Someone did a nice job of “tiling” a wading-pool-sized puddle that has developed.
Category: Atlántida
I was thinking the other day …
… “that tree is going to fall one of these days.”
Yellow trees
It’s the time of the yellow trees. I don’t know what kind they are, but for their own reason they all turn yellow for a while in the middle of winter.
In her own little world
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.
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.
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?
.
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.
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 ….
Unbelievable?
Before I even got out of bed, I heard machinery in the road. Looked out to see a large truck with a replacement length of plastic culvert. Oh nooo … the definition of insanity and all that.
But wait! It’s smaller (40 cm vs. 50 cm)! It’s got sufficient cover not to be crushed by the weight of a truck!
And it’s …
… done!
Lo barato sale caro
It wasn’t so long ago (one week to the day, in fact), that I speculated that the road crew might have solved our chronic drainage problem. But I did harbor some concern that the plastic culvert, covered only by a thin layer of dirt, might not stand up to the weight of garbage and delivery trucks.
As I see today, I did not. It broke. Within a week.
Proving once again what everyone here knows, but none seems to understand: doing things the cheap way ends up being expensive.
Expensive assuming they fix it. With general elections in the fall, the odds are better now than after, I’m told.
If you’re not a Spanish speaker, but want to show off, it’s lo bah-RAHT-o SAH-lay CAH-ro, with crisp Rs: English, not ‘Murkan.
What is cheap ends up expensive.
¿Solucionado?
Thought the street is still a muddy mess, we got a surprise today when a backhoe appeared and installed plastic culverts, potentially (there remain a few unresolved upstream/upstreet issues) creating a workable drainage system. Whether the plastic culvert, with only a shallow covering, will sustain the weight of trucks full of bricks or tankers from the barimétricos (septic pumpers) remains to be seen.
At the far (downhill) end, you can see the ripples indicating that real flow is going on. The swamp is draining. Given caveats, this represents a great improvement over the last “repairs,” during which the weight of the grader broke the concrete culvert, over which it then spread a fresh load of tosca (pulverized rock), which of course completely blocked the culvert, preventing any drainage. Yours truly opened that up and restored drainage, at the cost of presenting a slight danger to motorists.
It‘s really funny to look at these photos. This place looks so third-worldy. I had the same reaction when I took perhaps my favorite photo in Mexico, without the benefit of being able to see what I was taking a picture of (to not scare momma-or-pappa bird).
Seven years ago. Wow.
Road “repair” — looking ugly
Here we go again…fresh tosca (rock dust, for lack of a better description) and the grader.
Making a mess.
As if to taunt their efforts, rain comes in torrents, turning the road once again into a river, because the “repair” has done nothing to address the crucial issue, that the drainage system is broken.
Can this end well? Stay tuned.