Given a bathroom space that didn’t allow for a full-size bath tub, we recalled the sitz bad of my wife’s apartment in Frankfurt. I made a wood model of the seat, and the albeñil Martín went to town. No doubt this will end up as the single most expensive item of construction, but we’ve lived with a place to soak for almost seven years, and will install a solar hot water heater when I get around to buying one.

Of course, there’s always got to be a surprise, and in this case it comes through the semi-Medieval plumbing they do here. The draining water from the bath (this was its first test) goes into that little floor drain, then exits the house. Except that it doesn’t go into that little box; it floods into that little box, under considerable pressure, of course flooding the bathroom if you don’t slow it down. Not a show-stopper, and not unsolvable, and fortunately the floors consist of tile over concrete, so even if it were to flood the adjoining room it would simply be an inconvenience.

“Black well,” or septic tank. The first part is three rings deep; the second one ring deep. It will receive water from the bottom of the first tank, and when it overflows go into a pipe 60 meters or so slightly downhill to a sewage lagoon, in which we’ll plant papyrus, and around which we’ll plant some willow or eucalyptus trees that love water.

The soil is completely impermeable. If you dig a hole 50 cm deep and fill it with water, it will still be full a week later. A septic field would be useless. A friend suggested a mound system, running perforated pipe through a mound of sand topped by soil.

Perforated pipe? They didn’t even sell that in Mexico. And I don’t feel like spending hours (or paying someone to spend hours) drilling holes in plastic pipe. This is what they do in the country, and it works.

Saw this nifty little video yesterday, and remembered the comfrey (Spanish: consuelda) I transplanted last year from a friend’s place after they raved about it. It immediately wilted and looked dead. Don’t worry, she said, it will come back! Indeed it did.

As soon as I finished the video, I dug some up and took it to the campo.

This is looking south (remember, here the sun’s in the north) toward my ragtag garden dominated by zapallos that I didn’t plant.

Goal for next year: grow stuff I actually plant, other than tomatoes and loofahs.

An effective, inexpensive alternative to a gate (which is called a portal

in town, but a portero 10 kilometers inland, in the ‘interior’).

(Alambrero)

No, you cannot install that fence because…

…well, depending where you live, you might think the statement continues, because you don’t have a proper permit.

The passageway for cows and machinery, in which I planted fruit trees that will have to move, included a gate only on the road, leaving the back open. To prevent the cows in the back from destroying the fruit trees, I cut out a section of (useless) fence elsewhere, and dragged it to the offending gap, but I could not install it.

Because immediately two neighbors showed up, and next thing I know they had done it for me.

How many alambreros does it take to screw in a light bulb?

I don’t know. But this is what you get back when you leave just a key with the guy doing the fencing.

(Alambre = wire; Alambrero = guy who does wire fences)