Wednesday September 02, 2009

Who would have thunk it, I ask you? I just cooked up what I thought was wild rice (and if it wasn’t I would have been very upset cause it cost me a fortune) and it is! I can’t even find wild rice in a lot of US stores. ………..Sorry about that, there was a bit of a lapse in my typing, I’m eating cinnamon toast and some of the sugar fell onto my keyboard, had to get the vacuum cleaner out and suck it out.

When Ross drove Handyman and friend home last night he got stuck in some new sand with a hunk of concrete in it that jammed under the car, it took 6 Mexicans to lift it up and out. Of course being Canadian the first thing Ross thought of was how long he was going to have to wait for a tow truck; it simply amazes us on how ingenious the Mexicans are. To mix our concrete handyman put cement on a pile of gravel on the ground, put some sand in and mixed in the water with a shovel, viola concrete!

Everyday there are trucks going up and down our streets playing music over loud speakers and talking. I know one has cylinders of propane, another is the ice cream truck and this morning I thought I would check out one of them. It was a half ton truck with pineapples in the box. I asked him how much and I got 2 pineapples for 20 pesos (2.00). They are a little green but they should be good in a couple of days. When I went to the nursery to pick up my fruit trees the guy gave me an avocado. I peeled it today and I have to admit when you get them straight from the tree it is soooooooooooooo much better. I am so looking forward to eating the pineapples, I assume they will taste delicious!

I was outside doing laundry (go figure, outside doing laundry, I never thought I would be saying that), and the dogs started barking up a storm so I went to the front door and there was a man standing there. I went out to talk with him, he is about my age and he is looking for work. In invited him in, his name is Jose and we had a nice long talk about Mexico. He told me he does odd jobs, painting and such, I told him that we already had Francisco helping us out, but in the future I would give him a call. I want to give handyman the work as he is putting 3 children through school and it’s hard when money is scarce. Handyman has a job right now in Punta De Mita (about ½ hour away) where he is working days and he is at our house working at night. By the way, he walks here! It must be at least a couple of hours to get here and an hour to get home.

One of our taps broke off that is outside along the wall so Ross took off to Mega to see what he could buy to fix it. It is basically a pipe coming out of the wall with a spigot on it, unfortunately there is no way we know of to turn off the water so we have to fix it with the water on. He bought a hoola hoop which is just the right size for the pipe, but alas it did not work even with some smaller hose inside with hose clamps.

I have been corrected by my darling husband, his car is not working much better so it definitely will have to go into the shop, this will force Ross to start riding his bike, and mine hasn’t been delivered yet.

I think we figured out what happened with Big Dog. Remember I told you that a couple of days ago we were scared that he was ready to die because he was so lethargic, breathing shallow and his eyes were not happy. We think he was bitten by something, scorpion, snake, or whatever and his body needed to expel the poison. He is feeling so much better, so we are pretty sure that was what it was. A friend of ours has told us his little dogs (maybe 5 pounds) have been bitten so many times that it doesn’t even affect them anymore. We stopped by a vet in Bucerias to see if maybe this could be the case but she doesn’t speak English. Tomorrow we are going to stop in to the vet in Nuevo that I took the cats to, to see if we are right.

Ross went to his meeting tonight; handyman came over to finish doing the cementing in the back. I showed him the broken pipe and he went to the front of our property and turned off the tap (the same one that Ross turned off and we didn’t have water for 4 days) wow! The water is now off. He asked me if we had some orange tubing (you have to remember handyman is Mexican and his English is good but I still have problems understanding him) He went next door and asked our neighbor at the back of our property if he could use some of his orange tubing (I’m assuming he was asking that cause he came back across the road with about 5” of orange tubing) and he jerry rigged the tap so that it wouldn’t be spewing water everywhere and will fix it properly tomorrow. I told him that in Canada unless we knew our neighbor very well he might have asked for some reimbursement for the tubing. Francisco just looked at me and said a neighbor would do that? Unfortunately we aren’t normally friends with our neighbors at home, we seem to be too busy with our everyday lives, here, they aren’t, they are such a social society. I love it here!

We took off at about 8:30 because today is the day we need to buy pizza for the turtle people. (We buy every second Wednesday) Thankfully it is buy one get one free this month at Tower Pizza, we got six pizza’s and ate one ourselves in the parking lot of the hotel that the turtle people have a shack at on the beach. Once we dropped off the pizza we played with the new little turtles that were only hatched today and will be released tonight. Hopefully at least one will survive tonight; they have so many enemies that’s why we try to help them give the turtles a fighting chance. After we played for awhile we walked back to the parking lot (I took as long as I could walking in the ocean that was washing up on shore, isn’t life grand) and went to our favorite restaurant with our favorite Jennifer and Ross did some interneting, and I had a great talk with Jennifer. She is coming over tomorrow to hang out and get to know our children as we will be leaving for Vegas Friday morning early and she is our house sitter. Hopefully John will drive us, but he woke up with the flu this morning so we’ll see how he feels, we might end up taking a taxi. Ross will pick up Jennifer early tomorrow afternoon and she will spend a couple of hours with us then she will take our car home. Eugene is picking us up at about 8 tomorrow night in order to go to the jam at Philo’s then hopefully we will be home early enough to get a bit of sleep before we have to get up for the plane.

You know it’s funny, of all the times we have gone to Vegas we were counting down the days, now, it seems to be a fun trip but nothing, like “wow, we are taking off to some place new”, I truly believe, since we live in Paradise, why would you want to go anywhere else? Except of course seeing family! That will still be (or in my case) will be counting down the days!

No wonder why we sleep in until 11 am, it is now 12:50 am our time 11:50 pm your time, and we are still up, writing blogs and watching boat racing on Discovery HD. I have never been a night owl, always getting up at about 5:30 am when the kids were little and 10 pm was really late……….what the heck!

Well, I need to cuddle with my hunny, so I’m going to say goodnite for now and will talk with you again tomorrow!

Luv, Hugs and Peace (we’ll be in Vegas soon…..Summer of ’69)
Ross and Kim in Paradise!