Author: doug

Voting in Uruguay

In order to vote in national elections in Uruguay–required of adult citizens–you cannot present

  • driver’s license
  • national ID (cédula)
  • passport

You must instead produce a special ID specifically for voting, the credencial civica. When you have voted, you get a slip of paper (constancia de voto).

Your series and number on the credencia civica determine your voting place. For us, it’s a high school on the other side of the Ruta Interbalnearia. There are two closer school polling places. We can’t get to ours without passing directly in front of one or the other. Go figure.

Once there, you go into one of two buildings, depending on your number, then the range is further divided into classrooms. Inside is a soldier, and three people behind desks. You take a voting envelope, and one reads your number and the ballot number. A second person crosses your name off the list of voters, while the third records the ballot number on an electronic tablet.

You then go behind a shielded area where desks are strewn with ballots for various candidates, some of whom appear on more than one numbered list. No, I’m not even going there. I haven’t yet heard an explanation that makes sense. You put your ballot in the envelope and seal it (just in case, you might have picked up a ballot outside or at various stands the weeks before, since there’s no guarantee one will be available). You then return to the front desks, tear off the perforated ID portion of the envelope for person #3 while person #1 lifts a folder to reveal the slot in the ballot box where you stick the now-anonymous envelope.

I don’t know the details of counting, but I suspect they are equally meticulous.

It may all sound a bit clunky, but there’s something about the soundness of the process that a certain country, whose name also begins with U, which has 100 times the population of Uruguay, could learn from.

0800 Sunday: noise next door.

It gets worse.

Once again, I ponder the placement of those huge sliding (plate glass!) doors. Why here instead of further back, where our lemon tree, bushes, and casita (“little house”) would provide much more privacy?

The answer, I suspect, is that a few years ago somebody in the family graduated with a new architecture diploma, around the same time someone else in the family died, leaving behind a small pile of money.

The would-be birdbath

In my account of tearing out my bathroom furniture, I didn’t mention the glass sink that was attached to it. I didn’t have with me large enough pliers to remove it, so as soon as I got back, even before removing the whole thing from the car, I set about and…clink! The glass sink removed itself.

After 15 years, the connector couldn’t handle the shear stress when I turned the cabinet on its side. Well, I thought, that is not exactly a replaceable piece of hardware. So what to do with a round glass sink? Birdbath? But how to plug the hole in the bottom? Things to think about later. For now, just park it on the table outside.

And then it rained.

Problem solved?

Actually, no: the sides are too steep for a bird bath.

So what do we do with it?

Build Back Because?

Lots of noise the past week at the weekend place next door which was extensively remodeled three years ago:

Today the workers opened the rolling shutters for the huge glass doors positioned so that it’s impossible NOT to see into the house from our upstairs patio, and lo and behold! Apparently they’re tearing up the tile floor–that they installed in new construction three years ago.

This seems to be A Thing. We’ve watched the crappy house in Villa Argentina built, roof replaced (twice, I believe), rebuilt, repainted. Another much fancier house near it was built, facade changed, entire yard dug up for drainage, now sporting new construction which will apparently be a barbacoa. Does anybody plan anything?

In the process of building the new addition next door, I watched the attempts to join the new Isopanel roof to the existing one, then the attempts to seal, and re-seal, the various joints, ending in a mess that only we get to see from our patio (though from below they might notice the paint blistering on the wall).

As they were working on this, I asked the foreman, ¿Se planficó? (Was this planned?). No, he replied, we make it up as we go along.

At the time, I thought he was joking.

A long lizard trail

We’re getting to that time of year when we wonder what things must look like at night, given all the tracks we see in daylight with no evidence of what caused them. Generally, lizard rails cross the sandy trails as directly as possible, from one side to the other. Lately, though, a few seem to have changed their minds. This was an extraordinarily long “exposed” track.

We actually haven’t seen any good-sized lizards in quite a while.

Fixing up the country place

In 2012, about a year before the Cyprus bankers stole their depositors’ money, we decided to move cash out of our European bank account. We purchased a 5+ hectare chacra about ten kilometers inland. For what? That was to be seen. We chose to fix the little disaster of a house, going against everyone’s recommendation. You can see my various posts about the chacra here.

It has been unoccupied almost entirely since. A couple from Namibia stayed there in the summer of 2016, and a local guy and his family the summer a couple years ago. We spent New Year’s Eve 2017 there, only to be awakened at 5:30 AM by 35 dogs barking—boarded for summer holidays by the veterinarian next door (happily, she no longer has that business). We have thought about selling it, realized it needed a lot of work, and I started making lists….

Last few days, bathroom: replaced bath/shower faucet to get it working, replaced float mechanism to get toilet working, needed to remove sink faucet. Close to impossible, so I decided to remove the L-shaped counter with its two drawers. The flexible drain pipe broke as soon as I tried to move it, which was just as well since the counter construction made it impossible to remove except by detaching it from the wall, where it was glued (?!?) to the wall plumbing. I don’t recall how that happened. Anyway, got the whole thing home and took it apart this morning.

My god what a mess! 50+ screws, all kinds of little bits and pieces of wood cobbled together. Who was the idiot who designed and built this thing?

Of course you know the answer.

Encouraged by an American woodworker, I had bought a pocket hole jig from the US (now sold here a dozen years later, I notice) and decided it would be fun and creative to build cabinets for our country place! Well it wasn’t.

(Actually, the pocket holes are cool.)

So what now? Well, I see all kinds of bathroom furniture for sale online. Not particularly expensive, not particularly challenging. And at a certain point that appeals.