Food For Thought

I make sure the dogs are fed
the resident rodents feed on my victuals and t-shirts
the house geckos are gorging on the insects from my garden
the ants are feasting on my plants
and the grasshoppers and other insects are eating the leaves of my trees
who, I wonder,
who is going to feed me ?

More DIF card tales

And with this card, said Gloria at DIF, you can get discounts for medicine, for travels and some airlines as well and
and she paused and looked a little embarrassed
you can get discounts at places selling clothes too.
Oh Yeah!
Alright, so I did not look my best, but after almost an hour on the public buses and a walk to this office only to be told there was an long wait and spending that time walking to WalMart , fighting throngs of sweaty humanity to purchase a carton of cheap wine, nobody would look good.
And I had mistakenly put on one of my holie t-shirts.
She should have seen me when I left the office and the skies opened up and the streets flooded and cars were throwing cascades of water on the sidewalk where I was desperately running to find a bus.
Drowned rats have looked better.

Sad, really

And then we need a contact, said Gloria at DIF where I was getting my card for the elderly, typing away on a machine that sounded like it was close relation to the original Gutenberg printing press.
Anyone ? A neighbor ?
I have no neighbors, I said.
Friends ? Acquaintances ? anyone in Vallarta with a telephone number.
UH, I said, I can't think of anyone...wait....Antonio, there is Antonio, only I don't think he has a telephone.
Fine, said Gloria, we shall put down Antonio as contact.
So now I have a card, and heavens forbid something happens to me and people try and get in contact with my designated person of contact, for he is listed as :
Antonio Ontiveros,
conocido,
El centro, Vallarta.
There must be hundreds and hundreds of Antonios in the center of Vallarta.

Inconvenient Timing

I am pretty regular, which used to amuse Chuck no end. He used to say that he was regular in being not regular at all.
Most mornings I go to the bathroom to do number two
and almost every time I am sitting there, shorts around my ankles
the mutts will break out in a hysterical fit of barking.
These days I am about the only person living here on the hill, all the other houses empty and for sale or just being used a few weeks a year, so it is of interest to me to know what happens in the street.
I have, then, two options.
I can try and ignore the beasts and end up with bleeding ulcers and a heart failure or
I can push and wipe and run to the door with my shorts around my ankles and find, in most cases, it was nothing.
There is of course a third option.
Get rid of the worthless mutts.

Wish that I had done this.

My New Plant

I pinched a plant from my neighbors.
Well, in truth, I did ask if I could have a cutting when they moved.
They have moved, and I waited a decent amount of time to make sure they were well and truly gone, and then, armed with my shovel I went to retrieve my prize.
It is a wonderful looking plant. I think of it as a Japanese Maple, but I don't really know what it is.
It has beautiful serrated leaves and the whole plant, leaves and stem, is a glorious red and it produces pink flowers.
I love it.
As do every leaf eating insect living in the neighborhood.
From the joy of every morning checking the progress and marveling at the beauty of my new plant, I now check to see how many more leaves the voraciuos insects have consumed during the night.
And despair.
The woods are full of trees and plants, lots and lots for the insects to eat. Why, oh why do they have to choose my special and treasured ones ?
Something to ponder.

Frikadelle On A Fork

I am not sure what made me think of this bar that I frequented as a young person in Copenhagen.
The bar looked as if it had been around for hundreds of years, smallish interconnected rooms with lots of pictures on the walls and lots of smoke. Some pictures were so coated with smoke it was hard to imagine what they would have been like originally.
So there one would meet with friends to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and talk bullshit. And if one, late at night, would feel a bit peckish, one could order
A ROSE
A rose was a freshly fried frikadelle impaled on a fork wrapped with a paper napkin. In a surrealistic kind of way, it might look a bit like a rose.
It was the best frikadelle one could find.
These days I don't go to bars much and beers have been replaced by cheap wine; I don't smoke but I still bullshit and I still think a frikadelle on a fork is wonderful thing.
A rose by any other name.

justice.

It was a bad night with regards to scorpions.
Twice I had to jump up and stomp one of those miserable critters to death not having any kind of cutting tool close to me.
And then sweep them up in my dustpan to await further disposal, only when I got ready for that later on, a million ants had appeared from nowhere and were feasting on the carcasses of the stomped-upon scorpions.
Well now, I thought, there is some kind of justice in this, and let the ants have at it.
The next morning all there was left in the dustpan was a pair of pinchers.
Justice, says I. Maybe even poetic justice.

The Bougainvillea

Chuck planted it on the corner of the house, and he must have found an auspicious place, for it grew to an astonishing height and made a heavy trunk, not an easy feat for a climbing/trailing plant.
At its most gloriuos, people told me they could see it from the beach, like a beacon of red in all the green of the jungle.
Then came the Electric Company and cut it because of fears for their lines, but it made a steady and determined come-back.
That is until yesterday.
Yesterday arrived the maintenance guys; an old man with an impresive moustache and his dimwitted, but friendly helper.
They started to work and by the time I realized what they were up to, the Bougainvillea was gone.
All gone.
OY, I yelled to the guys. And my Bougainvillea ???
Si, said the old guy with the moustache and smiled proudly, it was big. Real big.
And that was the end of my Bougainvillea. What the Electric Company with all their fancy equipment had failed to do, it took a little old guy with an impressive moustache and his dimwitted helper, equipped only with machetes, about half an hour to accomplish.
I do not think it will ever come back after this.