Blimey, 5+ peeps have signed up for the photo tour on Saturday along with a few maybes. If you’ve happened upon this blog, understand the language and have a camera, come along on Saturday at 1 – 1h30 to La Fuente cantina, Calle Pino Suarez in central Guanatos for a few hours wandering the streets snapping photos and cotorreando. Or post-photography chat in Los Famosos Equipales (Juan Alvarez 710) around 4pm. César, ¿te late?
And it has some very fancy Flash gallery options. Think I’ll stick to Flickr and Picasa locally though.
Early stages yet though, but it could be very hand if you need to quickly shop something on a friend’s computer.
Some things are easier to cancel than others. In the spirit of public service, here’s the list:
CFE: Electricity. You can read the metre and they’ll tell you how much you owe, however you can’t pay it until the next bill comes along unless you want to stop the service completely.
Megacable: Basic cable is easy to cancel, you have to do it in person at one of the outlets and you just pay the percentage of the unbilled month. A day or two later they disconnect you and you never have to suffer The American Network or Holy Channel 22 again.
Gas: Zeta gas, since there seems to be no gas pipes to anyone’s house in Gwod you just fill your tank to whatever level it was at when you arrived. It’s probably for the best given that entire streets have blown up in the past that were meant to only be water drains… Minimum order for a tanque estacionario 300 pesos.
SIAPA: Water. Easy, bless them. You go to your nearest office with the metre reading and pay it and you’re done. They’re just happy to be paid at all it seems, as half their advertising campaign right now starts “Are you one of those people who don’t pay for their water?” And has a fresh faced young lad with an admonishing stare saying “Qué poca…” which means You´ve got some nerve, more or less.
TELMEX: Phone and interweb. This is a heady mixture of going to offices and fighting to not get disconnected from their labyrinthine phone menus. They´re split into different corporate sections, each with a different phone number, “Your call is important to us” muzak and wildly varying degrees of professionalism. Removing extra phone services was easy enough, just a question of 7 menus and a 10 minute wait on the phone, but to cancel the interweb tubes they gave me another number which didn´t even get answered when I rang the first 10 times. Then I finally got through to a human, then he said “un segundo” and disappeared for 20 minutes and I got cut off. All the conversations start badly when they ask you for your name and I have to spell out Gwyn and explain my lack of a 2nd surname… Anyroad, I could go on, but basically you have to take the complimentary modem to the Telmex office with a “victory” code that you earn if you win your phone battles and then they´ll cancel it. Sisyphean, I tells you.
Because of the aforementioned trials today we didn´t make it to Tequila, which is a shame but it would have been a long day…
Bit tired now, in 4.5 hours I´m making sure powerpoints work… saludos!
A more careful reading of the Tapatian Scrabble Association’s webpage points to them meeting in Cafe Sandys about 100m from where I went yesterday to try and get in on the scrabble action. That would explain a lot… Never mind. Javier turned up in the afternoon and gave me a lift there on the way to the cinema. I was going to go with him to watch “Nia mala” (bad girl) but luckily I googled it and it turns out that’s the Spanish name for Hard Candy which I’d seen the other week (Recommended, btw- It’s a feminist stalker/psycho thriller film with several unwatchable scenes and you’re forever trying to work out who’s occupying the moral high ground…).
Ana popped round too to share her latest academic success stories, then I went over to Providencia for a pot luck and met a lovely band of folks who have the American School of Gwod in common. I picked up some tips for places to visit in Jalisco and once we have the car here again I’m up for a mission to Mascota and San Sebastian de something or other. It’s all written on the back of a napkin somewhere…
Today finishing off a couple of sites, hopefully. I’m getting mightily sick of Flash to tell the truth. Partly because of the below par coding of the templates I’m adapting, but also because of the need to switch between half a dozen programs to import graphics and so on, which means my creaking computer struggles at times.
In other news, you’ll be happy to hear that my cold’s holding steady. Shall be repeating the same strict regime today, pozole, lime, tequila, zinc etc, today and hoping for the best.
Spanish word of the week for last week: Diapositiva A fancy, but the only, word for “slide” as in a powerpoint slide or slideshow… I was in Irvine, CA, and there’s no Spanish there except when you’re helping yer missus with her presentation on the Spanish version of Office 2003…
I didn’t like aubergines / eggplants before seeing these pictures, but now I’m not even going to try them every once in a while to see if my tastes have changed…
B3ta’s last competition was to illustrate misheard song lyrics. My faves? This one, this one (requires UK pronunciation) and this one.
If you’re on Facebook and liking the Scrabulous application, why not go the whole hog and download the game from here it’s not as pretty as Scrabulous, but I’ve yet to see it go down for 48 hours. Create a username, install the app, play a few games to establish your rating then watch your social life swiftly disappear over the horizon. My handle’s gwynfisher, and rating somewhere in the mid 1000s. Strictly SOWPODS.
All Calvin and Hobbes ever written online. Love it.
and finallly if you have a blog, this is enlightening: 13 blog clichés.
Plans for today, mooching around with my lovely camera then a pachanga round Aranza´s house off of Flickr at 8. Which means “any time but 8”. Aranza came round yesterday for a scanning session of old-school photos and discussed the respective merits of US/ Latin American academic endeavours. I was largely lost as I can barely maintain my side of an academic discussion in English let alone Espanish, still it was lovely to see Atticus make another new friend. I love the tags she put on his photo here… “el galan del barrio” indeed…
Just to freak out the cleaning staff, click here for what might well be a live photo from our balcony… It’s too dark at the minute, but every 30 seconds it should refresh. It’s GMT minus 6 hours for the record here. To refresh the screen, hit “F5″
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Híjole, creo que tendrá qué ser otro “maybe” 🙁
El fin de semana normalmente se lo dedico por completo a mi hija. Pero sí me late, así que dame un día para averiguar con mi gente qué planes hay ya hechos, y si se pueden mover. Te confirmo mañana temprano.
Oye, pero… fotógrafo, así como eso, ¿yo? Ni siquiera cerca. ¿No será que nomás les voy a estorbar?
Para nada, creo que ya vamos a ser unos 8 a 10. Si no puedes, de todas formas estoy en dialogo con mi esposa para poner una fecha para la cenita con tu y las tuyas. No hay presión. Hasta pronto!
Oh man, I am so sorry, I forgot to come back and tell you… I’m a horrible person. After writing this I’ll go sit in a corner for a while.
Also, I can’t make it to the fototur, I’m going out of town this weekend 🙁 🙁 🙁
Thanks a lot for inviting me, I really appreciate it. I’d love to be there. Échate unas por mi.
And yes, next week we’ll work out that dinner (or lunch at Goa or something else). No pressure, yes, but I don’t want you two to move out of México before we do it 🙂
Have fun.