and everyone got a go at shooting targets in the field. What could possibly go wrong, as young sita said before waving the gun around. Sarah took a few photos, hopefully I’ll shove ’em up here soon. We went into the town center (knackered by now) found the hotel where sita’n’sarah’s friend works and got a couple of rooms. I tended to my sunburn and had a cold shower and then went out for double espressos. To celebrate El Dia de la Mujer (last Tuesday or so) the main square (zocalo) was full of little stores especially for the ladies offering such feminine delights as depilatory treatments, shopping bags, earrings and breakfast bars. Viva la igualdad. anyroad, we met up with agustin a kid from the tequila course and he took us round the bars of Tequila ending up eventually in El Cielo, a v. cool place with a view of the entire town center. I was knackered by then but it was a fun evening and a fantastic day. Tequila, photography, steak and guns.
Sunday, in brief: fruit for brekky, drive home, fall asleep watching Pedro Paramo (1965), gigante, soup & spuds, Jose, 9 Canciones (reviewed right)… luckily next weekend might be a puente.
See the post below for links to the photos sets… or buy the calendar come october 🙂
I think we’re all pressied up thanks to a quick trip to the craft market. I just had a chance to explore the non-markety bits like the cemetary which is a much less grand affair than Guadalajara’s Panteon before Sita called me on the mobile to say she was done shopping. Now we’re back and preparing for a BBQ this avo with a few mates of our before we leave.
Last night we stayed in and had a lovely meal cooked by Sita then watched Good Night and Good Luck, George Clooney’s take on CBS during the McCarthy witch hunt years quickly followed by one of the bleakest documentaries I’ve seen (at that includes the bloody penguins) called Darwin’s Nightmare all about the extreme poverty in Tanzania around Lake Victoria. I’m a bit behind on my reviews right now, but I’ll have a stab if I get the chance on the road. If you find yourself feeling far too positive about life and the world in general, Darwin’s Nightmare will take your serotonin levels down a few pegs…
And broadband. Even if you don’t know “Omi” check out all the other videos to see her and her little brother dance to hipster indie beats. Fair play- It’s a little dodgy posting pix & videos of kids on the interweb and our mates have taken down the video. Which is a shame, but completely understandable. If you’re ever in Central/North California, look out for toddlers dancing to the likes of Spoon and Art Brut, you won’t regret it…
One Comment
Roll on the phone calls we say. How do yous Yanks get so much holiday? merde aux etrangers dis-je
of them pottering around the seaside (click for bigger, 87k).
Roll on the phone calls we say.
How do yous Yanks get so much holiday?
merde aux etrangers dis-je