Back in the saddle again…

Oh man.  We need a vacation from our vacation.  It has been a crazy (for us) couple of weeks and I have absolutely NO IDEA where to start.  So I’ll bulletpoint.

I took 2-3 weeks off diet and exercise (I honestly have no idea how long) and only gained 2 kilos.  So yesterday, when i found I could put a shoe on my burned foot (oops, did I forget to post about that?  I was making coffee one morning and managed to spill an entire pot full of boiling water on one leg and one foot - since I had pants on (baby it is COLD outside (but I’m getting ahead of myself) it trapped the heat and the burns were pretty bad.  If I could remember when I burned myself you’d be all “OOH! that MUST have been bad because it is taking a LONG TIME to heal” but since I have no clue when it happened - 2 weeks? who knows…all I can say is that I was unable to walk/exercise and actually had a few days where I couldn’t let anything touch it - night was especially bad as i couldn’t tolerate a sheet touching.  Anyway, nuff said.) I got off my ever expanding duff and went for a walk.  Coincidentaly, the temperature that day decided to drop like a stone and I’m sitting here in jeans and a sweatshirt and running out like a lizard ocassionally to heat up with direct sun.  Oh, the sun came back 2 days ago also!  Ummm…where was I?

So I’m back on my exercise program (walk and sometimes run 50-70 minutes/day) and watching what I eat.  Apparently, this means that the other day I watched myself eat a good portion of a small jar of Nutella.  So I guess I should change that.  The rain came down down down for over 30 days straight here in Quintana Roo and as we moved through the different stages of grief (denial, anger, acceptance and finally homicidal tendencies whenever anyone mentioned the sun) overlaying a general mind-numbing depression to match the grey of the skies it became No Longer Funny to Mention the F*cking Rain.  We even went to Merida to escape the rain.  Yeah, we did some stuff about the house but all of that could have been done from here.  We just wanted to escape the drizzle for a while.  And then, yesterday, the rain stopped.  We had been doing the laundry by hanging stuff around the palapa and pointing fans at it until it could be taken inside A/C for its final dry cycle and it was amazing to hang stuff up In The Sunshine.  Even if the sunshine only lasted a couple hours it was good enough to get a start on the moldy laundry.  So we’re living large here, able to DRY OUR LAUNDRY once again!  it doesn’t take much to make us happy.  And the lovely sun is just too lovely to describe.

Unfortunately, we must have made a trade-off with the sun gods as the temperature god decided to pack up his heat and go home.  Jamie is very happy about this development but I am freezing.  I suppose I haven’t really acclimated because I keep wondering why I’m so cold at 80F with 80+% humidity.  I can’t help it - I know I should be warm, but it just isn’t there.

We have made plans to go back to the US for Turkey Day.  Luckilly we’re Americans otherwise we would have already missed Turkey Day.  I’ve been beating the computer looking at rates and fares and finally pulled the trigger yesterday and bought tickets and a hotel room.  Now I just need to decide on trip insurance and a rental car.

I replaced the motherboard on my computer a few days after our first Merida trip and I can’t tell you how lovely it is to have my computer back again.  The only little oddity is that the mouse is sometimes iffy - but I’ll have to visit my friends at the thinkpad forums to figure it out.  I also got a larger hard drive for Jesse’s computer and he is dying for me to install it.  Maybe I’ll get around to that today.

Ellen celebrated 2 birthdays - one in Merida and one here in PaaMul.  She had (I blogged it earlier and if I’m not too lazy i’ll edit this with the link) quite a list of food items and we got most of it done.  One more item she wanted was a beach campfire but we might postpone that for later instead of indefinitely.  She has been dying for pierced ears for what seems like a year (but it could just be the constant request to pierce her ears makes it SEEM like a year) and if she hadn’t changed her mind, it would be happening right now.  She is really very girly and I think she’ll really enjoy pierced ears.  Both girls got haircuts yesterday - Sissy had been dying to have her hair cut since before our 2nd Merida trip and I finally got my act together and gave her a very pixieish cut.  She is cute as a button.  Ellen, of course, had to have hers cut too so I tried to even out the butcher job she did (AGAIN!) on her bangs and gave her a layered cut to show off her beautiful curls.

One of the tests I took in Merida gave me cholesterol results and it looks like my good cholesterol is seriously lacking (though all the other numbers are fantabulous).  I consulted Dr. Google and found that I’m doing most everything I can to control the bad and boost the good so I added nightly red wine (red medicine, natch!) and fish oil capsules.  I’ll test again in a month or two and see if they’ve made any difference.  What a TRIAL to constantly have to remember my red medicine!  The boys were wicked sick after our first Merida trip and Jamie, the girls and I ingested massive quantities of Vitamin C to try and avoid their plague.  It must have worked because we’re still going strong and they are STILL recovering (awwww).  As such, for our second Merida trip the boys stayed Home Alone.  It was a learning experience for both us and them and I would be comfortable doing it again.

Right now the house in Merida is simply waiting for us to get our fideicomiso together (a trust between us, the Mexican government and a bank to allow us to lease the land for 50 years).  I’m probably going to pursue Mexican citizenship in 4 years and we will get rid of the fideicomiso but since Merida sits within 50km from the sea (I think that’s the rule) we need to lease land instead of buying.  That should take a month so we simply sit and doodle drawings of what we want to do with the house once our ship comes in.  Because right now we don’t have a cent (thanks to stock market investments BEFORE the crashes) to put into the place.

I think I’m about at the end of my brain dump but wanted to wish a very happy birthday to Jamie’s Maca, his grandmother (and the kids only living great grandmother).  May we all live such full and rewarding lives!  Happy birthday Maca!