Hello everyone. Hope you had a great summer. Our ‘winter’ (rainy season) is still in force and will be until around Nov/Dec when windy season hits. After that, Mar/April/May will be the hot and dry season.
It’s been a while but with all 3 of our camera’s busted I don’t have any pictures to share and let’s face it, that’s all I’d be interested in! Not to mention, there hasn’t been a whole lot of excitement going on.
Wayne FINALLY has the boat out on a mooring. He bought a small little plastic boat for rowing back and forth to Gato Solo. Or if he’s lucky, he just hitches a ride from someone. They don’t use silly things like bumpers. They bring you to your boat and pretty much just smash right into it. ‘We’re here!’. We were out last week with our friend Kevin and his brother-in-law. 5 grouper and 1 snapper. Not bad for a couple hours and about a 15 minute ride out to the spot. Lots and lots of eels though. BIG ONES! We played baseball with them….their heads were the ball and the guys batted up.
We are in our rental. It’s in a nice quiet part of town right next door to the ex-police chief. It’s great and cheap. Wayne did a lot to it to make it critter proof….like filling 2 inch gaps between the walls and doors to the outside and putting screens over the OPEN, decorative, cement block windows. It’s almost all painted on the inside and furnished enough for us now. I decided to go a little whacky with color. It looks like someone threw up jellybeans all over the place but I like it. The back yard is only about 25 feet long and 10 feet deep but backs right up to a huge cow field. The cows get loose from time to time because the fence in our neighbors yard is down. So we are getting used to cows on our front porch and looking in the windows. We also get our share of stray dogs from the cow fields. One of which who spends a good portion of her day rolling in cow sh*t. I don’t think she liked my color choice for the living room because she ran in our front door and shook sh*t all over. I don’t think the walls had been painted for more than 6 hours! She’s a good girl though. She comes and steals Fischer’s toys, plays with them for the day and then returns them. She actually returns the toys right to the spot she stole them from.
Even with all the critter proofing we did have one unwelcome guest the other day. A nice juicy scorpion. He hadn’t actually made it in the house, just hanging out on the front door jam. The stings from the scorpions here are like a wasp’s sting. Nothing deadly. That’s always a bonus. Any way, a few good whacks and that was the end of him.
We’re still looking for a house/land. We are meeting someone today to look at a nice piece of land about a mile from the beach where we keep the boat. Price and location are right but that could all change. We found one house a couple of weeks ago for about $15,000. We were actually going to buy it until the price went up the day we went to tell them we wanted it. It was tiny…shocker! And who says an OPEN AIR bathroom isn’t a good thing….AKA, pick a tree and squat. It has probably 10 banana trees on the lot so there would have been plenty of choices to change up the scenery. It would have been more of a little project house to get us started and then we could have rented it out, but blah, blah, blah…as I said, the price changed so we walked.
So one thing we miss….being able to go into a store, like a Home Depot, and buying a hammer and having it be a 1 ½ minute transaction. Shopping here can be pretty different. At some stores, as soon as you walk in you’ve got someone glued to your hip. Personal space here doesn’t exist….that’s ok, it’s their way of providing customer service. If you touch something they’ll take it and hold it for you figuring if you touched it you must want it. We quickly learned how to say ‘I’m just looking, thank you.’ Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much. So then you find an actual item you want. Ok should be simple, go to register and pay. Silly, not at all. You have to first go to one group of computers….of course at the other end of the store from where you actually pay…show them what you are buying, they do their thing then send you to the other group of computers. You stand there and wait until your slip is printed out….a 4 page carbon copy thing. The stamps come out and pages are flipped, stamps are stamped, it’s a frenzy. Finally money is exchanged. We are getting close!!!…but don’t get too excited. Each item is then checked by another employee to make sure it’s been paid for. No problem if you just bought a hammer but when you’ve got 3 shopping carts filled, it takes some time. And you think maybe a few items could be skipped since someone was with you pretty much the entire time you shopped and made it up to this point. Not a chance. Ok, everything checks out. Now the bagging starts. I swear if a queen size mattress could fit in a bag it would be put in one. I will say, they are experts at fitting every possible item in a bag. Ok, we are so close, SO CLOSE. But wait, it’s knot tying time. Every bag is now tied in a knot, not just one simple knot either. At least two but usually more. You can be damn sure you won’t be reusing that bag because you are going to need to rip it open if you want your things. I dare anyone to try and untie these knots! Shopping always makes for a few good laughs and raised eye brows.
We’ve got an exciting couple of days ahead of us. This afternoon 3 couples are coming over…there will be 3 guitars, a fiddle, a few harmonics, tambourines and whatever else everyone has that will make noise. Our poor neighbors. They might actually wish for once that there were a noise ordinance. If they can play the accordions while barking at each other (barking is another story) until 4:00 AM EVERY SATURDAY then we can have a Gringo Jam party for a couple of hours.
Saturday we are supposed to go to a cock fight. I know, I know but here it’s like going to a baseball game. Our friend’s neighbor raises the fighters and we were over yesterday checking them out. I doubt we’ll make it part of regular routine but we’ve got to go at least once. Maybe we’ll even win a few bucks! Or sponsor our own bird and if it wins we get a cow!!
Lastly, the barking thing. It’s a way of greeting I guess you could say and it truly is a bark. Not a ‘woof, woof’ type of bark though. It’s got some depth. Wayne’s been practicing which I’m sure is really impressing our surrounding neighbors. It starts off with a sound almost like you got punched in the gut then moves right into sounding like what Horseshack used to do on Welcome Back Kotter. Remember that….Oh, Oh, OHHHH Mr. Kotta. Of course the bark doesn’t include the Mr. Kotta part and it’s got less of the Jewish/NY accent. With that said, I expect you all to practice and bring your best barks when you come visit!! AAAaahOH, AAAaahOH!
