Hell’s Half Acre

Ha!  Not a chance!  But I was heartened to find that while I still need to perform a fine tooth combing of November and December, we spent only around $33K last year.  Of course, that doesn’t include palapa costs.  A quick perusal of the palapa spreadsheet shows we spent about $8200 on the palapa renovation and fix-up and furnishings cost around $2300.  We still have painting to do, some more furniture to purchase and are waiting for our carpintero to give us a quote for lower cabinets for the kitchen and then I think we’ll wait for a bit.  We’d like to tile upstairs above the recamera and the upper walls of the baño, but that might wait a bit.  We also want to re-do some of the trailer space tile work.  I don’t think you’re really ever done unless you sell the place.  Our good neighbors, Ian and Deb are in a constant flux of palapa changes and have an absolutely GORGEOUS bathroom and now upper deck to flaunt.

I’ve been able to practice some form of Yoga for the past week and am really happy that I’m finally getting back to Yoga.  I’d always thought I would need to stop the exercise walks with Jamie or carve out an enormous block of time to practice but I’ve found that really isn’t true; I’m generally happy with 5A’s and 5B’s.  I have a Yoga blog so I’ll shaddup about Yoga now.

Pike is on the mend!  Thank you SO MUCH to everyone for their sweet concern, Vanessa; please NEVER feel like you’re intruding!  He has gone a solid week (or more?) without food and his mouth just is not getting better.  He really had us fooled as he and Sissy and the “good” toothbrushers but apparently he had a HUGE change in his little mouth (many molars up and down pushing all his teeth about) and he pretty much stopped brushing.  Why he didn’t tell us this I have no idea.  I have a feeling the tonsil infection might have been caused by the mouth bacteria.  At any rate, while he dropped the fever after a day of antibiotics, he was still weak, not eating and not out of bed.  While the tonsil infection had cleared his mouth still was red and swollen.  So today we headed off to our favorite dentist in Playa del Carmen, Dr. Jorge Armenta.  He took a good look, talked to us for quite a bit and did a light cleaning.  He gave Pike very detailed and explicit instructions on brushing, frequency and a suggestion for a different type of mouth wash.  We then took Pike to the grocery store and tried hard to find food he would consider eating.  Almost all his little teeth are loose as these molars move in (it is a testament to Jesse’s personality that he never mentioned any of this when it happened to him) and he HATES eating with loose teeth.  That and his gums hurt him badly.  For a boy who LOVES to eat almost anything served, it was a shock to have him dismiss food after food.  We finally ended up with strawberries, cottage cheese, little sausages and salmon.  He is sleeping after his big excursion to the dentist and store (he could barely walk in the store but soldiered through) after eating two bowls of cottage cheese, a decent serving of strawberries and some little sausages.  He has a followup appointment on Monday and we are hoping that there will be great improvement.

And that’s about it; Yoga; doing well on our spending, Pike on a treatment plan and the weather holds chilly.