Tiranos TembladTV posted four days ago its first Summary of Uruguayan events in seven months. The narrator explains that during this period, more than a thousand videos have accumulated, too many to show all. And then — drum roll — starts the summary of events with a dog barking at a balloon (1:40).
In case you’re new here (or to refresh your memory), here’s where that clip came from (added long after Syd’s comment):
The Summary is fun to watch all the way through. Even if you don’t understand the narration in Spanish, you’ll get the drift. There are a few bits in English.
So — if one dog year equals seven human years, Benji should have gotten 2.14285714285714 minutes (128.5714285714284 seconds) instead of 4 seconds. But the clip I posted originally was only 24 seconds long, and it was the “lead story” here, so good on ya, Benj. You’ve still got potential years of silliness ahead to claim your remaining 124.5714285714284 seconds of fame.
I’ve put this off far too long. With destructo-dog I absolutely have to have a fenced garden area. I’m not the most enthusiastic gardener, but I do have a bunch of seeds started, some of which (squash) will require substantial space.
Using what I had at the chacra, I cut posts to have 80 cm exposed. I had a roll of 120 cm fence wire already, so I figured I take off the top 40 cm and double it when I ran out of the roll.
It was pretty close — 2 meters shy! Had I not made a circular compost bin in the country earlier with the fencing, it would have worked out almost exactly right.
Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.
Benji, meanwhile, decided this was a nice place to hang out. No more. I trimmed the top 40 cm, leaving spikes, and built a gate. It’s not a pretty fence, and it’s not particularly well made, but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to keep out the dog and cat.
Aloe (pronounced as a Canadian might say, aloe, eh) vera grows in abundance here. Today I saw another first in seven years: its harvest.
Turns out they sell it to a laboratory that turns it into a skin product. For exactly what application I couldn’t catch. Uruguayan Spanish is not generally spoken in a crisp, clear way, and the guy at the truck, while friendly, was a little hard to understand. Anyway, they get USD 0.68 per kilo. Sounds like farmers grow fields of it. It wasn’t clear the connection between these guys and this little stand of aloe, apparently on private property in town, right off the main highway, the Ruta Interbalnearia.
Aloe is all kinds of good for your skin and more. Nice plant to have in the backyard, which we do. Easily planted, like so many things here: lop off a chunk of plant and stick it in the ground.
I spent enough years in the USA to be predisposed to a gung-ho, get-it-done attitude, and a respect for quality products and services, so a couple of things here stand out for me.
Tolerance of mediocrity: Chinese electric hand tools with a two-month warranty that cease operating after three, for example. Well, you might say, it’s poor country. And you’d be right. But you won’t find anyone here who disagrees that lo barato sale caro — false economy: cheap things end up being expensive. *Shrug* Es lo que hay. That’s what it is.
Lack of situational awareness: as with people at peak season who pause in the exit door of the supermarket to have a conversation, or bicyclists, motos, or pedestrians who cross streets without looking. And let’s not forget cars.
Here’s a photo that presents a lovely illustration of both.
The lady who apparently owns but doesn’t live at the end of Syd’s block had a hissy fit about the growing brush pile on her corner (but on the town right-of-way). She decided an appropriate response involved tearing the pile apart so that brush blocked both streets. Who did what next remains a mystery, but last week we returned from walking dogs to see two guys loading brush into a truck. Leaving Syd’s 5/6ths of the dog pack inside, we walked down to see if they’d be similarly taking away the 2+ year old brush pile next to Syd’s house. They indicated they would. Excellent!
They added that the current brush pile would require a second trip.
What you’re seeing in the photo is, left side, the remaining half of the brush pile. The blue and white stuff beyond is the non-brush trash that they carefully removed from the brush pile. The blue thing beyond that is (and was) an empty trash container that could have easily accommodated the trash they separated from the brush pile. But apparently for them when your job is to pick up brush, it doesn’t include leaving the street clean.
The rest of the story, as you might guess, is that they haven’t been back.
I’m guessing they will. Eventually. Meanwhile, es lo que hay.
It’s a perspective thing — the bucket is over half full.
I haven’t determined exactly how I’m going to incorporate fish waste into my close-to-totally-disorganized garden, but it will have to be dog-digging-proof. I have decided to make a substantial fence. But deciding is short of doing, and we happen to have a puppy who likes to dig — and meanwhile no fence.
Beyond remembered tales of American Indians dumping a fish head or carcass below each corn plant, my fish-in-the-garden story is this: shortly after arriving in Mexico in 2007, I attended an organic gardening class by a massively overweight American woman who happened to be very good at growing things. Actually, exceptionally good. She was also an outstanding cook and baker, and, unh huh, liked to eat. She had a plastic-lined pit in which she made compost tea from fish, and shared her secret source. There was, she said, at the end of a short two-block street that ended at the railroad tracks in Pátzcuaro, a place where they processed fish from the lake. You had to knock on an unmarked door, have containers, explain your request, and then, Hod willing and goods delivered, back out the two blocks, because there was no way to turn your car around.
Sorry, that’s above my pay grade.
She also explained how they cultivated contacts in the daily mercado for composting. They had to they dress down, relate to the locals, develop trusted relationships in order to get the valued vegetable waste. Wow. Heavy social investment.
Reference: there is no way a home gardener can get enough compost from home vegetable waste. You need organic materials from somewhere else.
Anyway, visiting a project of ours on Calle Independencia near the cemetery in Pátzcuaro, I discovered something amazing: garbage trucks appear there every afternoon. Guys with hand trucks and 55-gallon barrels go into the market and bring out the waste. I showed up day after day, with a plastic tub like the one I bought here, and soon they wanted to know before they went into the market: was there was anything in particular I favored? Onion greens? Carrot tops? It was deliciously ironic.
But it got better.
One day, a little truck pulled up. Fish waste. From the fish place. You know, the one where you had do a little ritual of obscure door-knocking and reverse-driving. I said to the garbage kid (remember, I’m an old fart, so everyone is a kid), fish is OK in the garden, eh? and he enthusiastically agreed and personally took my plastic tub to the truck and proudly filled it with fish heads and bones and guts, and placed it in the back of my several-years-old Toyota 4Runner.
Fortunately, I had a plastic-rubber floor liner. Because, in his enthusiasm, the kid had maximally-filled my plastic tub. And despite my caution, over the first tope — speed bump — I heard the flop of a fish carcass. On the next another. No matter. I could always hose that stuff off.
The problem arose — as today — when I realized that I had arrived home shortly before dinner time and actually had to do something with this treasure. In Mexico, it involved feverishly turning over my extensive compost pile, inserting fish waste, re-covering and weighting down plastic sheeting so our animals couldn’t get into it. It worked. And apparently fertilized magnificently, but by then we were the hell out of Mexico. Another story that I probably won’t tell here.
Meanwhile, here, a couple concrete blocks over the bucket this evening. Tomorrow? Stay tuned 😉
Thanks for reading this. Gardening is weird at times, no?
As in 2012, we’ve had some pretty serious wind the last couple days.
Yesterday evening, between two trips to the garage to get firewood, a couple of clay roof tiles blew off, landing directly where I would have been walking. (I still haven’t replaced the couple from the front that blew off in 2012, given the height of the roof.) I felt a little lucky.
Especially when, from upstairs this morning, we saw that a neighbor has suffered slightly more roof removal.
When we first saw it, the white area top center was a hole completely through the roof.
Not much more visible from the road. I don’t know what the roof was, but obviously not very sturdily built. And equally obviously, not a good idea here to build that way.
The best rule for driving in Uruguay is to try to watch every person and vehicle — pedestrians, bicyclists, motos, and other cars and trucks, constantly imagine the stupidest thing they could do — step into traffic, swerve in front of you without notice, run stop and yield signs — and plan for it.
In this case, I might have been distracted by the conversation and so didn’t see the approaching out the side window. Fortunately, the passenger’s field of view allowed her to see it before it cleared the A-column for my view, and warn me. Locals will recognize the voice 😉
When we bought this vehicle in 2010, the blind spot was one of the more pronounced criticisms I could find online.
The triangle caused by the A-pillar split should be helpful, but since my eye level is near the top, it provides no help. Still, I have most often had problems with the passenger side, so perhaps I had a lapse of attention.
Which — when driving in Uruguay — can prove expensive, dangerous, or worse, as perhaps you can imagine.
