Short answer: no.
Long answer: no, but….
Author: doug
Boo!
At the taller
While in the States in September, I got to thinking about the pobre Meriva, as our worker referred to our Chevy minivan after seeing the loads it carried. (I wanted to get a four-door pickup when we arrived in Uruguay; wife nixed that idea.) We got it in early 2010. Paint’s fading, windshield best replaced because of scratches from volcanic ash from Chile a few years ago. But it runs well, and the prospect of shopping for anything in Uruguay is generally dreary. So when I got back, I got some repairs done: replaced the serpentine belt in the engine at 90,000 km (supposed to have been changed at 45,000), body pained, and maybe the windshield one day soon.
Quite a few weeks after the paint job, I noticed the strip between the top of the doors and the roof was looking pretty bad.
I took it back to the shop (taller) and showed it to the owner. He walked around the car. Whoever painted it simply skipped that area. No problem, he said. Of course, to finish the job will now take another three (Uruguay: read four) days.
While waiting in the garage, I became fascinated with the packaging of a replacement door.
The strings aren’t added afterward. They’re an integral part of the design. They wrap around little round plastic fasteners.
What an elegant (in the engineering sense) solution!
Those ceiling spiders
I have nothing against spiders. They eat lots of critters, and that’s a good thing. What’s less good is when they decide to hang out at the tall peak of our bedroom ceiling, and we end up with insect inedibles drifting toward the floor (fortunately not directly above where we sleep).
I finally decided I had struggled with our foldable ladder (which gives us access to above-stairs storage) one too many times. So off to the workshop, and after a few fits and starts, this:
The lever and plunger are slightly off to the side, so the spray doesn’t hit the wire. And why wire instead of string? Simple — I don’t have any string!
So now I can stand on a chair that lives a meter away, reach up, and spray with much more accuracy than when I had to lean back off the ladder against the wall. Not exactly pretty to look at, but hey, it works!
I don’t like the idea of spraying poison. My ultimate solution will be a lightweight vacuum cleaner extension, but I can’t make that from stuff I have lying around. Up north, I’d wander around Home Depot until I found something that worked. Here, I have to tell someone in a store what I’m trying to do, have them rummage around and come back with the wrong thing, try again, try again—.
The last box
Since we have to go into Montevideo, today was a beach walk day. Strong wind. Heading back, near the zoo, I saw a trash container that had apparently been blown over. I decided to right it, a bit of a challenge with one arm, since I had Benji on a leash. But I did it.
One shoe box remained on the ground. I picked it up, noticed keys, old photos and a copy of a cédula.
The cédula number is 698,315. I didn’t see the birthdate on the back, but seeing as my cédula number from seven years ago is over 5.8 million, and Uruguay’s population is only 3.5 million, I’d say she had a pretty long life.
Unplanted flowers
If you look closely at the second, you might spot a volunteer tomato plant in the box, which I originally built for worms. Turns out they thrive just as well, with no attention, in the ”compost” barrel which never gets hot enough to actually compost anything.
There is a story here, perhaps
Spotted walking dogs today.
Another dead light bulb
Aren’t these things supposed to last eight years? Well, we have been here a little more than eight years, and this bulb is kaput.
To be fair, it was in my wife’s office, and heavily used. It’s also definitely more than a year or two old, whenever it was I started writing the date and source on the bulb in indelible marker as soon as I got it home.
You may recall the wretched bulbs Tienda Inglesa introduced after its American takeover.
Around the garden
Posting about the squash plants yesterday inspired me to survey the area in which I plan to plant them.
Surprise!
They’re already growing there! And the more you look, the more you see.
Here’s a nearby clump in the shade of one of the little orange trees.
Nearby, under the pine tree, a pigeon egg met its demise in yesterday’s very strong winds. Note the epiphyte as well.
My squash garden
Some time ago, after preparing a calabacín (here butternut squash, not zucchini) for dinner, I took the “guts” with the seeds, threw them in some dirt in a flower pot, and said dare you to grow!
They took up the dare, and before too long I found myself having to replant 35 seedlings.
Of the five or six I planted alongside the house, only one appears to have survived.
And I notice we have a volunteer avocado tree there as well, which needs a better location.
A few months ago, when we had avocados daily, I tried starting quite a few of the seeds. None took. So here’s one apparently spilled out of the “compost” barrel (which never gets hot enough to actually compost anything), thriving.
This is why I don’t take gardening too seriously. If things want to grow, they grow. If I want them to grow, well, maybe. Still: time to get those babies into the ground!