Oregon, this week… Florida next… San Diego last. It’s got to stop if only so the dog can live in a stable home environment. I came back today and he was staring at his food bowl by the door. Looks like the ants were keeping him entertained for a bit. Thanks ants.
Thants.
Anyroad, off for walkies presently… wish we hadn’t sold our treadmill…
Atticus has learnt a new “trick”. In his haste to get out of the house and go cruising the streets of Downey, he helps Sally carry her handbag. What he lacks in talent, he makes up for in charm…
Still no tickets back to Mejico yet, going to give it another try tomorrow as they’re a tad on the pricey side and ideally I’d like an indirect flight that spares me the usual LAX inmigration antics.
mysterytechno.mp3 (368k file) This has been bothering me on and off for the best part of 5 years. What is this intro from. It’s a cheesy chart techno song from the late 80s/ early 90s, it’s followed by someone (possibly the woman of the BodyForm ad, “Whoaaaaaa, Bodyform…”) singing ‘It’s coming over and makes me feel…’. Since that’s the only lyrics I know (and I’m not 100%), it’s impossible to google. If anyone out there in ciberespacio has any idea, let me know through the comments/ skype or gmail. Many tas, gwyn
PS. Brand new idea for the blog. I’ll take requests for songs in the ‘comments’ and record them and post them, virtual busking. The catch is that you have to stand me a pint of scrumpy/ boddington’s next time I see you (you’re probably safe for at least 12 months…). For the first person to make a request it’s on the house though. If I don’t know the song I’ll say as much. I play all sorts from Velvet Underground to Shakira, Spice Girls to Mariachi. Bring it on, as they said in the cheerleeding film which somehow I’ve now seen 4 times from beginning to end…
It all started with Mario and Angelica kindly inviting us round their´s on Saturday night. A few bottles of wine and plenty of botanas after arriving, the first tentative steps were made toward “Family Games Night”. Aranza brought Parcheesi, which is like Ludo with strategic elements. It´s popular in Spain though I´ve never played it before. After a few teething troubles (you roll one die, not two) we were completely absorbed in getting our tiddlywinks (fichitas) to circle the board and get home, and taking great malicious pleasure in blocking and eating other players´ fichas along the way. We lost.
Next up was one of my favourites, a Jenga type game, but with a twist that enabled the makers to dodge the patent issues and call it Stacko. Each jenga block was either red, yellow, green or blue and had a number from 1 to 4 on it like Uno, so if the last person removed a red #3, you had to go for a red block or one with #3 on it which makes it a lot harder. Luckily they´re all made from polished plastic so it´s not quite as hard as the artesanal wooden jenga thing we have.
Anyroad, all this nonsense went on until 3am and then some as it turned out we’ve all got quite the competitive streak. Many thanks, M & A 😀
Sunday we got up late, unsurprisingly. I went to the baratillo (huge Tapatian street market on the other side of town) and took a fair few photos. I stumbled into this church too, which is an architectural oddity, I’ve no idea what it’s called.
Afterwards I nipped by Amour Fou to pick up some stuff and got persuaded to play Mexican Scrabble. It was going great guns, practically every letter is worth 4 points and there were about 8 blanks (each worth 1 pt). However it started to get tricky as the board filled up and there seemed to be an endless supply of letters. I counted and there were 200 tiles to put on a 15×15 board (225). Madness I tells you. I don’t think the manufacturers of this game had every tried to play it. Cos unless you start placing your tiles vertically, upwords style, there’s no chance of finishing. And how they dared put in 4 Ws beggars belief. It’s not a letter that features much in the Spanish dictionary, it’s almost always just foreign words like Whiskey, Walkie-Talkie, Windsurfing and gWyn…
After that, Uno, which was a lot more fast moving than Scrabble with a 90% board coverage.
At my photo journalism seminar yesterday one of the attendees was complaining about having bought the Mexico edition of Monopoly and one of the squares having less-than-popular ex-president Vicente Fox on it. What were they thinking? I’d love a Tapatian (Guadalajaran) version of it, mind. I reckon the market’s ready… Collect the utilities, SIAPA, CFE, TELMEX and MEGACABLE…
You’ll be ecstatic to hear that the hard drive’s fine. It’s still something of a mystery what happened there. The reinstall is far from perfect but I think it’s cos I installed the beta version of IE7 and that wrought all manner of unholy things upon the registry. I’m not the only one on teh intarwebs that can’t use Explorer anymore. So that’s quite a shot in the foot for Microsoft. I’m a Firefox user because I have no choice… Maybe one day they’ll get round to writing a patch so i can reinstall IE. At least I have some DVD backups to show for all my troubles… Ah whatever, enough tech-ery.
Do you live in the Unaitid Esteits de Gringolandia? If so you can see what your house is worth and your neighbours’, have a look at this site here: www.zillow.com. Walking the line between the entertaining and the downright scarey.
Erm what else? Sita’s doing the tequila thing, i’m on page 10 of my camino real essay, erm, went out with gringos, koreans and a mexican for an italian last night, possible music club thing with jose and co tonight, sarah’s for a meal on sunday… that’ll do for now. I’m reticent to post entries when there’s no photos to go with them. so that’s yer lot for now. Thanks for the comments- Spam free for 16 days!
So it seemed to be about time to organise another Guadalajara Photo Tour. I’ve alerted various forums and my flickr contacts, and here’s hoping it all goes well. Instead of setting a time and date, I’ve put up a poll to choose, if you’re in the area feel free to vote on a combination that suits you here. If you’re not in the area then please don’t vote, so those who can make it get a say in when they can come. It was good fun last time and no mistake, a cantina usually features in it somewhere and the rest is wandering around in the sun and chatting about apertures and suchlike with likeminded peeps…
Last time we got photos published in various blogs, which was nice and it was grand to meet up with a few of the other Flickeros.
**Cack-handed tech alert**: Any readers know how to embed database driven data into Drupal pages? I’m having an in-at-the-deep-end go at getting a listings site up and running and it’s all new to me. Still trying to find some PHP classes… have an eyeful here of my noodlings… login: test, pword: password none too impressive for the minute, I’ll grant you…
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Maybe it’s time to find him a mate…hm??
Florida??? oh no!!! what are they gonna do to you!
He’s trouble enough without a partner in crime…