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.