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I’m tired. I feel like I worked non-stop all weekend. Funny how when you are retired, you go out to dinner every night during the week and then stay home and work on the weekend.
It’s not like I worked at a job or anything, just keeping up with my own stuff. I cleaned 2 ponds and filters, washed about a ton of laundry, made a week’s worth of dog food, made cat food, made soup for the humans, unpacked 3 boxes, washed the contents, bought black foamy stuff to line the shelves of the new credenza, went back out and bought double sided tape to stick it down, lined those shelves and put all the stuff on them. I think there was more but it’s making me tired to list it all. Oh, well, we did go to a marvelous brunch at the monthly brunch restaurant Remixto.
 Raui investigating About those boxes… When Mimi and I went fulltime in our RV and sold our house in San Anselmo, we got rid of pretty much all our stuff. It was cathartic, sad, emotional, and when we drove away, ecstatic. The few things we did save filled about a dozen boxes and have been stored in California for 7 years. Mimi got them down here with friends last fall and I was happy to see my cookware again and some of the other stuff. Funny thing, almost all of it had something to do with eating or drinking. There were 3 boxes of assorted crystal that have stayed in the garage because I didn’t have anywhere to put them.
It’s good stuff but it is not a set. I’m not much for things matching anyway. The good stuff I inherited from my mother I mostly gave to my son. I’m not sure if he got the glassware, it’s possible my step father never sent most of it. I kept some rocks glasses that I remember my father having his nightly drink in when he got home from work. There are 3 of those left, very heavy, cut glass with a small gold rim. I use this stuff, so it breaks or chips or disappears. That’s ok. The rest is stuff that I’ve bought or been given over the years. I usually buy wine glasses in pairs, more is not always better I think.
 all clean and on a lined shelf, mission complete So, it was nostalgic to open these boxes after so many years. There was a set of 4 beautiful martini glasses and a silver topped shaker that Mimi gave me for my first birthday after we got together. There were the cut crystal wine glasses we bought in Ireland. The burgundy glasses from London. I had a good time washing them and looking at them again. In fact, I’m having a little red wine right now from a satisfyingly full shaped crystal burgundy glass that might have been my mothers. It feels good in the hand.
The hardest part of all of that was measuring and cutting the shelf liner and then getting the 2 sided tape on it and sticking it on the shelves. I don’t measure and cut very well, I don’t have the patience. I tried to persevere with this, it’s sort of even. The double sided tape really only wants to stick to me and itself. We fought, eventually I won. I’m more than a little pleased with myself for getting it finished.
I’m happy with the credenza, it moved a lot of stuff that is better being near the table out of the kitchen to the terrace/dining room. At some point, I’m going to look for a stone top for it. I’ve got the locations for a couple of stone warehouses here and it will be fun to go and browse. With a stone top, it can also function as a bar which will make having half of it full of bar glasses make more sense. I also have to get Mimi to cut a hole in the back of one section for the iPod and speaker cords, that will clear it off better.
I’m really trying to keep things clear, to not accumulate a ton of stuff that I rarely use, to not have so much around that you can’t really see any of it. I’m no minimalist but I appreciate the look more than I ever have.
Finally! The first bloom from a night blooming lily. I’ve had 2 other night blooming lilies but they both died, not sure why they just never grew much and then disappeared. This one was given to me by a local ponder Francisco and I am thrilled with the huge 6″ bloom.
 almost ready to bloom First the anticipation, I spotted the bud when it was just emerging and watched it for over a week as it got closer to the surface. Then, for 2 days it kept growing above the water. We almost missed the bloom because it didn’t open until late that first night, after 10pm. The next 2 nights though it opened after sunset and stayed open until 10 or 11 the next morning.
Isn’t it beautiful?
Three blooms open this morning, it was overcast and the nightbloomer stayed open until after the day bloomers had opened.
The rains seem to be much more regular this year than last, almost every evening they arrive with the crash of thunder and flash of lightning. Last night the temps were at an incredible low of 25°C (77°F), it was chilly. I had to turn the hot water heater back on last week, the water was not warm enough from the tinaco. It felt great to take a really hot shower last night and then use our new hair dryer so I didn’t have wet hair. Who could imagine that I would want to blow heated air on my head in the middle of summer.
We haven’t had any flooding because they have been brief downpours or long slow rains, it’s long + downpour that makes everything flood. Of course, with every downpour the intersection by our house fills with water as the wells can’t drain it away as fast as it comes down. Another big “ah ha” moment was when it hit me that there are no sewers in the centro so all those grates on the street lead to are deep dry wells such as we have in our yard. If there is too much debris washed into them, they don’t drain very well. Theresa said they came and cleared out the wells on her street and it helped. We are one street over and I keep hoping they will come here next but no luck so far.
Mimi took some wonderful street shots the other night, lights on the waves and water at the corner. I liked this one best with part of an ambulance turning the corner.
 I love that they give them their gun back for the picture - and they hold it! Just when I think I have a small grip on the differences between the culture of the US and that of MX, I notice something else that I just don’t understand. Believe me, this happens a lot. I don’t have a huge understanding of the country I live in, I’m working on it though. Sometimes, I get a little clue and then all of a sudden a whole bunch of things that I wondered about make sense. I am trying to learn the art of not wondering. It’s a new exercise for me, just looking at something, not understanding at all what is going on, shrugging your shoulders and walking on without questions. It’s the zen of cultural change. Accept, observe, sit in the shade with a cold beer and forget what you were wondering about.
Except… I can’t really do that. I ponder things. Usually at night when I would rather fall asleep, I ponder odd things that don’t fit into my knowledge of the world. Like, criminals that confess almost immediately when caught. What’s up with that? For a retired cop this is a very, very strange thing. Yeah, I know, you all think that there are extra curricular activities going on that “convince” the crooks to confess. Except, that doesn’t work very well and no, you can not ask me how I know that. It doesn’t usually work for anyone for longer than the memory of pain and humans have a very short memory for pain.
Plus, these crooks have no marks on them. Visible marks are a big no-no in law enforcement but it’s not easy to keep that sort of thing under control. Look at those guys in the picture above, even without a shirt on there are no marks. There is one guy holding a bandage or an ice pack or something on his knuckles, which doesn’t really help his case does it? (Can you believe they get their picture taken with the gun? In the US they would be saying “what gun? I never saw that gun before in my life. That ain’t my gun!”) Anyway, I just don’t believe they are being beat into confession. Not all of them all of the time. Maybe a little convincing at times but not across the board everyone confesses immediately type of beating. They confess to petty crimes, major crimes, the thought of committing a crime… it’s as though all the cops have to do is throw them in the back of the wagon and by the time they get to the station they are ready to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness.
Those big tough cartel guys, they confess. The petty drunks who rob taxis, they confess. The old men who molest their step-daughters, they confess. Those attractive guys above confessed to robbing a gas station with that very gun AND they admitted they had done it before and had plans to do it again later. If they don’t confess they have a good story about how it ‘looks’ like they did it but really it was the butler or the dog. All of this gets put in the newspaper the next day along with their picture and any evidence. I guess that is an example of ‘guilty until you prove you’re innocent’ – you get your picture and story in the paper before you see the judge.
I know this because I do my best to read the local paper every day online. I’m thinking of subscribing to the paper version because it has more of these little tidbits. Also, every night after we watch our telenovela – which is getting really good by the way, can you believe that Leonor is acting like she likes Valentina when you know she is going to do something really, really shitty very soon. Where was I? Oh, after Soy Tu Dueña the national news comes on and I watch that too. The best though are the short, local crime stories in the Diario. They don’t pull many punches, they give the full dirt on who did who and what they had to say about why they did it.
That’s the unusual part. In the US, everyone knows that you should not talk to the cops and even though most crooks do talk they sure wouldn’t admit it on the local news. Here, they not only say what they did they explain how they did it and they usually say they are sorry and give some lame excuse about why they did it… and all of it gets printed in the paper!
So, I wonder why this is. There has to be a pay off for confessing. Is it part of the Napoleonic Code that you get off easier if you confess? Can you only get bail if you confess? Is it because they are mostly Catholic and confession is good for the soul? I cannot believe that a bunch of dirt bags, and these guys are admitting to some crummy behavior, would confess if it didn’t get them some benefit.
 Yes! I did it because I'm a dumb f*ck! Look at this poor schmuck. He ripped off a taxi driver and here he is at the jail explaining everything to the lady reading him his charges. He says “Por baboso, por borracho y baboso me pasó, la verdad, sí lo hice” which means basically ‘because I’m stupid, because I was drunk and stupid and the truth is yes I did it.’ He then goes on to absolve the waitress that was with him, she didn’t do anything, and he apologizes. OK? Do you just get to go home if you apologize and confess? It doesn’t seem that it works that way so why are they doing this?
It is questions like this that make me very happy to live here, I am never at a loss for something to ponder as I fall asleep and that is the true secret to a happy old age.
 cool, clean, sun dried cotton We have been back and forth on this question, we are wobbling towards having a couple AC splits installed. Do we need them to be comfortable? No. To sleep? No. Both of us sleep well without it and might not use it at night even if we had it. My idea of heaven is a warm night, fresh white cotton sheets smelling of the sun and a lazy overhead fan. No need for blankets or hot water bottles, no cold feet, no hovering in a tiny ball for an hour until you are warm enough to sleep.
So, why are we even thinking about it? Well, the backup hard drive died the other day. No power is getting to it from the plug and my first guess is corrosion caused by humidity. We have a guest coming to stay on Sunday and I’m kind of embarrassed to put someone from NOB in a bedroom without AC. I don’t know if they will be uncomfortable or not. I don’t know how it feels to someone who lives from one controlled environment to the next. I don’t want him to be miserable but I’m not miserable so…?
We are considering putting one split in the guest bedroom and one in the office. We can run the office one on dehumidify and see if that helps the electronics. Having the option for guests makes me feel better and if it ever got so hot we were uncomfortable we could always go sleep there – assuming we had no guests.
What are the down sides? Well, my personal feeling is that being in AC makes you feel hotter when you are out of it. It starts to restrict where you go and what you do and how you feel. It gives me a sore throat to sleep in it and I’m back to blankets and comforters. I don’t want to live locked inside like much of the US, I didn’t have to live that way in California and I’m sure not going to do it down in the tropics. I want to enjoy my city, my terrace, my garden and not feel like I’m walking into a wall of heat and humidity to do it.
Electricity! That’s a problem for us, we are still trying to figure out why we have these huge electric bills. I admit, we’re sporadic at trying to figure it out, usually every 2 months after we get a bill. I have said in the past that I wouldn’t get AC until I worked out the electric because usually they want to blame a high bill on the AC and not having one keeps the discussion real. Apparently it is a well known fact that all gringos lie about how often they use their AC.
I’m reading the meter every day now and may get a handle at least on why the bill is so high if not a solution. Frankly, I doubt the addition of AC would change it much. I’m starting to point the finger at the large pump at the bottom of our well that supplies our pond, pool and irrigation. When we have used that pump, the readings go up a lot. It still could be something else in addition but I will have to recognize that the way I let the hose run and the time it is on are probably a big part of the bill.
I’m not a good little green person. I hate being in a house where the only lights on are in the room you are in. Hate it! I want my house lit, maybe not all the lights but at least some so that I can see throughout and I feel that I’m in an occupied house not hiding in a corner of light. So, when it gets dark I go around and turn on lights, in the garden, the pond, the terrace, the hall, the living room, the office and usually at least one upstairs. I’m not going to change so I’m looking at changing some of the fixtures to use different bulbs and less watts. I also don’t run to the pump room to turn off the pump when I’m moving the hose, I let it run. Bad bad bad, meh! I don’t take navy showers either. If I have to, I’ll pay for my excesses but I will also look for some ways to reduce the bill. Life is a compromise right?
 Bird of Paradise bloom I’ve been joining forums for so many years I can’t remember how long. It started with old BBS and one of those incredibly slow modems. Then, sometime in the late 1980’s I found The Well and that was my biggest intro to online forums. It had a really complex command line interface and it took some time to learn how to use it, that might have helped actually. People there were so smart, so witty, such good writers… well, many of them were journalists, unix geeks or tech writers so I guess that is part of the reason. The other part is that it could be very intimidating to jump into a discussion with such wizards so the timid, the slow and the dull stayed on the sidelines. I kind of eased in through the women’s conference, they were smart, fast and snarky too but I felt more comfortable. Eventually, I meandered out into the regular forms and had my first experience with a flame war directed at me. That was tough but I learned a lot and it tuned up how I wrote and what I wrote.
I’ve spent time on Usenet too and that will keep your skills honed if nothing else. Then MexConnect in its old version when it was wild and wooly. After it became tamer (and cost $) I stayed for several years but eventually it just irritated me more than it amused me. I think that is my criteria, if I am irritated most of the time when reading a forum then why am I reading it? Especially, why am I responding?
Fast forward through numerous RV forums, Mexico forums, gardening forums, pond forums, etc. It’s a bit of an addiction actually, I check my forums more often than I check my email. Sadly I’ve run out of forums lately, there aren’t any that I find really worthwhile and I am kind of angry with myself for hanging around some that irritate me just because I have nowhere else to go.
I enjoyed the old Merida Insider but I can not get into the current local forum, Yolisto. It’s mostly oriented to those who live out on the Gulf beaches, rows of concrete boxes occupied primarily by gringos on a rapidly disappearing beach. Mainly what I find irritating about it is that most everyone on there is trying to sell real estate or rent their house or in some way make money off new people coming in. Can you believe that they aren’t particularly honest about life here? I have a vision of them all standing around in dirty sand, holding hands and singing kumbaya to the arriving planes overhead. As you can tell, reading that forum just makes me feel snarky, not a great trait on a forum that wants to be the love child of the Yucatan. So, I read it occasionally but I don’t post anything. I’m trying not to make everyone hate me all at once.
The last one to go was a pond and garden forum that I’ve been active on since it began probably over 5 years ago. I made myself ignore the born again idiots who had rotating bible quotes as their signature line and the dementia of the owner who liked to post really questionable pictures of young girls. There were good gardeners there, experienced ponders and some very nice people. Well, the demented one couldn’t take the uppity woman who actually knows plants but won’t bow down to him and he banned her. She was one of the best, always had the right information, the ID of almost any plant, great pictures. She was a bit abrasive, she dug in when confronted and battled it out. He couldn’t take it and neither could some of the jesus freaks because she had a big signature file that said she was a pagan. Hell, I felt like saying I was moslem just to get under their skin. Religious nuts are the worst on any forum, logic is irrelevant by definition and there is no shutting them up. So, again I discovered that it was irritating me more than it was amusing me and I stopped visiting. I never make big announcements, I just stop showing up and stop posting and make myself delete the link. It’s a personal decision and I don’t think it is anyone else’s responsibility.
Now, I find myself a bit bereft with nowhere to talk about ponds and plants and soil and water. Nowhere to post pics of my gardening successes or ask questions about my failures. Please don’t suggest Facebook, I have no intention of ever joining that, um, let’s just call it a time sink. Thus, my blog is going to take on some of the stuff that I need to write about and bounce off the universe. Don’t be surprised to find a lot more garden and pond posts and probably more snark too, hope it doesn’t irritate you more than it amuses you.
**This evening we had our first rain since my last post. I waited about a half hour before putting out the plastic cup to get a “clean” catch for testing, alas… the rain stopped. Maybe later.
Learning to garden in this environment has been a steep curve, I am trying to regain my formerly green thumb. There are some things that have just been perplexing to me. One is that it is very difficult to grow mint. Mint! The stuff that eats your yard up north if you don’t pull out the runners and the stuff that I had growing without dirt in the waterfall of my pond up there. How could mint be hard to grow?
Well, it is. Most people I know have just given up and don’t try anymore. A local woman at a nursery told me that you have to keep it out of the rain if you want it to live. Then, someone else said the same thing. It stuck in my head because it seemed an odd requirement for a water loving plant. I’ve tried it in several different ways, in and out of the sun, in and out of pots. It grows for awhile and then it starts fading and turns brown and dies.
Something similar just happened to my gardenia as well. It looked good, was putting out new leaves, bloomed. Then a week or so ago it started turning brown and it quickly died. Death appeared to come from the ground, the top of the plant was the last to go.
What do these two have in common, that’s one of the things that has run through my mind. I googled ideal conditions for mint and discovered that it prefers a more acid soil. Gardenia’s need a very acidic soil to thrive and I had been using some acidic fertilizer and adding coffee grounds to the gardenia.
It occurred to me that the start of the rainy season might have something to do with this sudden death situation. I collected some rainwater and used my pond test kit to check the PH. Leapin’ Lizards! It was over 9 – extremely alkaline. I doubted the results and tried it with a new catch of rain water in a different clean plastic container – still over 9. How is this possible? I googled and I still don’t really know. What I found is that highly alkaline rain usually occurs near deserts and is due to alkaline dust being blown into the rain. I don’t think we really have that extreme a situation here in the Yucatan. Other than that, it just seems that it isn’t something that occurs often or no one writes about it.
So, now I’m wondering if the casual comment from a savvy Mexicana is a real clue, keep the mint out of the rain. The rain could be adding so much alkalinity to the plant that it just curls up and dies. If so, it’s near hopeless as it would be too difficult to keep any plant that needs full sun out of the rain. I’m not that kind of masochist that I would run a pot of mint in and out of the sun and water it only with RO – although… I might try it just as an experiment. Or, I’m off on a wild tangent.
There are other possible leads to follow.
- It could be that one of the dogs used that gardenia way too much as a fire hydrant. I’m less likely to believe that one since we have been getting so much rain and it has to be diluting any pee that ends up out there. The mint is in two places and the dogs aren’t able to pee on it. I am going to start adding tomato to the dog food to acidify their urine, it might help.
- It could be that the rock underneath that particular gardenia doesn’t drain fast enough and it drowned from wet roots. I pulled it up and there is a wet rotting mass of root under there. That would happen though if the roots were dying and no longer absorbing water in all this rain.
- Is it just this gardenia or are all gardenia’s hard to grow here? Others have told me that they have a hard time with them but I see huge trees in yards that look to me like gardenia. I need to investigate one of those more thoroughly.
- It could be one element is missing from the soil and it eventually kills the plant. Magnesium has been suggested. I found the close equivalent to epsom salt and I’ve put that on the sickly mint to see if it greens up and recovers. Some reading online though suggests that too much magnesium could cause high PH.
- The dead gardenia and the dying mint could be completely unrelated. It could be heat, humidity, iron deficiency, nematodes or other bugs in the soil, a myriad of other things.
I’m friggin lost. I did not do well in chemistry and that’s an understatement.
 dying gardenia
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