Author: doug

The handouts

beach, Atlántida, Canelones, Uruguay
Foamiest I’ve ever seen the beach.

Walking home in front of the Zoológica (Atlántida’s little zoo), the parking attendant gives me handouts:

handouts

Addiction treatment. Save your life or that of someone who needs it.

handouts 1

A chance for the ultimate in hair restoration. USD 160. 100% limp? Something must be lost in translation. Regardless, I’ll pass.

handouts 2

Stonework, plus cleaning, fill, ponds — which reminds me our tajamar in the campo, bone dry two weeks ago, is more than half full after the recent rain. More on the tajamar here, here, here, and here. Anyway, no more for now. Thanks anyway.

handouts 3

Funeral services. More personal • more humane • cheaper. Than what?

handouts 4

Parcels and freight, moving. Daily, door to door. Now this might come in handy if someone in Montevideo wants to buy the freezer we have for sale.

Might.

Selling stuff online

This is from my latest sale on mercadolibre.com.uy. A portable disk drive.The buyer sent me money through the ubiquitous Abitab. There would have been no charge had he used a Banco Republica and transferred it to my account. I then dropped the package at Tiempost for delivery to his local branch in Pocitos (Montevideo neighborhood). He can track the package online.

tiempost-abi

My last sale was yesterday. A radar detector. The buyer came to my house. Although he lives nearby, he lives on the other side of the peaje (toll booth), so he might not have been so eager … except that yesterday was a national strike, and the peaje was wide open.

The sale before that was to a guy who lived near the airport. a GPS unit. I told him I had to take a friend to a flight in a few days. He didn’t mind waiting. I phoned him from outside the airport and five minutes later he was there, and the transaction done.

It’s not Paypal and the USPS, but it’s possible.

 

 

Motard?

motard

Doesn’t play well to my ear, even (or especially) knowing (which I didn’t) its Urban Dictionary definition: an obnoxiously enthusiastic US Marine. Another definition: Un motard, ou motocycliste, est un conducteur de motocyclette. Les conducteurs de side-car, de trike et les pilotes de compétition peuvent également porter ce nom. The funny thing about that definition is that I got to the end of the second sentence before I realized it was in French. Up until then it’s just a couple of letter-changes away from Spanish.

 

 

Gone.

After seeing the gull, I saved a little fish from dinner to take to it the next day. Didn’t. But the gull was still there, so I drove back, after dark, with little pieces of fish on a piece of wood, and some water. It jerked its head towards what I offered a couple times, but it was too dark to see if it was eating or not.

Yesterday I took a little canned tuna. The piece of wood was gone, but I found a piece of a plastic flowerpot, put the tuna on it, and edged it toward the bird … who didn’t seem to like the idea of that plastic thing so close to it.

So today:

gone

that piece of plastic. No sign of the little depression the bird had made. No tuna, but there wouldn’t be; there are every day many dogs on the beach. No bird, no sign of bird. Anywhere.

Gone.

Correa de secadora

Last Saturday, our clothes drier stopped spinning. Not entirely. Just when it had anything in it, the only time that matters.

I tore into it, took the breaking belt to find a replacement. Not happening in Uruguay, in a smallish town, on a Saturday. So Monday I went to the local appliance store. Nope. Have to go to Montevideo. How, I asked, do people in Rivera and Artigas (places several hundred km away) live, if everything has to be done in Montevideo?

The answer: telephone.

By now, I’m comfortable in person in Spanish, but I’m still a little hesitant to phone, because if you get a speed-freak mumbler on the other end (the phone company, a government entity, comes to mind) , you’re going nowhere fast. In this case, I was in luck. I confirmed datos by email, transferred money to their bank account online, and at 9 AM the next day heard a beep-beep of the truck delivering the belt.

Which was not the size I had ordered.

I emailed the company, and long story short, two and a half days later we’re up and running again. They paid the second shipment, and the return of the first.

Kudos to AMT Aspiratutto SRL!

 

 

Bags of shit

bagsoshit

Sheep manure, to be precise: the latest cargo of the pobre Meriva. It’s been very dry — too dry — for a while, so the abono is light and not smelly. I expected to do all the work, but the lovely Uruguayan couple insisted on helping. They have 120 animals. No shortage of shit 😉

My neighbor has offered to turn over the soil for a garden spot with his tractor. I may have a real garden this year, for the first time since the early 1990s.

Before internet. There’s a connection.