Spider on the workbench. Why?

Our house guest complained of mosquitoes in the casita (little house) so I had to clear space on my horribly cluttered workbench to slap together a screen insert for the window.

In which process I discovered a rather large, upside-down, and pretty-much dead spider. No idea how or why it got there, nor what killed it.

I think spiders are cool, but yuck.

Orgonics

It looks like I tossed a perfectly good Orgreenics omelet pan. Fact is, it was a perfectly good Ogreenics omelet pan for eight or nine years. Until it wasn’t. No matter how many “surefire” Youtube videos I watched and how many times I tried to season it, it just got stickier and stickier.

I cashed in some Disco (supermarket) points for a replacement, which isn’t perfect, but isn’t bad.

It’s been several weeks since I dumped this. I have almost no doubt it’s in somebody’s kitchen as I write this.

Voting in Uruguay

In order to vote in national elections in Uruguay–required of adult citizens–you cannot present

  • driver’s license
  • national ID (cédula)
  • passport

You must instead produce a special ID specifically for voting, the credencial civica. When you have voted, you get a slip of paper (constancia de voto).

Your series and number on the credencia civica determine your voting place. For us, it’s a high school on the other side of the Ruta Interbalnearia. There are two closer school polling places. We can’t get to ours without passing directly in front of one or the other. Go figure.

Once there, you go into one of two buildings, depending on your number, then the range is further divided into classrooms. Inside is a soldier, and three people behind desks. You take a voting envelope, and one reads your number and the ballot number. A second person crosses your name off the list of voters, while the third records the ballot number on an electronic tablet.

You then go behind a shielded area where desks are strewn with ballots for various candidates, some of whom appear on more than one numbered list. No, I’m not even going there. I haven’t yet heard an explanation that makes sense. You put your ballot in the envelope and seal it (just in case, you might have picked up a ballot outside or at various stands the weeks before, since there’s no guarantee one will be available). You then return to the front desks, tear off the perforated ID portion of the envelope for person #3 while person #1 lifts a folder to reveal the slot in the ballot box where you stick the now-anonymous envelope.

I don’t know the details of counting, but I suspect they are equally meticulous.

It may all sound a bit clunky, but there’s something about the soundness of the process that a certain country, whose name also begins with U, which has 100 times the population of Uruguay, could learn from.

0800 Sunday: noise next door.

It gets worse.

Once again, I ponder the placement of those huge sliding (plate glass!) doors. Why here instead of further back, where our lemon tree, bushes, and casita (“little house”) would provide much more privacy?

The answer, I suspect, is that a few years ago somebody in the family graduated with a new architecture diploma, around the same time someone else in the family died, leaving behind a small pile of money.

The would-be birdbath

In my account of tearing out my bathroom furniture, I didn’t mention the glass sink that was attached to it. I didn’t have with me large enough pliers to remove it, so as soon as I got back, even before removing the whole thing from the car, I set about and…clink! The glass sink removed itself.

After 15 years, the connector couldn’t handle the shear stress when I turned the cabinet on its side. Well, I thought, that is not exactly a replaceable piece of hardware. So what to do with a round glass sink? Birdbath? But how to plug the hole in the bottom? Things to think about later. For now, just park it on the table outside.

And then it rained.

Problem solved?

Actually, no: the sides are too steep for a bird bath.

So what do we do with it?

Build Back Because?

Lots of noise the past week at the weekend place next door which was extensively remodeled three years ago:

Today the workers opened the rolling shutters for the huge glass doors positioned so that it’s impossible NOT to see into the house from our upstairs patio, and lo and behold! Apparently they’re tearing up the tile floor–that they installed in new construction three years ago.

This seems to be A Thing. We’ve watched the crappy house in Villa Argentina built, roof replaced (twice, I believe), rebuilt, repainted. Another much fancier house near it was built, facade changed, entire yard dug up for drainage, now sporting new construction which will apparently be a barbacoa. Does anybody plan anything?

In the process of building the new addition next door, I watched the attempts to join the new Isopanel roof to the existing one, then the attempts to seal, and re-seal, the various joints, ending in a mess that only we get to see from our patio (though from below they might notice the paint blistering on the wall).

As they were working on this, I asked the foreman, ¿Se planficó? (Was this planned?). No, he replied, we make it up as we go along.

At the time, I thought he was joking.