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'