Author: doug

I feel like a phoney

We have two phones in our house: one local, and one VOIP with our business number in the United States. The six pictured here comprise neither of those two.phones

The farthest we brought from Mexico. Nice, solid thing but it dropped and cracked. Next to it, one we bought in Chuy, one of the towns on the Brazilian border where bargains can be found, and stuff brought back duty-free with a foreign passport. I hooked it up after taking the picture, and shortly after hearing it crackle and sputter, chucked it in the trash.

I know we’ve brought phones form the States. But why, and why so many?

Meanwhile, I realize the concept of a land line is kind of quaint. Why spend USD 15 on a phone and not-very-much (a bit over USD 10 last month) for a fixed line, when you can spend USD 500 on a smart phone and a bunch per month for a mobile plan, risk losing the phone and personal data, meanwhile irradiating your brain every time you use it, and your gonads when you carry it in your pocket?

Obviously I’ve thought about these things, their real consequences and costs, and speak with some authority.

Alas, I still feel like a phoney. And an old school phoney at that.

In her own little world

parking

To a North American or European, it might seem a bit bizarre that a woman stopping at a kiosk would make no effort to pull to the side of the road, and instead simply “park” in the middle of the road. And it’s not that there was no traffic — we were stuck for a few minutes waiting to cross the road.

I would probably have to explain to a Uruguayan what’s wrong with this picture from my standpoint.

Es lo que hay.

No engineering needed

Just send out a crew with shovels and concrete, no engineering needed

It’s classic palm-to-the-forehead “the work how she is done in Uruguay” moment. You’ll recall we just went through a poorly thought-out repair on the corner nearest us, and seeing as elections are coming up, it was quickly fixed.

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Here’s the main thoroughfare, the bus route, a few blocks down the same street. You’ll notice in the foreground a new strip of concrete, so people turning off won’t hit potholes immediately. Instead, they’ll go one meter before hitting potholes. Eventually, but inevitably.

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You’ll notice on the other side that they made the concrete patch lower than anything surrounding it, so that it collects rainwater. As you can also see, the puddle extends into the dirt section of the road, which means the potholes will start forming with the first vehicle to drive through.

We’ll see if they’re as quick to fix this. Your guess?

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Una Harley para papá

If there’s one thing I’d care to win less than a trip to Brazil for the UY-UK match, it’s probably a noisy, rattling and dangerous (especially given Uruguayan drivers) pile of outdated technology. Not that I stand a chance of winning (oh, such stinkin’ thinkin’!) but fortunately cupones (coupons) were only offered upon purchase of certain Father’s Day (today in Uruguay) items, and we’ve only bumbled into a couple of those the last few weeks.

harley

Around $9,000 new in the land of the Untied Snakes, prolly $19-20,000 here. I found the local web site, but under precios it has no prices. It does have an enticing shot of snow-capped mountains, though …

harley-mountains

… amusing because Uruguay has neither snow nor mountains. Oh, details.

How to [change] perspective

I have a talkwalker.com alert set for my name, and got curious when it notified me of a pirate site featuring one of my books in a collection. However, it was called How to Draw Perspective, and I have never written a book with that title.

It took several days to download the 1.3 gigabytes of files using free and restricted bandwidth (four files; only one allowed per day).

At the end of which I found this:

perspective-1

a scanned PDF file of the Russian-language edition of Draw 3-D. I think we sold the rights to it 13-14 years ago.

 

perspective-2

Suddenly this copyright violation doesn’t seem important enough to make a fuss about.

 

The säge saga

I helped one of my son’s friends build a bookshelf unit over the weekend. At the end, he had a piece of thin plywood for the back, that proved a little tricky to cut on the table saw. No problem, I said, I’ll use the circular saw.

Except it proved to be suddenly dead.

Well, I said, I can cut it with the blade on the angle grinder. But even with a very light load, it bogged, then started smoking. So the hell with tricky. We managed to cut it on the table saw, and finished the project.

Yesterday I dismantled the circular saw and tested the switch, then remembered that when I bought it from a German guy several years ago he had given me something else, replacement brushes for the motor. After a bit of searching, I came up with one, and dismantled the saw further. Voilà! Relatively painless to replace the brush, reassemble the saw, and it’s back in action!

saw1
Walter the German handkreissäge is happy again.

Not so the angle grinder (amoladora). It addition to being more challenging to dismantle, in the end I couldn’t get to the switch, which I suspect partially melted.

saw2
And I thought Hyundai made quality stuff.

It is the only thing I’ve bought here for which I cannot find a receipt, but I’m pretty sure it’s been over a year, if it even had a guarantee that long (the cheap Chinese power tools come with a two-month guarantee: inspires confidence!).

So, this becomes another addition to the next Montevideo trip: find their service center and see if it can be repaired. It may not be worth it, but anything with electronics, a motor, or an engine costs 60-100% more here than up north.

Brazil in flames?

I left the house about the time of the start of the World Cup semi-final match between Germany and host Brazil. On my walk, I saw something burning in the east, smoke plume extending far over the water.20140708-1

When I got back to the house, I could scarcely believe it: Germany ahead at the half 5-0. I looked more carefully at another photo.

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No, the smoke was between us and Piriápolis. And besides, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where the match was played, is northeast, not east, of us.

But I expect for the Brazilians, not only has their chance to win the World Cup gone up in smoke, so has their national pride. It wouldn’t surprise me that the burn from this will be worse even than their 1950 defeat by their little neighbor Uruguay. Billions of dollars spent, 260 million of which on a stadium that will never again see any significant use after just four games, embarrassing delays and infrastructure failures, and now total, and I do mean total, humiliation at the feet of the flawless German futbol machine.

7-1. A record number of goals scored in a World Cup semi-final match. Ouch, Brazil.

 

Mold season in Uruguay

If you hail from, and live in, a place where building construction techniques have changed in the last couple centuries, you may be thinking, “oh, interesting. I wonder when mold season is in Uruguay?”

But, no, it‘s an inside joke for locals. When is mold season in Uruguay?

All. Damn. Year.

cloro

Meet my new BFF: cloro puro, not the overpriced, diluted crap sold in orange bottles (which have their own recycle container at the local waste processing/recycling operation). In this case no doubt sold in a recycled bottle.

Remembering Syd’s tales of protective eye wear and scrubbing ceilings black with mold, I realize I had it relatively easy the last couple days (wasn’t even this bad), but it has been a bit of work. 1.5 liters of bleach consumed yesterday and today, and much of yesterday ended up consumed in the entirely enjoyable project of helping one of my son’s friends (early twenties) build a 6′ high bookshelf (the event also involved the death of the circular saw I bought for $40 from one of Syd‘s strange tenants [our only tenants turned out stranger still] AND a Hyundai angle grinder that went up in smoke for no apparent reason).

Simple accounts lead to stories and more stories and more than you need to know. Perhaps another time.

Worms!

Our local comadreja (possum; translates as weasel) has wrought havoc in my little 1/3 barrel compost pile. Like most things garden I do these days (I had a wonderful garden pre-internet), it’s a half-assed affair, without enough mass to heat up and, on rainy days like today, getting entirely too wet.

So I decided to transfer its contents into a full-size plastic barrel with drainage holes at the bottom, in which I have tried unsuccessfully several times to grow potatoes (to be fair, once in the campo where the alambreros (fence guys) upended it, dumping the contents, so they could stand on it.

worms

However, once again I have grown a rich crop of something unplanned: a dense, wriggling mass of worms. I don’t know how they got in there, but obviously they find it a good environment. In case you’re not a gardener, worms = good. When we moved here, we could not find a single worm on the property. We looked. Now we have an abundance.

Garden update: I have several of these type things in the garden now. This plant (predictably) didn’t make it. I did harvest and dry some insanely hot little orange peppers from here a week ago. The first year here, we had volunteer tomato plants everywhere; the second year squash. And the first summer in the country we had an abundant supply from plants I didn’t plant.

Maybe this summer will be the one I actually get my gardening act together. Just need to take a quick look at my Google+ account first ….