Meet Luis, Señor increible

The bearings on my 6-year old wheelbarrow broke. You can’t replace them. You can’t buy a replacement wheel with the same size axle.

A South African guy named Geoff told me about buying a replacement wheel, then taking it to this guy who fabricated an axle to make it work on his wheelbarrow. So I went to buy the wheel, then after some discussion with the muchacho at the ferreteria (hardware store), decided it might be prudent to discuss it with Mr. Fixit, Luis, before purchasing it.

Luis said he could make a solution out of plastic that would solve the problem for a long time. Come back at the end of the day. So I did, to find custom-fabricated plastic bearings (they would be a T in cross-section, with perfectly fitting rubber grommets.

“Put a little grease on it when you put it back together,” he said, “and you’ll have no problem.”

luis
“You should see what I can do when I get serious about this shit.”

And the cost? 200 pesos, around $7 US.

 

 

Yes, this is my 3rd post about plastic ice trays in Uruguay

I must admit, my first post from two years ago now strikes me as sort of silly, because the nesting ice trays design now seems quite clever rather than flawed.

And perhaps my second post, almost a year ago, struck some people* as somewhat silly, when I considered it a miracle to find ice trays that worked and didn’t break. (FWIW, I kinda still do.)

Orange plastic ice tray in Uruguay - that has lasted a year!

Well, here you go, muchachos, the orange plastic ice trays from Disco in Carrasco (Montevideo), almost a year later, still releasing ice cleanly (85% of the time) and not breaking.

  • not mentioning names, mm-k?

 

Not that you care about our dogs, but.

walkway

Gita (origin Doguita, “little dog”), on the right, finds it a challenge navigating the boardwalk to the beach with continual flank assaults from the enthusiastic puppy.

tugofwar

Settled down, they have friendly a tug-of-war with a stuffed bear. Which, ironically (or not), was a gift from a cleaning lady to the third, and smallest, dog Bandito, the Shit-Zoo (Syd will appreciate this spelling).

Pecking order? Notice the paws.

Cajun-style comadreja

Cajun-style comadreja, with essence of plastic

I’ve spoken of our trash collection system before.

Last night, for the third time, our closest container was burned. Yeah, it makes some kind of great sense to collect trash in flammable containers.

dumpster-burn-3

Just as it makes sense to purchase for Uruguay trash containers from a country with absolutely no UV problem: Germany. Plastic doesn’t fare well here.

However, the irony—or synchronicity—in this current destruction is that my wife took a shovel yesterday to remove the body of a dead possum (comadreja) from the road, and threw it in that container.

So the little critter got a proper cremation.

Well, almost. From the attention our garbage-hound Gita gave today, apparently there are some Cajun tidbits still edible by her standards (shared by almost no other living thing besides ants and bacteria).

A certain lack of [something]

At some point, we realized that the Disco “Hypermercado” gives a 10% discount for ten bottles of wine. In general, Disco has little to recommend it beyond perhaps-lower prices than Tienda Inglesa. But for a deal on wine, it’s fine. Unlike Tienda Inglesa — which has thicker bags — the cashiers at Disco put three, not two, bottles of wine in each thinner plastic shopping bag.

So what happens when you buy nothing but ten bottles of wine?

Three bottles in the first bag. Three bottles in the second bag. Clearly what remains are four bottles. Two more bags. So — ?

Three bottles in the third bag. One bottle in the fourth bag.
disco-bagging

This is not an isolated incident.

Why would a cashier not put two bottles in the last two bags? What am I missing here?

 

 

Bok Choy

bokchoi

This is what happens when you stick the bottom of a head of bok choy / pak choi in dirt and let it go. It didn’t make another head, but we did harvest quite a few leaves before it bolted. The bees love those flowers. Next: collect seeds ….

Those are heads of lettuce either side of it, from seedlings courtesy of our friends Don and Jan.

 

 

 

New addition to the family

If you’ve ever tried to take a picture of a puppy, you’ll understand this photo viscerally.

benji

No image manipulation involved. We seem to have settled on his name as “Benji,” which was the name of the beautiful but personality-challenged dog we rescued (with permission) from our troglodyte property-squatting neighbors.

Suggestion inspired by our Uruguayan-American friend Isabel, who recalled that I once said all dogs in Uruguay were named Benny, because when owners call them they say ¡vení! (come!), which seems to be a Rioplatense Spanish conjugation. (If you can clarify, please do!)