An inquisitive old fart with a camera
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!
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.
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.
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.
We were wrong.
A couple of pepper plants persist, even as the sun sinks lower and lower in its daily path. I figured well, maybe I can give one of them a little more sunshine with a piece of sheet metal I had lying around. Note the ashes from the wood stove in the lower left.
We live at 34°45′ south (about the same as Raleigh, NC in the north).
… nothing insightful today, but a pretty sunset. Over my little mango-greenhouse.
And yet, I keep entering, even though I’ve never won one of their shiny red cars.
For this month, at Tienda Inglesa checkout you get a separate receipt, which you scan near the front door, at a machine that spews out coupons to fill out. I got tired of handwriting them in past drawings, so had a rubber stamp made, stamp them at home, and forget to take them the next time.
They’re giving out one trip per day, on a charter jet to Brazil to watch Uruguay play England.
Unlike certain friends, who have gone twice to Brazil and returned very disappointed, I have never been too interested in going to Brazil.
But if the lack of a shiny red car in my driveway is any indication, it’s not going to be a choice I have to make any time soon.
No, not me. The goofball who swerved into the ditch in front of our house last night and took out the end of our little-two-brick-high wall.
It actually doesn’t bother me terribly. I have materials to repair the wall, and the guy not only lost the plastic liner to his wheel well, but, by the fact that he didn’t get stuck in the ditch, must have traveling with sufficient velocity to require, at the very least, a serious alignment.
The tow truck approaching in this picture brought a jump-start to our neighbor. I half-expected it to retreat loaded with a car whose front left wheel was hanging loose.
Anyway, in case the driver remembers the incident and returns, I left the wheel well liner there for him.
Carefully cut into five pieces.
Mr. “real” Anonymous who comments here gave us a mango tree, one of two he had in a sheltered nook of his property. The other one died, not entirely surprising considering it’s a tropical plant and the Oriental Republic is not a tropical place. He and his wife have been in purge mode plant-wise after this last horrid-growing-season mucked-up-by-HAARP summer, and I agreed to take it.
I got as far as a basic structure with top and front sheathed in plastic (at times I’m not real good with math, as in buy the amount you actually need all at once). Yesterday’s strong and prolonged wind basically trashed it. Apparently the wall anchor (taco Fischer) was not adequate for the closer crosspiece. Back to the dangerous power tools.
To his credit, Mr. “real” anonymous did not claim we’d be making homemade mango chutney from our backyard a year from now, though a Uruguayan did tell me this afternoon that, though not allowed, it is quite possible to smuggle fresh mangoes in your car from Chuy, on the Brazilian border, one of the few places in Uruguay where it’s actually fun to shop, because shit is cheap … as long as you have a foreign passport to show when returning. Not for the mangos, which you’re not revealing, but the other goodies: electronics, alcoholic beverages, and such.