I stare at my 'in box' where scads of mails from good friends and family are waiting for a reply
and I sigh
and I think that this is not really the way to start the new year, owing so many a line or two
after all, I replaced the sponges in the kitchen
and threw out books and magazines and other out dated items
to make room for the stash of things to come
so now is the time to sit down
and answer the mails.......
and then again
maybe tomorrow, the first day of the new year is a better start
that is, if I don't have a nasty hang-over
in which case I will just wait another day.
After all, it will be a new year with 365 unused days to fill with chatter and emails.
See...I got around it.
Happy New Year.

It is the 24th. Traditionally the celebration of Xmas, at least for we who grew up in Europe.
Chuck was always amenable to celebrate this night rather than the morning of the 25th, and for so many years that was the rule of the house.
Like eating the salad after the dinner rather than before.
Chuck has been gone for eight years now and I have survived many Xmases by myself.
So why, I wonder, why is this year so difficult.
I have done my preparations. I have even baked a bread to go with the dinner. I have cooked and I have imbibed. Without that I am not sure I would be able to get through this.
So I fill yet another glass with cheap red wine, check the pots a'cooking and wonder
why?
I could have gone to McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken and gotten a meal that would be filling if not exactly nutritious, and with a wide circle of losers like I with no other place to go, quietly getting through the evening maybe remembering better times, maybe not remembering at all, just filling a need.
But here I am, in my house with The Worthless Ones, some of whom have not even bothered to show up for din-dins, slowly emptying the gallon sized bottle of cheap wine and thinking of all my friends and family, all so far away.
Merry Xmas.

I don't know if this qualifies as a Christmas gift or merely a treat.
Many, many years ago Chuck bought a tea kettle, and not just an ordinary tea kettle. This was in the shape of an eggplant complete with the right color and top and handle in green.
And I didn't like it. Not one little bit, and yet is has been with first us and now me for a long time.
I have checked stores for tea kettles, I have visited websites checking for tea kettles and then, out of the blue, today as I was pushing my cart in Sam's loaded with nothing but a bag of dog food, I saw "The Kettle". There it was. Sparkly steel and clever design with a handle that won't get hot and a whistle to tell me the water is boiling and a price I could afford.
I got it. I love it. And more that anything I love throwing the old one out. Wave my wand and say
" Be Gone".
That is what is either a gift or maybe merely a treat.

well listen to this, said Jane when I told her that at times when I go to Sam's all I buy is a big bag of dog food.
When I go to Costco, she said, all I buy is napkins, toilet paper and paper plates. That's all.
Paper plates ?
I suddenly had visions of Jane, who lives alone in a small apartment, having wild and boisterous parties, maybe with some of the other senior citizens who live in the complex.
What, I asked her, if you don't mind telling me, what are you doing with the paper plates ?
Eating my dinner she said, as if the question was silly. I don't want to do dishes.
But Jane, I said. You already eat TV dinners and there is only one of you. How many plates could you possibly use. Real plates.
I just don't want to be bothered, she said.
I fervently hope it will be long time before I find that I don't want to be bothered.
A very, very long time.

I made a wreath.

Christa mailed me a photo of a wreath she made and which won 1st prize awarded by the ladies in her Connecticut neighborhood. A lovely wreath it was, and so I decided that I wanted to make one too.

And I went to the jungle for vines for the basic part and scoured my drawers and shelves for left-over scraps to use as flowers and ribbons and bows.

This is the result.. my one concession to Xmas. It was fun to make, so enjoy it as did I.

I like watching cooking shows on the telly.
Not the kind where some mad queen is having all kinds of fits and using language that even I--and I am tough--blanch at
no
I like to watch the shows with people who really love to cook and want to share their love and knowledge with folks like me.
And so I caught a show with a Cuban lady ( skinny, but then she might have been away from her native island for many years ) showed how to make chicken with a Cuban flavor.
I love this, I thought; I can do this.
And so I did. Today. But when I counted the bowls holding chopped, minced and otherwise cut up ingredients, I said to myself....
all this for just one person !
Am I so despondent that I have to fill my counter with chopped, minced and otherwise cut up ingredients to prove that I can cook, that I have not yet succumbed to the easy way out and just getting frozen dinners.
Whatever.
It gets me working, and if the result is a deliciuos dinner, who is complaining ?
Not I.
Bitching a bit maybe. Complaining ? NO.

Funny what things are important to one.
I have been proud of the fact that I still, at my age, can put on my pants standing up which requires some kind of balance and skill.
And that had made me feel a little less decrepit, to be able to stand on one leg whilst hoisting up the shorts .
That is, till a few days ago when my back was feeling tricky and one knee a bit tender and I had to sit down to put on my shorts.
Forget the minor aches and pains, the attack of gout and the constant battle with gas; sitting down to put on my shorts made me feel old.
Very old.
My back is better and the knee back to normal and I dress standing up again, but I know there is a limit. One day I shall be glad I can even get dressed by myself, forget about standing on one leg.
Till then I will stand proudly on one leg putting on my shorts, one leg at a time.

So who needs a cat?
This morning a couple of the dogs were sniffing around one of the cabinets and I got a bit nervous since one never knows what animal might be lurking and exciting the mutts.
With the help of a flashlight I saw that it was a mouse hiding behind the cabinet and I relaxed. Mice are pretty smart critters and good survivors.
So I put it out of my mind and went about my daily doings till I heard a scuttle and checked out the cause.
The mouse had taken a chance trying to escape and Priscilla had caught it. I know because she was prancing around the house with the mouse in her mouth, the little tail hanging down on one side.
And she took her trophy outside where she eventually got bored with it and left it for the other mutts to play with.
It ended up on my front steps, guarded by one of the mutts. A small, wet and very dead rodent.
So who needs cats when the dogs will kill rodents just as well.

This being the "season" and all, and having Flemming tell me about all the great things he is going to cook for a Christmas get-together, I decided that I too had to something special.
I wanted to make a liver pate.
I have nor done one for years, so now was as good a time as any.
And so I went to the store and bought stuff for the pate
anchovies...very special for the pate...check
onions, garlic, cream, butter...check, check and check
it was not until I was on my way back to Mismaloya that I realized
I had forgot to buy liver.
You cannot make liver pate without liver
you can, however, postpone the event till you get your manure together and your shopping list in order.
Until then, no pate.
Senior moments may be funny to others; they are not funny to seniors.

This month it has been 11 years since Chuck and I moved in to this house, and for 11 years I have disliked the dining room chairs, but they were Chuck's choice, so for a long time after his death, I did nothing to change them.
In the meantime I have gotten a new table, and the chairs are even more disagreeable.
And then I thought........paint the suckers.
They are not made of precious wood, in fact they are made from cheap pine, and they are what is known here in Mexico as " rustico ".
So I started to paint them.
And now I can stand them.
I still don't really like them but with the paint, I can stand them.
Such a simple thing; should have done this a long time ago. And before the termites got to them.
Ah well; so I am a bit slow, but I do muddle on. Like with the chairs. One at a time.

It is Thanksgiving and I wondered, as I am sure do millions of others today, what to give thanks for.
I was standing in my kitchen when I was having these heavy thoughts, helped no doubt by a bottle ( ! ) of red wine given to me by Kathy and James.
What to be thankful for ?
And I looked at my dining table where I had placed a bouquet of bougainvillea that I had picked this morning and thought:
This is what I am thankful for.
That I am still able to pick flowers
that I live in a place where on the 25th of November I can pick them
and that I still appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of these simple things
for that I am thankful
and to be able to share this with my friends and family who read my blog.
Happy Thanksgiving.

I am not old.
Compared to Methuselah who lived to be..it is said..969 years, I am a spring chick.
And yet.
Limbs are not working the way they used to
and the mind is definitely not.
But the problem is that the mind seems to be growing older at a much slower pace than the body, or maybe it just seems that way.
Maybe, cleverly the mind is fooling you to think that you can still think in a young way when all you do is make a silly fool of yourself.
Getting old is not fun at all.

I had already made the meatloaf, so I wondered what to make to go with it aside from the ever useful potatoes.
Beans, I thought. I am going to make a pot of beans.
I live in Mexico where beans is as important a part of the daily menu as is pizza to norte americanos, our brethren north of the border.
Beans.
I rinsed out my bean pot and dumped a bag of beans into it, added water and thought...wow..maybe I overdid the amount.
Never mind.
I started the process and now I have a pot of beans and enough to feed a small family.
I shall have to freeze some and that is fine too. I have come across recipes ( mostly for chile con carne) calling for cans of beans. All I have to do is to dig some bag of beans out of the freezer and use that. Simple.
And I do like beans. Seriously.

When Sara, who has never been to this house, visited me I grandly announced to her that I was living in 'genteel squalor' with thousands of dollars worth of art on the walls but covers on the sofa and chairs because the worthless ones insist on using them for anything ranging from eating mini cocos ( a messy business ) to a safe place to throw up after eating grass.
I refuse to refinish the covers on the couch and chairs for sure as shit, like when I mop the floors, the worthless ones will take that as an invite to do their business.
So I live in genteel squalor and I hate it.
But the worthless ones are happy.

Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent
( They who lie with dogs will rise with fleas )

As with most sayings, there is always more than a grain of truth to it.
I know, for I "lie with dogs " or more correctly, the dogs sleep on the bed with me.
I do not invite them, in fact I disinvite them heartily, but almost to a morning I wake up to find my bed covered with snoring, farting happy canines.
And they have fleas. You cannot live in the woods as we do, and not have fleas and ticks.
And even though I have read that fleas will prefer canine blood, I am here to attest that they are not against human blood and nor are the ticks.

So yes, if you "lie with dogs" you will rise with fleas. I know. I have and I do.

To face one's inadequacies is not always pleasant.
I have been facing some lately;

My kitchen sink is in need of repair. I have the parts. I do not have the know-how. I tried, the maintenance guy from the house down the street tried. My sink still needs repair.

My sewing machines developed belt problems. I finally got new belts ( apparently not available in Mexico ) and tried to change them. And couldn't. The machines still don't work.

I got a music thingie from Roger to install on my computer which would enable me to listen to his vast treasure of recorded music. I tried and I failed. I daily look at the little black box and wonder what it might take to find someone to install it.

And I wonder who I can find to fix all the other silly things that have accumulated little by little.
I obviously am not that person, although, in defense of my poor skills I must report that I tackled the chore of the print.
It is a wonderful print of the actor Edwin Booth as Hamlet that has been around as long as Chuck and I shared house and before that and it got a bad case of the mildews.
That I could fix.
Maybe there is hope, as long as the problems are not too complicated or technical.

Kunsten At Græde i Kor. This was one weird experience, sitting in my TV room in Mexico watching a movie in Danish. And not just your run of the mill Danish. No Sir. This was in a heavy local accent, so heavy in fact, that I had to rely on the subtitles. In Spanish. And I despaired. I despaired till I caught a brief, very brief, commentary by a British footballer who had just doubled his salary ( already in the millions of pounds ) by threatening to leave his club. And all I could understand from his guttural utterings were......
Y'know..Y'know...Y'know....
That was the extent of his vocabulary, or so it seemed
and then I didn't feel so bad anymore, not understanding the lingo in the Danish movie.
I like words. I like to be able to express precisely what I feel.
I am a minority.
All I can do is being me and point out to others who might feel the same, that language is a precious gift and we should all do the best we can
Y'know.

I decided to look for and tap into my gentler self.
you see, when I almost stepped on a snake in my hallway, rather that going for my snake killing hatchet, I went for a broom to evict this unwelcome visitor from my home.
Live.
And I chased it around the bedroom, catching it trying to escape under the bed.
I succeeded. I took one mighty swipe at this reptile and sent it out on the deck, where I repeated the procedure and made it go skitting down the stairs ending up in some undergrowth, lost to view.
And I felt good. I did not kill it and yet, it was out of the house and I could relax.
Sort of.
If there was one, might there not be another?
or might this one not find its way back in?
Is killing these unwelcome reptiles not better that letting your gentler side get the better of you.
I sure don't know.
Next time I will weigh my options carefully
and most likely whack it.
Nothing like certainty. Dead snakes don't come back. Ever.

I wanted to write a post using a quote from a favorite author of mine, Karen Blixen, and I searched and searched but I never found the quote. What I did find, re-find, was my admiration, my love for her writing. Such clarity, such a feeling for words describing the world around her.
Since I was a teen I have loved her writing and one of the most thrilling happenings of my then short life was seeing her walking with her secretary in Copenhagen.
Now I just have the memories and I can't even find the quote I was looking for.
Never mind. In my mind I still see her slowly walking, gently assisted by her secretary, wrapped in a fox collar and a cloche hat and turning eyes heavily outlined in kohl on some witless boy from the suburbs.
Me.
I will never forget, and she will always be my number one author. Always.

The mutts were on a tear last night. It seemed that they had to bark and check out the kitchen every hour.
In desperation I even got up and checked out the kitchen, thinking that maybe the cat had been back but alas, no cat nor other animals. And yet they persisted so when morning came and I finally decided to get up I went to check the kitchen again.
I opened cabinets, I opened cupboards, I pulled out drawers and nothing.
Till I got the bright idea to pull out the bottom drawer of the place that seemed to bother the mutts the most and LO...there was the cause of all the hullabaloo.
A small and at that moment very confused mouse was getting out of what must have been a very uncomfortable place, squeezed in between drawers and no way to get out. It must have been the mouse SOS'es that the mutts heard.
And there it was, looking around and then jumping up on the kitchen counter searching for something, paying very little attention to the human who was standing in absolute awe of the fearlessness of this tiny rodent.
And it did a thing that deeply impressed me. It found a glass left on the counter with some Jamaica flavored water still left in it and somehow managed to get to the rim, hold on with the hind feet and get down far enough to be able to drink this liquid. And when sated, to pull up and look for a safe place to hide.
I know they are destructive little buggers, but watching this guy doing what it took to survive, how could I ever kill that?
Snakes I will kill, yes. Scorpions as well. Mice! I am not so sure. I hope this little guy finds a better place to live.

It has been a good year for my outdoor spiders. In one place I counted six with intertwining webs, a spider condo if you will. And I was impressed that they could sort out who got the flies and who did not, but when I checked back a couple of days later the amount of spiders was down to two, and they had moved their webs way up in a tree. Maybe communal living did not work out too well for the arachnids.
I keep checking on my remaining spiders who are growing enormous with endless strings of victims neatly lined up in long lines, with the male lurking somewhere near, but not too near so as not to annoy the female who is easily ten times his size and very cranky and has been known to eat an incautious male.
But today I saw a male get his wicked way with a female, the biggest in my flock of spiders and with the longest line of victims and therefore, I assume, the most content and easily swayed.
So now I can depend on another batch of spiders next year.

In the store the sign on the box of frozen chicken legs and thighs said seventeen pesos per kilo, but when I checked the label on my bag, I had been charged twenty one.
Not a great difference, to be sure, but it was the principle of it that made me call attention to this and get the price altered.
On the bus home from this shopping, a young kid with malformed hands were singing, loudly and off key, to make money for an operation he said.
I gave what I had gained from pointing out the difference in prices, and then some.
This was money well spent.

I had a break-down.
Not so much I as my car.
I was reluctantly driving to town, fighting my way around the massive potholes when I started to smell something nasty.
This I automatically thought was the car in front of me.
Not so.
When I happened to look at my heat gauge the line was so far in the red that I couldn't even see it
and so I found a place to turn off, not an easy thing on a road that has the sea on one side and mountains on the other. But I was in luck and found an area as of yet undeveloped and for sale.
And there I waited for a tow-truck to come and truck me to my mechanic and, surprisingly, I was rather calm about it all.
My stomach was not, however. I had to go the bathroom really, really badly and there were none available.
All I had to rely on was a strong sphincter muscle to save me from the indignity of tell tale marks on my shorts.
So for two hours I battled the loose bowels and hot sun till the truck came and saved me and my car.
The car is still not ready and I, when I finally made it home to my own bathroom, didn't really need it so badly anymore.
Funny things, cars and stomachs. You think you know them and Boom they fool you.

I seem to have real bad luck getting my favorite cookies home from the store without crushing the packaging and finding a whole bunch of cookies nothing but crumbs.
Part of the problem is also that the Mexicans have not yet taken to the way of protective packaging where you spend more time opening the stuff than you do devouring the content.
So the other day when the bag boy at my local supermarket ( bag boy is a slight misnomer. This bag boy was even older than I ) suggested packing my stuff in a card board box rather than the endless plastic bags, I felt righteous and "green" and agreed, also hoping that this time I would get my cookies home intact.
Not so.
When I grabbed the box from the back of the car and schlepped it from the garage to the front door, I had to get a good grip on the awkward sized box and not until I dropped it on the kitchen counter did I realize that exactly where I had had to grip the box was where the cookies were.
And yes, they were in crumbs.
Maybe I should pretend that I really, really like my cookies in crumbs. That way I would not be so upset.

I am sure other dogs do it too, but the pack of social misfits that i share my house with, have raised this to perfection.
Whenever they have eaten grass or some unsavory thing found on their forays in the jungle, they choose the couch to throw up on.
If they want to munch on one of the greasy mini cocos that they find at this time, it has to happen on the couch
and if they get a bone, which is not often as I have learned my lesson, it will be devoured on the couch or one of the chairs.
All of it messy and all of it annoying.
The only good thing is that they still think of the floor as their private place to do their business when it is the slightest bit damp outside or,which is getting more common, they really, really don't feel like going out late at night.
I dread the day they get the idea that couches and chairs make fine toilets too.

When I was a child, I cried easily and I blushed easily.
The crying I was able to control, but never the blushing.
As a young man, as a mature man, as a middle aged man I was pretty good at controlling the crying.
I am now an old man and I am right back to where I was when I was a child.
Show me an ad with a polar bear hugging a human and I weep;
Show me the diminutive president of Mexico excitedly yelling Viva Mexico on the independence day, and I burst into tears.
Strangely enough, it takes a bit more to make me blush these days. I still do, but not as easily as before.
I am not sure what this means, but since I spend a lot of time in the company of the rabble of mutts I share my house with, and since they don't give a hoot whether I blush or cry, the question is kind of rhetorical.
I cry and I blush and I am going to live with it.
So there.

I admit to being a bit tired of having the furniture eaten by termites, so I had the god idea--at least I thought it was a good idea--to replace my desk where the computer is with a table with a base made of iron. It might rust, but it would never be eaten by termites.
After the requisite waits and false dates I finally got my base and placed it in my garage and set about to find a place to have the top made.
The carpenter I found, an older guy with eyesight so bad his glasses looked like bottoms of coke bottles, promised the top in a week.
True to form the top was not ready in time and then my car had to go into repair and I had no way of getting th top, when it finally was ready, to my house; schlepping it on the bus was out. A taxi trip too expensive and my one and only neighbor and owner of a truck was strangely reluctant to help out, so there it was, the table top, at the carpenter waiting for my car to be ready. And when it finally was, after endless waiting for parts shipped from the US, I picked up the top and brought it back, triumphantly, to the house where I started the process of painting it only to run out of paint and when I went to the paint store for another can of the same paint,red, that I had started painting with, somewhere there was a misunderstanding, for the paint I was given was lavender. Now I nothing against lavender as a color, but not for my table and and most decidedly not in my house.
So here I am, months later, with an unfinished table top for a desk that is still sitting in the garage and wondering if it really was that important to get a new place for the computer.
And the price keeps going up as the latest idea is to have a filing cabinet as part of the system.
Yeah right.
I do have funny ideas at times.

Some guy in a trailer park in Kentucky shot his wife and step daughter in a dispute over breakfast.
He also shot the neighbors where the wife and step daughter were trying to hide.
And I thought...how very strange. To be that upset about a small thing like breakfast and to shoot somebody....I could never do that
or could I ?
Many's the time when the Worthless Ones on one of their barking sprees will not stop no matter how loudly I yell and cuss and I know
if at those times I had a gun
and I don't like them, if anything they terrify me
but if I had a gun at those moments
I think I would use it.
Is barking all that much different than some miserable breakfast ?.

And with humidity you get mildew.
I have seen my formerly white walls of the house develop streaks of green, and I was aware that the iron door to bodega was showing signs of mildew.
What I did not know, was that my front door, painted a bright and cheerful red, was being attacked as well.
Nasty stuff, mildew.
To-day, with a few hours respite from the daily rain, I took to the doors with a vengeance. The walls I can do little about at this point, but my doors I can keep mildew free.
Or at least try to.

So here is my conundrum :

Do I drink and then get depressed or
am I depressed therefore I drink ?

That I drink is a fact. That I get depressed is a fact as well.
The unclear part is how they interconnect.

I shall pour me another glass of wine and mull this over.

At my coffee supplier's there was a pot like the one I use in for repair, and I checked it out and I was appalled. This is the type you put on the stove to force boiling water through a filter to the top part and mostly they are made of aluminum. As was this. And with the bottom part black from sitting on the stove and I thought
Dear Me....not very nice this pot
and then it hit me...I am turning into my mother.
My mother would, surreptitiously, check out the neighbor's laundry when hanging on the lines and make comments like.....too bad about Mrs. So and So, she must have a hard time, her sheets are really not all that white, are they?
as if it really mattered if the sheets were super white.
And here I am, doing the same thing, thinking....poor owner of the coffeepot. It really is not all that clean, is it.
I am sure it still makes perfectly good coffee.

It took one lightning strike and one tremendous thunderclap and my mouse fainted dead away and I was left staring at the same page on my computer.
Nothing I could do would make the arrow move, so in desperation I called my computer store and was told that, yes, it might be something very serious and yes, it might just be a dead mouse, either way I was stuck with the unmoving page on my screen.
Enough, I thought, and pressed the magic button and shut down the computer.
There, I thought, now we try again, and pressed the magic button to start and there was the arrow....
and it moved.
All is well. The mouse has recovered.
Who would have thought that the mouse would be that sensitive.
The world of computers is a wondrous one

Well, well, well.
There I thought that I was an original. Not so I fear.
Trying to change my URL to something more manageable, I discovered that there are many, many thinking Alans around and many have chosen the name Alans Thoughts ( I seem to be the lone apostrophe ) so, much to my disappointment, no simple change for my URL.
But I tried, oh how I tried. And Oh how I found myself in places where I knew not what I was doing.
End result ?
Same old, same old URL.
Now it looks pretty good to me.

And another thing

I cannot change my silly url, but maybe I can figure this email business out.
Maybe.

--
Gay-bashing

Violence against men who love men by men who fear they love men

The Cynic's Dictionary

Now this is right fascinating.
I discovered a tab saying "Stats" and since I was bored and had nothing better to do, I clicked it.
And it showed me how many and when folks visited my blog
but most intriguing
from which part of the world
and to my surprise ( and theirs too, I'll wager ) there had been visits from China (!) and Argentina and Canada and, no surprise, Mexico.
Somehow my Danish audience is failing me.
Fascinating stuff, this.

I remember a hymn from my childhood which went like this:
Han bærer med smil sin byrde
translating to "He carries ( shoulders ? ) his burden with a smile".
Even as a kid I was a bit skeptical about that concept, the smiling through adversity.
I was contemplating this as I was sliding down the hill, this time ending up with a scraped knee due to a very slick stretch and not very secure sandals.
And I was on my way to town by bus since the car is still in repair, picking up parts for the latest disaster, my kitchen sink.
And frankly, the smiling and shouldering burdens is just getting a bit old. I want a break and soon.
Smiling and shouldering burdens..indeed.

We had another black-out this morning, following the one last night and all the mini ones after that.
This time I packed my backpack, locked the door, skidded down the hill, passed the tree that fell down a week ago and still is waiting to be cleaned up, and to the bus stop to get me to Vallarta.
Where I went to the local supermarket for a few items like dog food and turkey ham
and where they had a sale on cabbage and white onions.
I joined the frenzy of the bosomy, sweaty Mexican housewives and tore the tough, outer leaves off the cabbage--99 centavos a kilo--and elbowed my way to the better of the white onions--1 peso a kilo--and hauled my stash, my treasure to the bus, sat down and calmed down enough to think:
whatever am I to do with this ?
Onions, yes, I use all the time. Very useful item, but cabbage? Cabbage that I mostly use for "brunkaal' a dish involving slabs of pork and cabbage, cooked with sugar and vinegar. I have no pork, so no "brunkaal".
What then, for surely a sale like this must not be ignored. What then?
Ah, I have a recipe for chicken and cabbage. All is not lost. I shall make chicken and cabbage and enjoy the tremendous deal I got on the cabbage.
I wonder what all the sweaty, bosomy housewives were planning to do with their cabbage. A dish as of yet undiscovered by me.
Sheesh.....at 99 centavos a kilo they could afford to throw the cabbage at their cheating husbands or screaming kids. That might stop them.

Every child has favorite family members. One of mine was my Faster Anna.
Faster in Danish = father's sister. In Danish we articulate between the different sides of the family, until you get to great grand parents, when suddenly it doesn't matter anymore.
So Faster Anna was the sister of my father, like Moster Else was the sister of my mother.
Simple, no?
And fortunately Anna also escaped a name including Gud..my father was named Gudmand, his other sister was named Gudrund and a brother was named Gudmund, but my favorite aunt was just Anna. Plain and simple.
Faster Anna had an ample bosom, a slight but discernible mustache, the same combination of, in those days, very dark, almost black hair and blue eyes as my father, smoked cheroots and never ever talked bad about her peculiar siblings, some of whom were felons and murderers or just plain drunks.
She was a good person who adored her little brother, my father.
I will never really know what made her the person she was since I left the country and family and went to live abroad , but I shall always remember her as my favorite aunt, smiling gently as she smoked her cheroots.

I am a creature of habit. I like to shop at the same supermarket because
i. I know where all the stuff is and don't have to go on searches, and
ii. There is underground parking which, with the climate we have here is much to be preferred to
the outdoor variety.

The other day I had to go to the telephone office for a new modem and decided to stop at the supermarket next to that store.
This market is huge and it is good and I am now thinking that my choice of market might have to change.
And then I realize that I would have to learn where everything is and cope with no underground parking and, well, it hardly seems worth it.
So I shall stick with the market I know. I can always make special outings to the other on, like once a year or so.
Good to have habits. Better not to break them.

Whenever I pull on one of my t-shirts that have holes from the rapacious rodents or unraveling hems due to extreme old age, I swear that I will get rid of it.
And then I wear it, wash and fold it and the next time I wear it I will say the same thing.
One day I will. One day I will check my collection of decrepit t-shirts and chuck the worst.
That will give me a lot of room in my closet
and a chance to buy some new ones.

Another reason to drink.
There I was reading the increasingly depressing news on the computer, all the while listening to music from King FM out of Seattle, when the chirpy host announced an aria from Dido and Aeneas by Purcell as sung by Renee Flemming.
Whoopty Doo I thought. A most favorite aria of mine.
And I listened
and I started to yell back at the computer, which is something I normally limit to the telly.
So when the cut was over I rushed to my collection of CDs to find my version of this aria as sung by Janet Baker, and I played it full volume--I have no neighbors--to find out if i were crazy or not.
I am not. Janet is far superior to Renee.
So why the drinking you might ask.
That comes from the fact that I have nobody to share this with.
When Chuck was alive we used to have "discussions" about music, about performers and certainly about singers.
He might not have agreed with me--although I think he would--but he would have been there to argue the case, for and against.
Now I have nobody, and so I pour me another glass of cheap wine and write a post.
Whoever thought that good music could lead to indulgence.

I had declared a unilateral moratorium on Cheap Red Wine, and for two days I had nothing but weak tea and tepid water.
Till today.
Today, when I faced yet another day of having to bus it to town for food for the mutts, and talking to my mechanic in charge of making my car OK, I decided to lift the moratorium. But fast.
Furthermore, of all the many problems that plague me, a little headache from too much wine is nothing. Scraping together enough shekels to pay for the repair of the car is a problem.
A big problem.
So schlepping a couple of cartons of cheap wine up the hill seems like child's play compared to gathering enough money together to pay for the repair of the car. My car. My only car for the last seventeen years.
And I sold the bicycle.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I do not expect any surprise party, in fact I do not expect any party at all, so I have decided to make my own.
I shall bake myself a Queen Mother cake, I shall cook a chicken with a lot of good things and I might even spring on a good bottle of wine.....well now, there I got all carried away.
I am sure my usual Cheap Red Wine in a carton will do just fine.
What I might consider though, is to start the toasting a bit early, just to make sure that I get to say:

Happy Birthday Alan.

And many, many more.

I have bats. I don't have a belfry, but I do have cathedral ceilings and from the hightest point Chuck and I decided to hang a triplet of chandeliers.
This is where the bat or bats hang out.
I never see the culprits only their droppings under the chandeliers and the occasional butterfly wing or grasshopper leg. And the mess on the arms of the chandeliers.
I don't mind the presence of the bats so much; what I do mind is the mess on the floor and if one does not get to it in time, it is darn near impossible to get rid of. That part I mind because it forces me to houseworky things not necessarily on my schedule which is, to be frank, not very often.

In this debacle about the repair of my car, the mutts are winners. Hands down.
I cannot haul big bags of food up the hill without the help of a vehicle so, as the time for fixing the car keeps extending, I keep running out of doggie food I buy in small but transportable bags and have to improvise as I did today, making them a dinner of ground beef and rice and a couple of veggies, all spiced up nicely with garlic.
They loved it and why wouldn't they.
I, however, worry that I might run out of stashes of ground meat in the freezer before I get the green light about the car.
And the wine supply is getting dangerously low as well.
Now that will get me on the bus to the store.

We were talking about many things, Flemming and I, when I mentioned that I was really, really peeved with the fact that I had spent so much money securing the house against leaks and BAM, with the last big storm, I had leaks where I thought I had fixed the problem.
It was, I told Flemming, a very bad storm with downed trees and broken bridges over the river in town. And rock slides and pot holes. A bad storm that we get a couple of times in the rainy season.
And that was why I had leaks, I said.
I said all this looking at the sunny outside, a Sunday morning with the birds a'chirping and the dogs a'barking, a perfectly delightful day free of rain.
Till at night when I sat down to some mindless entertainment on the telly and all hell broke loose, the skies opened up, the rain came cascading down and the telly stopped working, the lightning struck at my house and yes.....there were the darn leaks again.
What, I wonder, can a person do ?
So I mopped up the mess and told myself that this was just another bad storm that we get in the rainy season. Live with it.
And as I am writing this, the rains came back and there was another lightning strike at my house.
I jumped a foot in the air from fright.
Well, if nothing else, this will give me an excuse to pour another glass of cheap wine.

My car is in repair and it has come at a very awkward moment for me since I have run out of dog food.
So what is the problem, you might ask.
Well, the problem is that there are four mutts who eat quite a bit, so to be ready for this, I normally buy 25 kg. bags of food.
To throw a bag that size in the back of the car is fine; to try and haul it up my hill by hand as it were, is out. O-U-T. No way, no how.
Last night I got by cooking hamburger meat and rice and mixing it with the bit of kibbles left.
Today I faced the problem since the car will not be available for a few more days, and hauled myself to the store by bus, bought a 2 kg bag of food ( that I can schlep up the hill, no problem ) and problem solved, temporarily.
I also happened to be out of Cheap Red Wine, but I felt better pretending that the doggie food problem was the main one, the wine of lesser importance.
It sounded better that way.

When I started blogging I was convinced it was a way to express my thoughts in print.
My thoughts. In print. Private like. And utter B.S.
I was never so proud and happy and gratified as when the first comment arrived at the blog.
Someone had read it, and more to the point, someone had taken the time to comment.
And that, truth be told, was the point of the exercise of my blogging.
I know what is on my mind, most of the time. But to blog means that I am willing to share these thoughts with my friends, few as they may be.
And so back to the "comment".
It is a little discouraging to send out post after post and never knowing if they get read or not.
Would it be so difficult to comment? Or raise a hand and say..."I read your blog..it stinks " or something.
Cyberspace to me is like a big, black hole, sucking up energy and unwanted and unread blogs.
Like this one.

One day at the supermarket, a long time ago, Chuck and I were gushing over the facts that there were yellow onions available.
Why, asked an American lady, do you get so excited? look at the beautiful white onions they have.
And that was the point. White onions we can get all the time. Yellow onions were, and are, a rarity.
I was remembering this incident as I was squeezing my last of the hoarded lemons. The ordinary, yellow lemon that is so hard to find here in Vallarta. Limes we have aplenty, I even have a lime tree in my back yard and there are several out in the street. But lemons, like yellow onions, are rare.
I like the white onions and I like the limes but......there are times when a yellow onion and a yellow lemon is the right thing.
Just sayin'

And so I opened another bottle of wine. Well, this is not exactly true. It is not a bottle. It is a carton, and like most cartons, this contains 1 liter as opposed to most bottles which contain 750 ml. ( three quarters of a liter) and so, even at a price well below the cheapest bottle of wine, I get one third more. Now that is well worth the uncomfortable trip to town. Cheers to all of us who know a good deal when we taste one. and who can still remember the days when getting high on liquor on a Saturday night was a wonderful excuse to have sex. Now we need a lot more just to remember what the excitement was all about. Or to forget that sex was ever part of the equation.
Here is to cheap wine.

It is still raining, and the only space not occupied by some scruffy canine seems to be, luckily, my chair in front of the computer desk and for good reason. It is not very comfortable.
Otherwise my house is full of dogs, lolling on my bed, on Chuck's bed, on the couch and on the sillon in the TV room/library.
Any place but my chair at the computer.
And the smell. There is nothing quite like the smell of wet dog, and add to that the residues of a mosquito fighting slow burning incense spiral thingie that I have to use to be able to watch the telly at night without going mad fighting off the pesky little blood suckers. That one.
Since I stopped smoking ( seven years ago) I have discovered scents and smells that I was blissfully unaware of for so many years. This might be the only reason to take up smoking again, that and quelling of the craving for munchies. But I digress.
The Worthless Ones are being even more worthless in this rainy season refusing to do their "Business " outside when wet.
Really!
Whoever heard of mutts with sensibilities like these ? Really.
I, and I am human, can and will go outside to pee. So why can't they ? Rain or no rain.
Sensibilities indeed.
Mutts.

It is raining; it is the rainy season, therefore it rains
but when it rains and it is gray and dreary, my energy level--never high to begin with--dwindles to new lows, and all I do is think whilst consuming cups and cups of tea or coffee or, on really bad days, glasses of wine before the designated hour.
And I think of many things, of why people contracted to do work don't show up, of how my mother used to make a dish we called cowboyfood and recently finding a similar recipe for a dish that really seems to be enjoyed by cowboys of southern Texas and northern Mexico, of why some friends find it difficult to respond to mails even after multiple mails from me and of why I have too much time to ponder these items.
When it rains
and it is gray and dreary and humid.

I have said it before on this blog that going to town is not a preference.
That is my choice and that is cool.
But when Mother Nature interferes and stops me from doing just that by way of fallen trees on my road, then that is not a choice of mine and therefore.....not cool.
I had--after much thought and agonizing and running out of cheap wine--decided to go to town.
I got the car out of the garage and trundled down the hill when I came to a complete stop.
A tree had fallen, due to two days of heavy, heavy rains, on my road and barred any e-or-ingress.
Going the other way was not much of an option since just getting the car turned around and facing my way again was a major undertaking due to slick and wet road, and the other way is way steeper than mine. No go.
Back to the house and car in the garage and then the sorting out of the situation.
If I decide not to go to town, that is fine.
If I decide to go and cannot, due to whims of Mother nature, that is not fine at all.
Now that is really a conundrum.
Isn't it?

So I did it myself.
I hired Candelarion to paint, well, in truth his wife Hilda was the one negotiating the deal when Candelarion was voicing unsurety about painting.
And so I hired him and he worked hard at painting, a thing he truly had no talent for.
He also begged off work Friday for some family do which, in Mexican fashion, turned into a very wet night and that made him unable to work Saturday and even Monday, when he returned to work he admitted having to fortifying himself with a few beers to stop his hands from shaking.
He worked that day and then we parted ways; he to go to another job, a manly job where he got to use tools and crash and bang things like men do.
And I was left with the job unfinished.
Till today.
Today I hauled the ladder in to the house and I clambered to the top to paint the wall at the highest point, precariously holding on to the ladder and the wall, feeling faint.
But I did it.
After that it was a piece of cake.
So now the wall is painted and the paintings and prints all put back and I am having a glass of wine to celebrate the task done.
I "done" it.

Another day spent waiting in vain for people to show up as promised.
I tell myself that this is Mexico and therefore normal, and I know it is.
But that doesn't alter the fact that I feel that there is a lack of respect for other people's time.
No, I don't have a lot of things to do, and I can mostly work around waiting for these guys, but once in a way it gets to me, and I get a bit pissed off.
This time some guys from IUSAcell worked on some electricity deal Saturday and told me they would be back Monday morning to finish the job.
Still waiting.
And since it involves me opening my garage doors I have no choice but to be present.
And the iron monger who was already a week late said, when I confronted him in person, that sure thing he would be at my house Monday morning.
I am still waiting.
I am much better than I used to be about these delays, but I still do not like them.
Not one little bit.

So what to do to make your stew more palatable the second, third and maybe even fourth day?
You bake a bread
which I did.
A Russian black bread which turned out to be neither Russian nor black, but all the same very, very delicious.
My stew and my bread will make me full, if not happy for the coming days.
That and some Cheap Red Wine.
Bon Appetite.

I decided to make Chicken Provencale for dinner. I had all the ingredients, sort of. It was a perfect day for chicken stew, being gray and dreary and all that.
And so I started the process, chopping, mincing, frying, peeling and all was going well till I got to the point where the recipe said to add wine.
Whoa, said I.
I will gladly put garlic and stock in my stew.
Wine, however, remains in my glass.
And so the stew has all the good and healthy stuff, and I have my glass of Cheap Red Wine.
It is a win-win situation.

This is sad on many levels.
First, it is sad to have a small wiener
Second, it is sad that one does not know how to spell wiener. And
Thirdly, since this is a tattoo we will forever know that he has a small, misspelled wiener
and that is truly sad.

I have had dogs most of my adult life. Most of them well behaved, some even very well behaved.
And now I have the mutts, "The Worthless Ones", and they are anything but well behaved. They chase cars in the street, they chase and try to scare folks who walk by ( few, thank goodness) , they use the inside to go to the bathroom if it is wet outside, they bark at things only they can hear and they totally lack the switch off button, in short, they drive me mad.
How did this happen, I wonder. Where did I go wrong, and so spectacularly.
Are Mexican dogs different?
I see the Mexicans who live in the shantytown at the bottom of my hill with their dogs, and they are all well behaved, to a point.
Why me and what do I do ?
I try to think of some good points in their favor. I fail.
Somehow I was meant to suffer for my sins with these mutts.
And boy do I suffer. And loudly.
Like this.

When I get down, I have a drink.
Sometimes I drink too much
and that gets me down
so I have a drink....

Roskilde....a city outside Copenhagen where the kings and queens are laid to rest in the cathedral and which only a few years ago celebrated its 1000 year birthday, is also the home to a yearly rock festival, one of the many off springs of the original Woodstock rock festival.
Today in one of the local papers I read, there was a video report from the festival, explaining how one could find a place to sleep even though one did not have any money to buy a tent or other cover. I was curious. I watched the video. I am still curious.
Something has happened to the spoken Danish since I left the country. I listened and I didn't understand, and it was not just the mumblings made famous by challenged actors in films...no, this went deeper to a more profound not-understanding.
I am 66 years old. I left Denmark when I was 22, so I spent a third of my life speaking the language which, as I sit here now, sounds so very foreign to me.
Is it, perchance, that the guys interviewed spoke what could be called "Ghetto Danish " ?..
I don't know anymore.
As far as I am concerned, the queen speaks the way I think Danish should be spoken.
Anything else is just not up to snuff.
Or something.

I am thinking that maybe I should start a rating system for my posts.
Not for the content but for the amount of wine I have imbibed before I write; a way of excusing some of the really bad ones.
Many newspapers have rating systems, mostly stars, for movies, plays, books, music etc etc.
I can see my system being glasses. Too many and the reader will be free to skip that one.
I think I will pour myself a glass of cheap wine and think about this.

So I am sitting here in front of the computer, sweating.
I have on a strap t-shirt, made popular by Clark Gable when he appeared in a t-shirt like this in a movie with Paulette Godard.
Only I don't look like Clark Gable.
And the reason for this t-shirt is the extreme humidity we have at the moment, the beginning of the rainy season. There are no Paulette Godard in my vicinity, or, more to the point, any Clark Gable either.
What we have here is a mess of canines scratching and humans (me) getting annoyed, blaming it all on the rainy season.
But more to the point, we have humidity. And with the humidity, one sweats. So the solution, albeit it not the ultimate solution, is to wear a t-shirt like Clark Gable's.
You can see, smell, and feel the progress of the sweat, rolling down your arms.
All you have to so, is to have a whole bunch of clean and unused t-shirts waiting to get exchanged with the sweaty and used ones you have.
And for your information...
somehow canines don't seem to mind the way you smell
think about that.

I read recipes. I love reading recipes. I read them and I imagine the taste and texture and, if it is a really compelling recipe, I copy it down ( by hand--my printer up and died ) and if it is really super compelling, I make it.
And mostly I love the result but, and there is always a but, it would be so much nicer to share the experience with a person rather than what happens so many times, with the mutts who get to finish what I could not eat.
They are more gourmands than gourmets, so I never ask them what they think about my latest endeavors.
I enjoy cooking my recipes and they, bless their greedy little hearts, love cleaning the plates.
It is a win-win situation.

So what is better, I wonder. To loose your blog and start a new one, or find that you--after a certain time thinking your blog lost forever--suddenly have your old blog back.
What ?
I hated loosing my blog after all the years of spilling my inner thoughts and yet, there was something titillating in starting all over, but--a big but--I felt that I had lost my background, my reason for blogging.
So I am glad to be back, and I am glad to share my thoughts once more with my friends.
There are so few of them.
Thoughts and friends.

Of all the mysterious mysteries, this takes the cake.
My blog, my email and I had been "temporarily disabled " by Google.
We tried to get back but were rejected, so we created a new blog, new email and a whole lot of bad feelings for Google.
This afternoon as i returned, hot and sweaty from town and just wanted to see if the world had caved in while I had been off the net, I found a mail from my genius cousin who--I am happy to say--still lives in Denmark or else I should be feeling even more inadequate than I do, saying that he checked my blog which seemed to work, and that he had mailed Google asking what was going on.
And so, when I checked my gmail account they asked me to change my password and voila....I'm back. Email and blog.
Now I have to get to all the poor souls who changed my address, because keeping two accounts would stress me out.
And that I don't need.

So relevant with all the nonsense about the help to Gaza.

The dresser.
I found it in the backyard of the studio in New York and hoisted it up the fire escape, all the way up to the third floor.
I stripped multiple layers of nasty brown and bilious green paint till I found the wood, which turned out to be oak.
The dresser traveled with me when we left New York, and all the stops till now, where at the moment, it is resting in my bedroom in Mismaloya.
So many years, so many memories.
Today, escaping Juanito working on some repairs in the living room and sitting on my bed trying to read a book, I suddenly saw the dresser in a new light and realized that it really is not very pretty, not pretty at all. It is more like the spinster in a Victorian novel, plain, solid and durable.
This doesn't mean I like it less, only that I am not fooling myself into thinking this a great piece of furniture. It is not. But it is mine and there are untold memories stored in the three crooked drawers and I would never want to part with that.

A bus named Paradise

After FCDC moved to Seattle, it was decided that some of the touring was easier done by bus, so a bus was found; a bus that in its former life had had a run to Paradise in Rainier National Park and kept the destination listed on the scroll screen in the front of the bus.
And so we called it Paradise.
It was home to the dancers, the crew, some plants and an endless amount of dogs, and it had a bad habit of needing repair, not being very young when it was purchased for touring the company.
Paradise would never have won a beauty contest nor a matter of comfort. Compared to what is now used by touring bands, Paradise was rock bottom, but it had what none of these new behemoths have.....personality.
It fought its way in a snowstorm in Baton Rouge ( I am not kidding ) and it found its way to places barely on the map, endless forgettable truck stop eateries and cheap motels.
I don't know what happened to it when the company disbanded, but wherever it is, within its walls and rusty exterior were dreams and love of arts and dedication.
That would be hard to duplicate.

I did it. Today I went to town. Truth be told, I kind of had to; I was out of wine and the phone bill was due. No phone, no internet and no wine, no silly posts like this.
So I had to go.
And I made it to the first gas station with the gas gauge hovering around empty. The first gas station is also the only one within a thirty minute drive from my village, going either south or north, which made me contemplate, again, the pro's and con's of monopoly, as we have here in Mexico. The monopoly of Pemex.
And that made me think of a silly remark I read, where an agitated politician asked his adversary if he was in favor of " benign dictatorship".
Isn't that an oxymoron ?
just as describing, as some politicos here in Mexico have, Pemex as "benign monopoly " surely is an oxymoron too.
Wonder what "oxymoron" is in Spanish.

Funny how one little word changes everything. I thought I saw an ad for ...The Best Stock Of China, calling to my mind pictures of luscious and luxurious dinnerware.
I looked again and the ad really said : The best Stock IN China....referring to stock markets and easy money and all that kind of stuff.
One little word, one preposition, two totally different worlds.
Maybe I need better glasses....specs, not drinking glasses.

It was not even an argument, it was a series of emails between a person I don't know and me , a person I am not so sure I would ever want to know, a person who reacted to a massmail where my name was included, a reaction that I thought was incorrect, hence the mails.
The last mail from him was this morning, and I got all fired up again, wanting to drive my point home, wanting to make this person see the light and in my mind I composed all kinds of clever and erudite responses and then, slowly I admit, I realized that no amount of emails from me would change that person's point of view, just as in reverse, I was not going to change either.
So I decided to stop the flow of mails, to admit defeat and get on with my life and wish the unknown and unchangeable person all the best.
All the best, Bud.

Ah, the wonderful world of words.
I was writing a mail and wanted to use a word describing transition; the word I wanted was right on the tip of my tongue, I knew it, I could hear it, I could almost taste it but I couldn't find it in my dictionary that I keep next to the computer. Nor in the Thesaurus, nor the web dictionary.
Despair and rewrite but not defeat.
I got off my duff and hauled out my trusty and trustworthy Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, a tome of 1535 densely printed pages, and there I found it, my word.
By then the mail was somewhere in cyberspace or in the computer of the recipient waiting to be read, hopefully making sense, even without the special word, but I now have the word right in front of me, and I won't forget it.
Wonderful things, words.

I am biased, I know it and I try to fight it, but when the governor of Arizona signed what I think of as a super draconian anti brown bill, I took a good look at her, the person, and saw a sad woman fighting old age with all the tools available, the bleached and straw-like hair, the turkey neck and worst of all, to my mind, long and spade shaped false nails on liver spotted and bent fingers, barely able to hold the pen to sign this nasty piece of legislation, and I thought....you there, Ms governor, spend a little less time fighting age and a little more time fighting for the underdogs.
But then I am biased, and she has the support of all the steely eyed, balding middle aged males with pathetic comb-overs who would rather drown than be brown.
I am biased, I know it, and I am not so sure that I regret it anymore.

I was listening to my aunt telling my mom about her trip to visit with her. In those days we had trams running in the middle of the street in sunken rails. Our tram was # 16, it was bright yellow and it was rattling its way from our suburb to the center of Copenhagen.
And stuck in one of the sunken rails, my aunt was explaining, was a female, desperately trying to get the heel of her shoe out of the rail without---and that was the point--taking the shoe off. When she finally admitted defeat and took the shoe off, the reason became clear. She had a hole in her stockings.
My aunt related this accident as a cautionary tale.
Never, ever get stuck in a rail if you have holes in your stockings. Ever.

Gosh....I thought it would be a simple thing to delete the first Chubby Lady. Not so.
When I tried I got all kinds of warnings about what might happen and where the desired deletion would take me......a slippery slope not recommended by the little folks who work inside my computer and who speak and write in a language barely recognizable as English.
So they won. I shall let the Chubby Lady remain rather that fear the wrath of whoever decides what is good for me and my blog.
Fearsome critters, they.

I decided that the image of "The chubby lady with a stick"
was not the way I wanted it, so I made a new one.
Here it is then, "The chubby lady with a stick # 2."
Enjoy.
Same "lady", same stick, better art work.

AH, and the pen is mightier that the stick.
This, then, is the cause of so much disruption in the house on the hill.
Imagine, if you will, meeting this thing early in the morning.
Enough to ruin your whole day.

And so I thought, as I do so many mornings when making the bed..........
why?
Why do I have to make the bed ? Why can I not be more like the long-ago boyfriend of Miss Alice who refused to make his bed because, as he said, it just gets messed up again when you go to bed.
Following this path of logic, a reasonable person might argue why wash your hands as they get dirty again, or why do the dishes as they get all messy again; but then I don't think he, the boyfriend, was a reasonable person, in fact not even a very intelligent person, in my estimation.
So why?
The one time I did not make my bed a friend of mine stopped by unexpectedly and said, loud and clear, that he had never ever seen my bed not made. Any explanation would have been redundant, so I just smiled and swore to myself that this would never, ever happen again.
And that is why I make my bed, first thing in the morning, fearing that some person might wish to visit and might see my bed unmade.
Since the first time, no-one has, but just in case.....
I make my bed. First thing.

When people ask me about the names of The Worthless Ones, I have to admit that they have none.
Always expecting that one day they might leave for a better home, I have refused to name them, making that the right of the new master or mistress.
Till now.
They are soon to be 5 years old, and chances of finding homes for them have dwindled to less than zero, so, I thought the other day, maybe now I ought to give them names.
The mother is named Priscilla, a pretty name for a mangy mutt, which gave me the idea to use the names of Jane Austen heroines for the names of the bunch.
I checked and I blanched.
We are talking names such as Eleanor, Marianne, Lizzie, Fanny, Emma, Catherine and Anne.
None of them in the least suitable for either of the mangy mutts.
I think I shall stick to : You...Hey You...You there...yeah you.
They don't listen anyhow.

This must be the punishment for sins committed in my youth.
The stick wielding chubby lady is back, and she has upped the ante.
This morning as she minced by my house wielding the stick, scaring the mutts to seek shelter and bark frantically, I stood guard at my front door, watching her progress.
When at a safe distance from the door, but close enough for me to hear her, she bent down and picked up a rock and said, loudly
Gringo Loco
I don't know whether she wanted to throw the rock at me or the mutts but the remark was most certainly for me; it translates to something like Crazy White Person.
So now I wonder what I did in my youth that was so heinous that I have to be punished this way.
What ?

And there she was again, the chubby lady armed with a stick and bad attitude and oozing malcontent.
She is now daring the mutts and me by walking as close to the house as she can, swishing the stick to defend her dubious virtue.
I stand in my door and follow her progress with a stern stare, and this morning at a safe distance, she flipped me the bird.
Not a nice way to start the day, but then, a bit later on, a beautiful bird flew into my house, got a bit concussed and when i finally caught it, to help it find its way out of the house, it grabbed hold of one of my fingers with its little feet and sat there, breathing fast, for a while till the breathing had slowed down when it took a mighty leap and flew away in to the jungle.
But it sat there, on my finger; and it was beautiful
and that made me realize, comparing that little bird and the sourpuss of a chubby lady,that the bird won, hands down.
More birds and fewer--way fewer--sour-faced ladies with bad attitudes, please.

When at the funeral of my mother the pastor asked if anybody wanted to say something, I wanted to but I did not, and for many reasons.
At this point in my life I am more comfortable speaking English, and addressing my family that way would be silly;
and my Danish would leave me open to much ridicule and pity, and I did not need that.
So I did not speak
but for many years, in quiet moments, I have gone over the remarks in my mind that I never got to say at the passing of my mother.
I know what I wanted to say and she, wherever she is, must know that by now.

And so I got a new fridge. A big fridge. An eighteen cubic footer. And white, like Moby Dick.
And with all the stuff transferred from "Little Leaky" and the freezer, it is still a pretty empty fridge.
I could have done with a much smaller version, I am but single.
I open the door and look into this pristine and empty interior of my new fridge, and wonder, what did I think?
Were I so traumatized by the "Little Leaky" fridge I had before that nothing but this hulking thing would do ?.
I keep buying things to fill this new thing, but I seem to fail. It still looks pretty empty.
Ah well.
At least it does not leak.....yet.

I am really such a wuss.
And why, you might ask, do I think I am a wuss ?
Well, the other day, when a former acquaintance of mine decided to steal my bag containing all my cards and cash, and I in fit of misappropriated machismo elected to chase him down the hill in my car and on return from this hapless venture stalled the vehicle and locked the steering wheel, and abandoned it there to the next day when James with brute force and luck, got the whole thing free and functioning.
And I was thrilled and grateful
till I had to go to town, and the thought , the mere idea that the car might do this stunt again--for surely it was the car, not I --gave me an upset stomach and a good excuse for no going. That day.
But today I ran out of excuses, and slowly and carefully I started the journey to town with lots of twitters in my stomach.
And it all went well.
Whatever happened before was a freakish happening
but I still had a whole colony of butterflies in my stomach when I drove to town and returned.
And that is why I am a wuss.

When Chuck and I first tried to mate my Schnauzer Frau,we chose to go to Renee and Joe, a lovely elderly couple in our neighborhood , the owners of the delightful Fritz, a male Schnauzer.
It did not work out and thinking that Frau might be too young, we decided to wait a while for the next try.
So when we showed up some years later,we had the the exquisitely bad timing of choosing the anniversary of the death of Joe.
So that did not work out either. In the end Frau never had a litter.
All that happened so many years ago, and I have not thought of Renee for as long, till last night when she suddenly appeared in my dream.
And with exquisite timing, on Chuck's birthday.

AHH, the follies of Mother Nature.
I was resting secure in the superior wisdom of Mary Ellen and her helpful hints, telling me not to clean my windows when it was sunny.
And then the clouds rolled in and we had a gray and sunless day.
So I could either pretend not to notice the hint from Mother Nature, or I could bow to her inimitable ways and clean the goldanged windows.
I chose the latter.
And I feel better about it, looking out of freshly cleaned if still a bit streaky windows.
Now for mopping the floors.
Nahh, maybe the next gray day, whenever that might be.
Mustn't overdo things.

I was checking my "Mary Ellen's Helpful Hints" about homemade window washing products, and right there, on the page listing ingredients for such a product she said:
Never wash windows on sunny days. They will dry too fast and show streaks.
YUUBI, I thought. Now I can legitimately put off this onerous task for oh, say a couple of months, til the rainy season, and then , what will be the point with all the rain....
SO many thanks to Mary Ellen and her helpful hints, they saved from doing this hateful job
at least until my inner houseproud person takes over. And that can be a while.

And so she came back, the chubby dame in the designer sweat suit, but this time she came already armed with a big stick that she was swinging wildly at the barking and mystified mutts, her not very attractive face set in a grim, determined look.
And I gave up.
Ignorance and fear are powerful forces, and she has both in abundance.
She is here but for a short time; the mutts and I live here, and we will survive this.

The fat lady in her designer sweat suit and with her designer thermos did not show up this morning.
Yesterday she was met--again--by the pack of screeching canines who share my house, and in spite of having met them before ( same way ) she grabbed the biggest stick she could lay her well manicured hands on, to ward them off.
That was when I stepped out and yelled at her that the dogs did not mean any harm so to put down the stick. Besides, I said ( yelled ? ) they live here, you don't.
It turned out that the female ( no lady indeed ) resorted to some low-class expletives, most I couldn't hear but the ones that I could were words like " pendejo" kindly translated as "asshole" .

When the couple I had seen when I got back from my trip to town this morning entered the safety zone of the Worthles Ones, I expected the same brouhaha.
Not so. These folks talked to the mutts and petted them and within seconds the barking had turned into obsequiousness, and everybody was having a grand time.
So, I learned, the mutts are friendly to folks who are friendly to them .
Very much like humans.

It can hit you at any time, doing the dishes or watching the telly
when that private little voice will pop up
like some impertinent child, and say
Hey...you know what ? You are all alone. You and the Mangy Ones. HA.
And the antidote to this bit of unwanted truth is always
another glass of wine
and if that doesn't do it, double the amount.
Maybe one day the voice will stop, either from overdoing it
or because it just isn't true anymore.
Either way, I am still here.

I was waiting for my delayed bus at the terminal in Guadalajara after a visit with Flemming and Alexis in Ajijic.
A young girl with Downs syndrome was selling mini lollipops for, said the hand painted sign, 1 peso a piece.
I gave her five pesos and refused the lollipop.
The girl got very agitated and even though I couldn't understand her, it was clear that she was upset that I refused to receive what she was selling and I was buying.
So I took the lollipop, and I still have it with me, reminding me that there is a fine line between begging and selling. The girl with Downs knew the difference and I had to learn it.

The ants came back last night. Scads and scads of them. All over the floors and up the walls but, having learned my lesson a long time and many visits ago, I let them do their thing, waiting for them to leave which they do, eventually.
And so I thought they had all left when I went to close the front door and lock up for the night, not realizing that some fringe group, a smaller and nastier breed than their big and burly brethren, was still busy by the door.
And I stepped on some of them
and they bit my feet. Yikes, but they have a poisonous bite. It took what seemed like hours to calm down enough for me to go to sleep; this morning I can still feel the pain.
They may be small in stature but they carry a big bite. Good thing they don't show up all that often.

And this, I said to the visiting daughter of a friend long since returned to the states due to ill heath, this wall I painted...
not a glimmer of interest in her eyes.
First I, ahem, I painted the leaves and....
still no glimmer of anything.
And then I, I gushed on, then I painted the birds and the flowers and the butterflies,
and looked at her expectantly....
she was thinking hard for something to say and finally said..
It is very lonely up here. There are, like, no stores or anything.
I agreed that there were , like, no stores or anything.
How about a drink, I said, and we had a few glasses of cheap wine, and suddenly I did not mind her lack of enthusiasm for my work.
Wine works wonders all the time.

And so we met for Valentine's day, James, Kathy and I, and at a place we like, a restaurant located at the bottom of some condo-hotel high rise on the way to Mismaloya.
The food was good, the company excellent and the entertainment.....
There was a single guy playing a computerized keyboard and playing a lot of oldies and before we knew what was going on, scads of geezers and geezerettes were on the miniscule dance floor, happily jiving to old Elvis and Beatles tunes.
So they were maybe a tad cautious in their turns, a little slow on the take off, a beat or two behind but, and that is a big but, they were having a wonderful time, and that made it a wonderful time for us-- we who just watched-- too.
Happy Valentine's Day, fellow geezers and geezerettes.

Old dogs, new tricks

I have been making poached eggs for longer than I care to remember, so I thought that I knew all there was to know about the process.
Granted at times the result would be less than stellar, but I always blamed that on old eggs, bad water or whatever excuse I could come up with on a short notice.
So there I was reading a recipe where a poached egg was part of the end result, and the author casually mentioned a way of poaching and all my little and rarely used food antennae went up.
Ohoy, I thought. I shall try this method.
I did. It worked. It worked better that the old method of mine.
This old dog has learned a new trick
and that is a neat trick, indeed.

Gray t-shirts

One of the big decisions in the morning is, which t-shirt to wear or lately, can I get away with yesterday's t-shirt ?
So standing in front of my closet I was pondering these deep questions when I realized that I have nine gray t-shirts in various degrees of decay.
Nine.
Whatever was I thinking ? Did I have a gray period ?
There they are, neatly folded and a testament to some emotion I no longer remember.
Ah well; they too will end up the same as all the other t-shirts...cleaning rags and dusters.
Think of it though...nine gray t-shirts.

I blame it totally on the Worthless Ones. My drinking.
They have times when they bark at things I cannot see, hear or smell and that makes my stomach go into knots and, the best remedy for knots in the stomach is cheap wine, says I.
So I drink, and I blame it on them. The mutts. The unlovable ones.
And they bark daily.
Funny thing that; The Schnauzers never made me drink. In those days I did it because I liked to.
Now I do it to unknot the knots caused by the barking of the miserable creatures I share my house with.
The result is about the same though.

We had planted the Norfolk pine when we moved in to the house, and it had been growing so tall that I got a bit nervous and had it topped.
The vine with the orange flowers decided to use it for support and the result is this.
Mother Nature is truly wondrous.

There had been a reunion of sorts of some of my class mates from college, and they sent me photos of the occasion and it was at first like looking at a party of total strangers.
Later on, when I had studied the photos more carefully, I discerned features that I recognized and little by little the names and faces came together.
It is extraordinary what 45 years can do to a person.
I, of course, have hardly changed....well, maybe a little grayer, maybe a little heavier, maybe a little more wrinkled....Sheesh...who am I kidding.
I am as altered as they are.
It was good to them again though. A bit of my past to hold on to.
A toast to them all.
SKAAL...

Future(s)

It started with a photo of some display boxes that Christa was using to show her amazing scarves.
On one of them was printed
Fashion For Futures
and I queried her about the plural of "future", and thought about it and--
if the planet we live on has but one future
we who live here, the billions of humans each has a distinct and individual future, which would indeed make for "futures".
My head is spinning.

One more piece to polish.

I was rummaging in the garage looking for something that I don't remember now, because in a box that I obviously had not checked for many years, I found another brass candlestick.
AWWW, I said to myself, this was such a favorite of Chuck's, and here it is, dismantled and forgotten.
So I picked up the pieces, figured out what was wrong with it, and started to polish it,
one little part at a time, all the time wondering where I could find someone to fix what was ailing the piece.
So here I am again with polish under my nails and aching fingers from buffing.
Will I ever learn ?
Chuck would have been so pleased though, he really loved the piece.

There they came. First by tens, then by hundreds and finally by the thousands.
The ants were coming to clean house.
I have had them before and learned the hard way that all you can do is sit back, relax, and let them do whatever thousands of ants do inside houses.
These ants, however, were not as disciplined as the ones i had earlier who made lines, ten to twelve ants wide giving you ample space to walk around the house; no, these ants were disorderly, spreading all over the floors and up the walls.
When they invaded my couch I moved to my bedroom and sat on the bed, resting, till they entered that sanctum and forced me out. By then, fortunately, they were finished doing their stuff in the TV room, so I sat through some show, watching the slowly diminishing amount of ants finally forming lines and leaving the house.
Maybe these ants were more disorderly, but they did not leave as many dead comrades behind as did the more militaristic ones.
A lesson here ?

His name was Peter.
Peter was a finch,
a green, singing finch.
Chuck had bought him in Wenatchee, and he spent many years with us in our house in Seattle before Chuck decided to move to Mexico and I got custody of him, me being the stable one with a new house where he lived, happily, to the the day when the house was sold and we were packing the the rental truck with all my paraphernalia, waiting to the last minute to move Peter, still residing in his bamboo pagoda cage.
And when I moved the cage the bottom fell out and Peter, all flustered, escaped, and was chased by Arnold my Schnauzer who finally got a chance to get a hold of this fluttering bit of feathers and...since by then Peter was well beyond fifteen years, he had a heart attack and died right there.
We buried him in the garden of the house where he had been so very happy and took off to California, much like the family in The Grapes Of Wrath.
So often I wonder about this little bird who kept on singing for so many years and who never made it to California; was he happy, or was he lamenting his fate, stuck in a bamboo pagoda cage with no company except for humans and dogs.
And so he died, and I will never know.
R.I.P.

For no other reason than because I feel like it, I am posting another Cattery drawing.

Thank You

Standing in my kitchen, apropos absolutely nothing but being in my kitchen, I thought of a salad using grapefruit chunks that Chuck used to make.
And I thought: " Did I ever really thank him for all the great stuff he cooked ? "
Now it is too late, but I decided to make this my New Year's resolution; to say thank you and not just put it on the "to do" list of things.
So thank you to those brave and patient people who read this.
Thank you.

A fond farewell to The Catteries and to 2009. I can hardly believe that is has been such a long time since I drew those critters for what was to become the calendar of Ms. Clarice and Mr. Q's guide to the dance and other movements.