Houston, heat and the circus

So, once again I failed to post anything last week...my excuse this time is that i went to oregon. Flew up for 6 days to help my daughter with some wedding planning.
I had an 8 hr layover in Houston. This frequently happens on the way up or the way back, sometimes both. I've logged a lot of hours in that airport. i've thought about getting a part time position at the L'Occitane shop because I go in there at least 3 times during my "visit" to put on hand lotion. I could be making some pocket money while im there. I will say, you can get a great egg,bacon and cheese breakfast sandwich on a lovely fresh roll for around $3.00. For airport food thats a steal...They still inform you the color of the days terror alert there. they did away ( since bush is out ) with saying if you talk badly about the president you may be arrested or detained. Honest to god they used to say that. I'm sitting there reading a New York Times someone had left behind (if i'd have gotten that job at L'Occitane i could have bought my own...). Article after article involving bad economies. A country...in the Ukraine? can't remember...is running out of hard currency, old people may have to pay their own medical, even china is having finacial problems, Portugal may go under because they are not getting a bail out from some other country....article after article...then there's the article about how the rich will not get their taxes increased and as i flip the page there is a department store add for a pair of "peek-a-boo Chanel booties" for $3600.00....THAT IS NOT A TYPO!!!! $3600.00 for a pair of shoes. Does anyone else find this grotesquely offensive!? And if not, WHY NOT!!!Ahhhh...it's a mad, mad world we're living in.....I have two words ...SALES TAX. Its really the only fair way to make the rich pay. They find loopholes in everything else. If you are out there buying $3600.00 shoes then by god you can pay a heftysales tax..what's that? Then you can't afford the $4500.00 matching hand bag? You poor thing,,how WILL you survive...i think people who buy hand bags and shoes that cost that much should be made to eat them...and I think we should form a task force of people to do it..lets say..people forced to mine diamonds, people forced to sell their daughters so that the rest of their children can eat, people who spend their whole lives on a piece of cardboard in India, people who have to walk 10 miles a day to get water. We'll be humane- we'll give them condiments.....OK, OK...I'll stop......
On to the heat...luckily, we don't have any jokesters around asking "hot enough for ya?!" with a big dopey grin on their face. It was 111 degrees yesterday. That was in merida and we are at the coast so we were a bit cooler. All i could do was lay in a hammock in the bedroom. It was too hot to lay on the bed. Unfortunately, the pool is not done......sometimes work here is a slow process...could have something to do with it being really HOT! Just a guess...it's probably pretty hard to see what you're doing when sweat is rolling into your eyes. Or possibly your focus is being disracted by the idea of "I wonder if I could hook up a water I.V. ?" As we headed into merida today ,the temperature in the upper 90's, we drove through Cansahcab. Its a village of maybe a thousand people. Little old ladies wear traditional, embroidered dresses. Trici Taxis (3 wheeled bicycles) line up around the square, the drivers swapping stories while they wait for their next customer. Folks of all ages on bicycles ride here and there with little bags of tortillas on their handlebars. As we round the bend, we see -what?- a zebra. Tied up next to the road eating grass. Not what one would expect to see along the road in Cansahcab. It was very surreal. As we drive by, I see horses and...a camel...a baby elephant...curiouser and curiouser...then i spy ( just after wiping the sweat from my face with a kerchief) a reindeer....a young, very thin reindeer....in cansahcab...in the Yucatan....I'll tell ya, very little really shocks me anymore. I must be getting to the point where the bizarre is the norm. i'll tell you what though, if one of those animal handlers would have been wearing a pair of peek-a-boo chanel booties, i would have totally freaked out.......

Garbage and other topics...

First of all, I apologize for leaving you all with that empty feeling last week.....I must say, this heat sometimes takes it out of me! That is NOT a complaint about the heat either...when i see day after day of 40 something degrees in portland, I'll take a small case of heat stroke....and this is only April. " May is the really hot month " we hear over and over. We've been here many times in june and it was never what I would call unbearably hot so i think we'll be fine. However, we did decide to put in a "dip" pool. The name tells you what its for- to get in, get wet, cool off. No laps, diving, pool toys...just a cooling dip. About 4 ft deep with a nice wide edge around it for sitting or laying ( i'll post a picture when it's done). The fellas started working. They never cease to amaze me. first of all, just going out to water overheats me. Standing in the sun with a hose in my hand for too long and my face is beet red and me eyes are stinging from the sweat rolling down my forhead into them. these guys are in full sun for hours. Lots of digging, measuring, carrying of heavy things.....After seeing some of the pyramids around here then watching them work..its the same construction! They use whatever is available. Anything is a tool. This time i saw them get out a tube of clear plastic maybe 20 feet long and about as big around as a straw. They stuck it in the cistern and got some siphon action going to fill it with water. Now, some of you guys might have seen this before but I was mesmerized. They used it as a sort of level. The ground out back slopes so they used it to adjust for that. One guy went to one point and held it in place while the other squatted on the other side at an opposite point. They somehow held them in place and marked a spot. They also incorporated several pieces of fishing line with rocks hanging from them and used a sharpie to mark spots where the fishing line intersected- voila! Theres a pool. Now, while all of these fascinating events were transpiring, a material delivery truck arrived. It was one of those trucks that ramble down the road sideways and are half rusted out with various stickers placed in strategic spots ( i think this is what really holds them together...). About 4 guys started unloading concrete blocks, gravel, cement. John went out to supervise and called to me "Jill! come check this out!" I round the back of the house to see them all standing around a cardboard box with a frayed, yellow rope tied around it. One young guy is carefully prying open a corner of the cardboard. A snout with a couple of beady, black eyes came peering out..."what is it? A puppy?" I ask? " (in spanish) "no, no no!" they all echo...a bit more head is exposed and i see fur and no, its definately not a puppy...but what the hell is it? "que es?" what is it....a flurry of words and gestures involving biting motions and vigorous displays of teeth gnashing ensue...the word peligosa is thrown out ( which means dangerous) but nobody can tell me what the viscous creature is called. The gist is that they found this creature on the road while on their way to our house and decided it was a good idea to catch it and put it in a box. " porque?" why? ( this did not seem a good idea to me at all in fact im wondering when they will be leaving and taking the box with them.....). i then heard a round of explanations involving a dog. A fight? like to bet on? No..for entertainment? no....im sorry readers, but the name of the creature and what they intended to do with it shall remain a mystery. I have looked on line to find animals of the yucatan....almost nothing...books on animals of the yucatan? almost nothing. I've been thinking i should contact Smithsonian or National Geographic and give them a heads up that there is a vast array of animals, reptiles and insects that are virtually uncatalogued down here.Even the natives don't know what these things are called! hey, if they haven't been named yet i can name them whatever i want right? isn't that the honor of the person discovering the thing? I could be naming all kinds of things! I was having this conversation with a guy who lives in Santa Clara. He and his wife moved down from Georgia with their two small children ( who are now bilingual). When i told him I wanted to find a book he said 'good luck'. he'd been trying to find one too. He and his wife have spearheaded our recent campaign to get a better garbage system.Currently, we are working with a designated dumping area where people bring their trash ( concrete rubble, household trash, piles of fish from the local restaraunt...)and they get it sometimes merely in the general vicinity of the designated area. Some feel the area OUTSIDE the dump is close enough. this is relatively new and hopefully not a trend. I will say there is a LOT less garbage in our area then some Ive seen in mexico, but there is no recycling and a lot of burning of plastics. So between this guy Jason and his wife, john and i , we have gotten a large portion of the residents of Santa Clara to attend a meeting with the municipal presidente at our house tomorrow night. We are hoping to establish a system where the trash will be seperated, plastics and metals sold, and the rest disposed of in a non toxic fashion. Some of the gringos think the locals don't care about the burning of plastics (stereotyping...)but thats not true. they know its not good and dont like it either. Its just very difficult to get things accomplished because there is a lot of corruption( politicians are politicians wherever you go!) and little follow through. I'm trying to remain hopeful and positive about the outcome. I'll let you know. Tonight is meeting night. After attending the business meeting a couple of weeks ago, there are some format changes (yes, i did have something to do with that.....)We will now have a different chair person once a month. Currently, the secretary has people do the readings then-the meeting is open! no sharing, no nothing. It has been really hard to get to know people because you never hear their story. I've never seen anything like it. So once a month it will be a ...normal format and tonights the night! And who might it be who's chairing? Yes! yours truly..... so there is my update...people ask "are you bored?' ha! just like the song says" if you're bored then you're boring". How can i be bored when there are crazy animals to deal with, fish garbage to categorize, corrupt presidentes to entertain and meeting formats to challenge?! All this in 100 plus degree heat too, I might add.....

Whew!

Okie dokie.....aren't we glad THATS over! So, where did I leave you...ah yes, Eduardo was just about to arrive......

So, he was a very nice man who did not clearly understand what we were looking for....when we explained the situation, he was as unclear as we were! Why was i not surprised...im telling you, this is a mystery indeed...An hour or so later, my friend called to see how it was going. after updating her she said 'oh thats it..we are calling my lawyer. All this running around will make you crazy." So, long story somewhat shortened, we called the lawyer and after talking with him realized everyone we had spoken with had a bit of truth to their story. If you bring your car in with a permit, you dont have to worry about it IF you have an FM 3 ( we have an FM 2). You DO need to legalize your car IF your are bringing or have brought it across the border while you are in possession of an FM2 and this costs a lot of money. In our case, because we brought it over when we were tourists and now we are full time residents, there is NO way to make the car legal........The lawyer informed us that there is a pretty good chance that as long as we only drive in the state of Yucatan ( which borders on a state of grace...) we should be OK because they arent that familiar with that particular law but if we go to another state and get stopped and they DO know, they will keep the truck and there be nothing we can do. Now that puts a spin on the insurance. there is enough of this situation going around that they ask you "is it legal?" when you ask about insuring your vehicle. So, yes, we have insurance now. Today is the second, when the old policy expires and as of yesterday, we have a new policy. It cost us around $900 for a year. End of the truck saga.......good, because it really was not very interesting.

Next topic..we had another visitor, our friend Aleka. Thats her in the picture. Lovely young woman who is 2 months shy of being a doctor. She was here for 5 days. took her to the airport this morning. Shes bound for Oaxaca where she will work in a clinic for the next month ( besides being really smart and pretty she is bi-lingual ). In 2 months she will begin working as a doc in San Francisco. One of the things i really miss about being here is that, while we've met some really nice folks here, none of them are under 50. At home I hung out with some young people ( wow, THAT makes me sound old...) including my kids and i really miss it. So it almost felt a little like hanging out with my daughter. In fact, most people thought I was her mother, which i took as quite a compliment. While she was here, we went to visit a friend. i drove there. I actually knew how to get there and felt very comfortable doing so. The traffic doesn't freak me out at all now and i can actually get my bearings ( within a certain area of town mind you). Its kind of like if i knew and stayed in down town but could find my way around inner southeast. baby steps......I drove through the heart of the market when we left her house, found a place to park, walked around the market ( it was 104 degrees) returned to the lot, got the car and returned to the hotel. You just don't KNOW what a big deal that is! I feel such a sense of accomplishment. What a big girl I am.....when we first got here, i went to the market with some ladies and was horrified by the traffic and the throngs of people. I told the woman driving how hard core I thought she was that she could navigate that madness un-ruffled. Today, I AM THAT WOMAN!Yes...AND I know how to get to the airport...wow...but hey, if you're coming, don't expect me to pick you up if its dark. Im not there yet.

My friend and I also drove to Uxmal which is a little over an hour away. it is a huge ruin-as big as Chichen itza but not as innundated with tourists. Amazing architecture and the air resembled the inside of...lets see...a smelter? a blast furnace? the 6th level of hell? We were there about 2 hours and by the time we got back to merida ( which, might I add we managed effortlessly....)we were worn out.

So there it is, another week in Mexico, a few more challenges met...still no regrets, still lovin' being here. Next challenge: helping my daughter arrange a wedding from thousands of miles away...but hey, if I can drive the market, I can do ANYTHING!!!