Seemed like a harmless enough thing at the time.
Little did I know it meant we were now intimate friends.
Offered to walk my hosts’ dog
Clinton, Connecticut
Ridgefield, Connecticut
Thar she blows
You may remember my posting about the massive noxious cloud that ANCAP, the national oil company, releases daily over the most densely populated region in the country.
Here it is, in all its glory, from the airport at 7:58 AM Wednesday morning. Probably 15-20 kilometers away, blowing over the heart of the city of Montevideo.
Uruguay Natural, indeed.
The wine prescription
I had to go the doctor to get a piece of paper documenting the dog bite on my leg, sustained when three loose dogs tried to attack Benji, who was on a leash. The paper adds weight to my denuncia filed at the local police station. The bite was superficial, and from my dog (again), but I didn’t share that detail. Not important. Those dogs should not be loose.
The doctor was concerned about my blood pressure, and took his time so that he could measure again. We talked about a few things, and he asked me if I smoked — no — or drank — yes — and he asked white wine? Curious question because yes, I do like white wine, and very few locals do. So he asked me what I thought of Uruguayan wines. Not much; I prefer one from Chile.
Oh, he said, have you tried this and this and this? All sold at Tienda Inglesa, and he even told me the prices. I asked him to write them down, and so he did.
On a prescription pad.
Love your new house!
Mind if we put up this piece of shit ten meters from your back door?
Actually, that’s just a rhetorical question. We could care less what you think.
And who is we?
My neighbor Wayne tipped me off to this. I hadn’t been by recently, but know it well. This house is new, and this radiation tower even newer, and all of a quarter mile (.4 km) from the one installed a year and a half ago.
316 meters (1,034 feet) from our front door. The previous is 544 meters (1,785 feet) away.
In contrast to when I posted before, I now have a smart phone, and took these pictures with it. It has less bulk than my digital camera, many more capabilities, and is a great help traveling: Lyft, AirBnB, etc. However, generally when I carry it it’s in airplane mode. I don’t consider more radiation a good thing.
As I don’t consider another, closer radiation tower a good thing.
Much’ agua
While watching organic fruits and vegetables harvested to order today — lettuce, swiss chard, celery, carrots, arugula, grapefruit — from the greenhouse I noticed something I’d never before seen to the east: water.
Not the ocean, but the Río Solís Chico. I asked Ricardo about it. Sí, hay much’ agua. So I had to check on our tajamar (pond), and wow, yeah, lots of water.
From our little country place — just a few hundred meters from Pilar’s, where the every-other-week feria organica happens, I could also see the river. That surprised me. I consider myself relatively observant, and if the river was visible from our place, I’d certainly never seen it before.
Much’ agua.
Since we first lived here at the mouth of the Río Solís Chico in Parque del Plata, and ever since loving its constantly changing paths as it hits the beach, I thought it might be worth checking out the water flow at the mouth of the river.
Indeed! Hard to do justice in one photo, but in normal times the width of the water separating these two groups of people would be about one half this. You can get an idea here. In that video, all of the foreground beach was underwater today!
Much’ agua.
Flooded beach
We had a lot of rain overnight and this morning.
All the more water for Benji to splash around in. Here he takes a brief confused time out, attention divided between the head of cabbage he quickly lost interest in tearing apart, the stick I had been throwing for him drifting away, and something else. We were the only ones on the beach, so who knows what the something else might have been.
Hieroadglyphics
Waiting for the muffler on the car to be replaced, I walked back into town, which included crossing the highway on foot, something I almost never do.
Lo and behold, I see this below me. What’s it trying to say?
What cement?
“No, wet cement.”
“Oh, sorry.”*
*Not really — that was fun! Let’s do it again!