Meet Barbra S. Bear

I realized that all the bears that i have been making--a total of thirteen--have been boy bears.
That seemed to me to be wrong so I created the first girl bear.

Here eyes are a little small
and slightly crossed
her nose is rather large
and she likes her schmattas and bows

I will call her Barbra

Barbra S. Bear

here she is for your enjoyment.

The price of water

I could hear the asthmatic water truck make its way up the hill and what a stroke of luck that was. I was down to the last few liters of bottled water in the big blue 18 liter water bottles I keep for drinking.
I asked the guy for three and feeling grateful and generous and happy not to have to haul water bottles up the hill, I gave the guy a 200 peso bill and said
" just give me change for ninety"
he grinned at me and said   "ninety ? " 
I agreed and he handed me a wad of bills which I stuck in my pocket and with a big face cracking smile he  got the truck started and took off as I struggled the bottles into the house.
The bottles taken care of I put the money back in my wallet and realized why he had the big grin on his face.
He had--maybe deliberately ?-- misunderstood and just given me ninety pesos in change.
Some expensive bottles of water.
Next time I will count the change before he leaves.
--

my best friend

With all the outages as of late, my fridge is full of things of questionable food value, one of the many being a cucumber, another a green chili, bot teetering on the edge of  their expiration date. Well, never one to throw food out if at all salvageable, I decided to make a cucumber/chile pickle.   And so I diced and sliced and chopped and mixed and jumped a bit because I really, really had to go pee-pee. But i got it all together and I streaked out on the terrace to relieve myself over the railing. As a good boy I shook vigorously when finished trying to make sure all was dry when of a sudden i got a slight pain in my wee-wee, a burning sensation.   OY, I said to myself. Cancer, I said. Cancer of the urethra. All is going to rot and fall off, I said to myself. But...I said...why so sudden ? Why now ?

And then a million little yellow flags went off.
Chiles.
I had been cutting chiles and I must have had stuff on my hands when I so lovingly and gently held my best friend so we could take a pee.   And sure enough. After a short while the burning sensation went away and we are back being best friends again without any pain involved.
--

The color of bathrooms

Angela came to my house to talk business.
After that we chatted and I pointed to my newly painted wall and said
"Look, I finally did it. I painted the wall "
She looked at it and smiled and said
"Oh, that is very nice. It is a very nice color. I think I would like to paint my bathroom that color "
This was not exactly the compliment I was looking for.

The pesky apostrophe

AH, the pesky apostrophe.
When I wrote the post about Manny's offer of coffee, I suddenly had  doubts about the name of the coffee;
would it be "Tasters Choice", as-- many tasters choose this-- or, as turned out to be the right one "Taster's Choice" --the choice of one taster.
This came after I had espied a card on the street waiting for my bus at the bottom of the hill.
The card read :

GAY'S MEN'S ONLY
OPEN MODEL

I don't really know what the card refers to but a name of a hotel appears and a bunch of telephone numbers,.
What I do know is that whoever had the card printed had some funny ideas about apostrophes and that it made me do some checking so that I would not be caught misusing this pesky little comma looking thing.

Coffee with Manny

I stopped to see Manny after a trip to town.
Manny has had some problems with his landlord and will now move in to the little one door, no windows shack behind the cement slab that is his work area.
Now we will be real neighbors.
His helper/cousin/nephew is moving back to Ciudad Juarez so Manny will be on his own.
Hey Man, he said. Since we now are neighbors and I will be here all the time, stop by one morning for some coffee.
You do drink coffee ?
I said I did.
Good, he smiled, took a deep breath and said with great pride
I have Taster's Choice.
How could I not accept such as offer.

A matter of national pride

Wimbledon today saw a Brit and a Dane win the men's double.
All were jubilant.
The British press hailed the victory as well deserved for the Brit and the er, ahem, Dane who shared the game.
The Danish press called it a miracle that the Dane--the first ever--won the Wimbledon and..sure, he had a partner, the Brit.
And both parties are right of course. It just would have been so much easier on national pride if both players were from the same country.
As it is this was a great victory for Britain
As it is this was a great victory for Denmark
you sort it out.

ink.

I was trying to print something the other day when my machine just processed the paper and sent it out as blank as when I put it in.  Yo, I thought, we have a problema here. No inko.
So I grabbed the spare cartridge that Miss Alice so thoughtfully had provided and after a few mishaps, got it into place.
Hurraaaah, I thought. And on we go. Ta DAhhhh.
Not so fast.....the little screen on the machine lit up with a maliciuous gleam and said....cartridge incompatible !
Say What, I moaned. INCOMPATIBLE ? How ? They assured Miss Alice that this was the right one. They did. She told me herself. She did . They did.
and so I changed the F...ing cartridge back and forth until i finally admitted defeat. I had to get a new one.
Which was another item on my list of things to get and LO.....at WalMart they had a sale on the particular cartridge that I needed for my particular printer---why they don't have one size fits all is beyond me ---and I got it and I replaced the old one and eventually got the thing to work.
Am I clever or what ?  And all that was for a receipt for an absentee owner here in Lomas Del Pacifico who had problems with the IRS and needed proof of a payment of one thousand pesos ( less, much less than a hundred dollars these days ) to the fledgling  HOA where I am the treasurer by default. It makes you wonder what the IRS is doing to the big fish if they spend so much time on items less than a hundred bucks.

potted plants

My neighborhood is expanding.
At the bottom of the hill small and ramshackle houses are appearing, made from stripped palm fronds and secured with colorful election posters. And chuck full of kids and animals and pregnant females.
At the moment there is no running water or sewer service so on hot days it is rather pungent around there.
The latest addition that up to recently was but a slab of concrete and a few corner pieces of wood, is now another marvel.
When I took the short-cut the other morning on my trip to the local tienda for some eggs for breakfast, I met the new inhabitant, a gent with a ponytail and a smattering of English. Manny had told me that he was "artistic" and I believe Manny now, for when I passed his shack he was busy watering an endless array of cans and pots with wonderful plants and flowers.
There is something so impressive about people who will think it important to have plants around them even living in shacks with no easy access to water. Bravo to them.

The snake

  I woke up early this morning and putzing while I waited for the coffee to brew, I noticed the resident frog jump across the room and the all to well known zig-zag movement of a snake.
A snake !
This is the time and i had been expecting something .
It slithered under a couch and I knew that I would never be able to relax as long as I knew there was a snake in the house, however well hidden.
I hate them,
As far as I am concerned there are only bad snakes , snakes who spend their miserable lives scaring good people like me.
So there it was and there I was.  Stalemate.
But then I rushed into action and armed with my trusty snake-killing meat cleaver I started to frantically move the furniture until I had the snake cornered, but this wily critter managed to slither rapidly across the room and hide under another piece of furniture and from that to the final one, a big wooden case with very little space underneath. And heavy
I pushed and shoved and lifted and shored this piece of furniture up so I could prod under it with a long handled broom--a very long handled broom--and finally after what seemed like hours but was in fact no more than 45 minutes, the snake, all five feet of it made its way out of the door I had conveniently left open, wide open, for that same purpose. And I saw it zig and zag its way over the bricks on my terrace and disappear into the jungle where it, I am sure, is searching for a mate to share its miserable life and make many more snakes to come and pursue me. I do not like snakes.
And during this whole ordeal the mutts were absent. Something made them stay way the heck away from this mad chase of a snake in the house.
Now they are back to form, barking and being their usual disagreeable selves.
But we got rid of the snake. Good riddance.
The upside--if there is an upside--is that i got to clean behind furniture that I don't move about all that often, in fact never. Sweep and mop so now I can feel really righteous for  One, not having killed the hideous, slithering and disgusting critter and Two, for cleaning behind the furniture.
Cleanliness is next to holiness.

A mystery

HARK ! I said in my dream---a cell phone ringing !
but, but, I said---I do not have a cell phone, which then could mean only one thing
my telephone was ringing
and I clawed my way to consciousness and stumbled out in the hall to answer the phone.
A call at what turned out to be 4:20 in the morning can only be either wrong number or really bad news from another time zone. By the time I got to the phone it stopped.
I went back to bed and was almost asleep when the phone rang. And again I did not make it before it stopped ringing.
Four times it rang and I never made it in time. The more I rushed the fewer the rings.
Four times we had this dance of ring and stumble and never once did I get to the phone in time to squawk a "hellooo" before it ceased ringing.
Maybe--I thought--maybe the person will realize the errors of his/her way and mail me an email.
So far I have encountered none.
And I wonder and wonder whatever it might have been, whatever disasters  might have happened to someone I know or that--hopefully--it was a really bad idea in a drunken stupor by someone who could not dial straight and got my number all the time by mistake, 
I hope.