Motorcycle repair

The plastic zip ties that held the battery in place on my son’s friend Mauro’s motorcycle were failing. He asked me if I had some he could use, and I sort of did, sort of didn’t, but in any case he clearly had no idea how to rig them as the previous person had. Nor did I.

I noted a mount for an obviously-missing bracket, from the back of the car grabbed some wood I had just salvaged from a friend’s remodeling project, cut a chunk, drilled a hole, put in a screw, and voilá!

The wood appeared to be made to order. Mauro laughed delightedly – imagine that, a gringo showing an Uruguayan how to fix things with nothing!

Rejas.

We bought our house, unfinished, from a couple in Buenos Aires who built it for a dozen years, finally splitting before they had a chance to live in it. Because of their distance (3 hours) and big-city mindset, they had the whole place swathed in rejas – bars, even going so far as to have two locks on every door.

The discordance of the bars with the width of the custom-made wooden window panes gnaws at me aesthetically.

Worse (or better), many houses in our neighborhood have identical windows – and no rejas. Do we need them at all?

Envisioning a solar convection heater for our chilly upstairs bathroom, I borrowed a grinder yesterday and removed the bars from one bathroom window. And then the other. And then two over non-opening windows high in our stairwell. Each is held in place by a tack weld on the head of four lag bolts. Lots of noise and sparks, but in fact relatively little cutting before the bolt will unscrew.

I’m tempted to keep going – the kitchen (above) would be so much nicer without the prison feel. But isn’t it foolish to remove a security feature?

Or is it foolish to live with prison bars because of another person’s fears?

This is a coincidence. Surely.

It took me a while to figure out that something was wrong.

Tienda Inglesa has another promo/giveaway going on. These tend to be semi-annual events, which involve filling out endless dozens of ‘raffle tickets’ with the same information. After a couple years of this, I splurged on a rubber stamp.

Name? Address? Document number? Telephone? Ka-chunk.

Back from the store, along with groceries, my wife unloads a tacky little Disney sticker book, El Mundo Magical, and little envelopes which have to be torn open (what a waste of paper!) to find stickers that need to be peeled (waste of paper!) and stuck in the right place. Glitzy little tacky shit.

Meanwhile, I am locked and loaded for a barrage of raffle tickets, but my rubber stamp sits silent. Don’t tell me….

I expect the next ‘event’ will be around Christmas. Hopefully, we’ll be back to normal, and my ‘automatic 911’ will be just the ticket.

Back from Argentina

No trip report because who cares. Me: back spasms, I presume from hours at a lovely outdoor cafe with slanting floor. Also fever, aching shoulder. Am I getting old and crotchety? The words of Ralph Waldo Emerson come to mind: The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home…. Bodywork this afternoon will helpfully cure all.

Back home, first an hour or two sleep to fill in the cracks from the night before at the dreary and overpriced Hotel Suiza in Neuva Helvecia, near Colonia. (But we had a lovely dinner with an ever-entertaining friend, so all’s good, except for my Tripadvisor report ;-)) Second priority: walk the dogs to the beach.

En route, watched an individual on motorbike pull up to a two-meter wrought-iron fence and put something in the mailbox, ignoring the huge black dog, jumping and barking inches away, reminding more of Cerberus than something that might be put on a leash and expected to play in the sand without killing every quadruped within 500 meters. But then I expect most of these crazy caged dogs become wiggling tail-waggers when free to sniff and circle.

Anyway: The utility companies, preferring their own messengers, deliver bills outside the aegis of the Correo (postal service). Which reminds that back north, putting unstamped mail in a USPS mailbox is illegal, though in fact the US Post Office could apparently not care less.

Dream

In class, I heard an announcement of a meeting tomorrow at 37:15. Someone said that in Buenos Aires the clock reset weekly instead of daily. So today was Monday, and the meeting tomorrow was at 1:15 PM.

I know the Argentinian government is nutty, but even in a dream this seemed a little overboard.

But we’re on our way to Rosario, so we’ll find out when we arrive in Argentina tomorrow.

At about 129 o’clock.

Dare to grow!

No, I’m not going all inspirational on you.

I should more properly title this, Dare You to Grow, but then you might still assume I refer to you, which I don’t.

Inspired by the audacity of this tree that clearly has no intention of rolling over and dying, I decided that various cuttings from avocado tree and sprawling geranium bush deserved a chance.

I stuck them into the sand/dirt/rubble bordering neighbor’s unkempt lot with a challenge: I dare you to grow!

Check back in a couple months.

Couchsurfing redux, redux

We got involved in Couchsurfing when we lived in Mexico, and hosted a number of interesting, and fun, people.

One time it was Sara and Sébastien from Paris, en route by bicycle from Anchorage Alaska to Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina and the southernmost city on the planet. When we hosted them, we had no thought of moving from Mexico. When they learned we were in Uruguay, the became our first return couchsurfers before heading back to Paris.

Similarly, Marjorie and Jörg, retired five years and traveling extensively in the Americas from their home in Lörrach, Germany, stayed with us in Mexico, and when they learned of our move promised to include us in their South America trip. We shared their delightful company for a few days as they got ready to head home, while this rather impressive refitted Toyota Land Cruiser parked in our driveway.

As an added bonus, they taught me some new German words: Grünschnabel, Quatschkopf, Quasselstrippe, and Frostmemme. You’re on your own for the first three; the last means someone who’s always cold. I’m not sure I’ll be using them any time soon, but you never know.

They are, after all, kind of catchy.

In the campo

Perplexing pickled peppers

Compared to the north, beef here is local, grass-fed, delicious, and cheap. As a result, we eat more, sometimes as hamburgers. Inevitably, the wife has lamented lack of dill pickles to accompany them. She tried making some. They were close, but not crunchy.

She recently brought home this:

Ajías Catalanes – Catalan chili peppers. They’re hot! They’re great! Who needs dills?

But this raises an interesting question. Uruguayans in general will not touch spicy food. Something with pepper – just a sprinkle of black pepper – is considered picante. Yet they grow hot peppers; you can buy them in the supermarket.

And now we see they pickle them (at the bottom of the label: Industria Uruguaya).

Why?

Besides us, for whom?

Tomorrow I’ll get a life. Promise.

Today:

Caught up on three months’ worth of accounting.

Got curious about Javascript (why?) and from scratch learned enough to solve (with help!) the FizzBuzz challenge.

if( i %3 === 0 && i %5===0){
console.log(“FizzBuzz”)
}

Oh yeah, I know you’re awed 😉

Listened to the second learning Morse Code podcast (almost through the easiest third of the alphabet woohoo).

Replied to months-old email from the high school teacher who introduced me to the formative work of summer camp counseling.

Thought about mowing the grass. Nah.

Walked the dogs.