Evdad is off on a ride today to Volcan Colima. She had a two-mile high exhalation yesterday and I'm excited for him to get to see it up close. She's currently the most active volcano in North America and a mere 2.5 hours from our house.
Evboy was here for 10 days over Spring Break. We took a couple of days to go to the beach, stopping to look at Colima from the side of the road. She was having just a little upper GI distress that day, but still beautiful:
I wish I could offer you a soundtrack of our lives down here. At night, we have a resident owl that hunts and hoots. The morning cacophony is lovely. We've lucked out and inherited a yard full of extraordinary birds. Soon, they'll get used to my camera lens and not see it as a big predator. I can show you pictures of the vermillion flycatchers, the hordes of hummingbirds, the orioles and other assorted wildlife we enjoy. That's the good.
The bad: Our town of 6,000 has a party rental store that recently acquired a jukebox with Karaoke capabilities. Can you see where I'm going with this? This picture shows the morning after at my neighbor's house. It started at noon yesterday with a jumping castle and Disney tunes, ramped up to oompah Mexican country music in the early evening and came to conclusion with a crescendo of Mexican rap about 11pm. All is well, right?
Noooo! At midnight, one of the kids woke up and turned the jukebox music to low (presumably not to wake the parents) but left the Karaoke microphone on high. I fell back asleep at 2am and the kid was still singing. At 6am, the family woke and started tidying up. The jukebox rental was coming to an end. I understand, really I do. I told Ev they wanted to squeeze the last few pesos worth out of the ol' jukebox while they cleaned up. Ev said, "In the States you'd have been all over them with your ire." He's right. I would have been. I had bleary eyed coffee in bed serenaded by more oompah than I was feeling.
Something I'm sad about: Another neighbor either lost or chopped down one of the most beautiful things on our northern horizon. It was a norfolk pine-you know, the kind of houseplant you have in Albuquerque and can kill before it gets to be a foot tall. Click on the picture below so you can feel my loss.
And this is the largest of our potable water tinacos. We have two more in other places.
Then we have the pool (also could be considered a water storage tank) with a very cute pool boy.
Evboy was here for 10 days over Spring Break. We took a couple of days to go to the beach, stopping to look at Colima from the side of the road. She was having just a little upper GI distress that day, but still beautiful:
I wish I could offer you a soundtrack of our lives down here. At night, we have a resident owl that hunts and hoots. The morning cacophony is lovely. We've lucked out and inherited a yard full of extraordinary birds. Soon, they'll get used to my camera lens and not see it as a big predator. I can show you pictures of the vermillion flycatchers, the hordes of hummingbirds, the orioles and other assorted wildlife we enjoy. That's the good.
The bad: Our town of 6,000 has a party rental store that recently acquired a jukebox with Karaoke capabilities. Can you see where I'm going with this? This picture shows the morning after at my neighbor's house. It started at noon yesterday with a jumping castle and Disney tunes, ramped up to oompah Mexican country music in the early evening and came to conclusion with a crescendo of Mexican rap about 11pm. All is well, right?
Something I'm sad about: Another neighbor either lost or chopped down one of the most beautiful things on our northern horizon. It was a norfolk pine-you know, the kind of houseplant you have in Albuquerque and can kill before it gets to be a foot tall. Click on the picture below so you can feel my loss.
Changing the subject again. For months we were completely flummoxed by the water situation down here, but bless Evdad, he's getting a handle on it. The property's plumbing is confusing: we have potable water and non-potable water, softened water and hard water. Things that should be potable are not, things that should not use softened water, do. Water appears intermittently from the city through two pipes, it is not metered. We pay annually around $60 usd. Sometimes the city gives us water (Senora! Tenemos pression!) and sometimes the city doesn't seem to have the water turned on (No hay agua hoy senora). No city water=no problema because we have three big storage tanks called tinacos for potable water and one big storage pond called an aljibe for the yard. (I recently discovered the gardener is growing his "Catholics don't eat meat on Friday" fish in it).
This is our aljibe full of tilapia.
All this to say, SewellFam2 should never have to be thirsty and the toilets should always flush at Casa Luna Azul. Right? We have water everywhere!
To quote my favorite Mexican border crossing agent, "we are having some problem Senora". One day in a wild confluence of bad juju, the city water main broke, I accidentally filled the pool from the potable water hose bib while Tony was watering the membrillos orchard from the aljibe. We went from hydrated to thirsty in four short hours. And it lasted for three days.
In trying to sort out the problem, Evdad went out to check the large tinaco. Several days after resolution, he happened to mention to me it had quite a bit of algae in it. From that moment on, every time I drank water all I could taste was swamp. Ev pointed out at least a hundred times that I had been drinking the same water for a month and never mentioned swamp before, but whatever. Mama was not happy. Happily, it turns out, Mexico has invented tinaco cleaners. I hired one to come out-he was a jolly stout guy with his hired hand: a kid the size and shape of a piece of bacon. They got to work with a pressure washer and a scraper-the bacon strip kid was lowered into the tinaco. He hand bailed the algae with a bucket.
I was on the porch watching from afar. I asked Ev, "What the heck? Are we paying Tony (our gardener) to watch the tinaco guy all day?" Wisely, he said, "Let him do his thing and stay out of it." Unwisely, I jumped up to go see what was going on. Tony saw me coming down the driveway and intercepted, holding up his arms. "You don't want to go down there", said he.
Let me preface the next picture by saying nothing, and I mean NOTHING, goes to waste down here. What came out of the tinaco, we used in the compost pile. There is something to be grateful for in every situation. But yuck. Tony carted up at least 10 times this.
What we learned: Tinacos should be cleaned annually. Ours probably had not been done since the house was built. Learning curve was steep that week.
Coming up next: meat in Mexico.
Posts
