We had a MAAVELOUS time on Cozumel, dahhhhlings. We loved the B&B; it wasn’t 5 star and anyone used to resort areas would probably not be happy with the lack of wireless, cat fight in the pre-dawn hours that sounded like it was coming from our patio, the drain on hot water when six bodies shower at once and the lack of blankets (I am still wondering about that one; maybe to keep the A/C use down?) but to us it was heaven. We had a fridge that was cleaner and worked better than our palapa fridge, a hot plate, cooking and eating stuff, blender and CAWFEE machine (and FILTERS!!!). It really doesn’t take much to impress us, but we really loved it there. Two wonderful king sized beds, a cute bathroom, AMAZING hardwood (which gave us ideas for our lower kitchen cabinets) and just such a cute layout. We had a fresh fish “restaurant” (someone’s home) next door with wonderfully fresh fish (we picked our meal). Ok, I’ll stop gushing about the accommodations and instead gush about Carnaval.

I was so happy with our choice of Cozumel to introduce the kids to Carnaval. It was a wonderful family party with lights and color and dance and music and kids and babies and magic. Channel 10 from Cancun ran a float/bus with a live camera and feed; channel 35 from somewhere else did the same. There were parades each night and we mistakenly assumed that Fat Tuesday would be the comfy crowd we encountered the other nights but we were quite wrong; all of Quintana Roo must have shown up along the malecon but it was still a lovely celebration. Necklaces were thrown from the crowd, to the crowd, scrambled for by the kids and handed to bystanders by adults. As I headed crowd downstream, holding tight to Sissy’s hand on Tuesday night, a parade participant took one from his neck and placed it over my head.

We spent the days at the East beaches and never went snorkeling; the water and air was just too cold. I finally broke out my shorts for a few hours the day we left but honestly, it was just too cold for our thin blood, though the kids really enjoyed the beach (as evidenced by the photos). We’re seriously thinking about taking Aunty Chris over when they visit. Water should be much warmer then. We really didn’t see the touristy parts until the night we left and without Carnaval, saw the downtown and malecon the way the cruisers must see it and honestly, it looked like a different world.

It seems that a stomach virus is rolling through PaaMul as our Canadian neighbors are sick, Ellen fell ill today, and I am dreading the roll of illness through our family. We spent much of December sick (those airplanes wreaked havoc with our immune systems) and until Ellen fell ill I’d forgotten about illness. So it would appear that January was sick-free. Ellen is not a happy camper when sick and I generally lie about in bed with her, one arm trapped under her feverish body. She has now progressed to the point that I can turn on lights and take short breaks and she will now watch DVDs. You know your kid is sick when they won’t even watch DVDs/TV.

We still haven’t decided much about the kitchen. I had a contratista (contractor) come over and give us a quote for the cabinets; he suggested a concrete base (over the lovely tile) so that the wood would not come in contact with the floor (and water). He assured us that his (extra fee, natch) termite treatment would allow the (cheaper) pine to last a whole FOUR years. His quote was around $26K. Our local carpintero, who was able to put in our upper cabinets now must work under the control of the restaurant owner which increased his presupuesto another $5K to $14K. He estimates 10 years for untreated pine and since he isn’t nearly as slick as the first guy, I tend to believe him more. I had our contratista for the work we had done on the palapa come out and give us prices for the rebase (concrete footing) for the gabinetes (kitchen cabinets), tiling the bathroom and tiling the roof of the recamera/bath. We’re still waiting for one more carpintero who comes amazingly recommended, I’d love to see some of his work but since we’d most likely be working with pine, I wonder if his talents might be wasted on our lowly job. At any rate, we’re on Mexican time. And after seeing the lovely doors and cabinet doors at Tamarindo, I’m rethinking the whole cabinet design. We do, however, have a door for the bathroom and the boys will no longer be forced to barricade the door with the towel rack. Jorge is coming tomorrow to install it and I’m sure the boys will be in heaven.

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.

if i thought i could get away with it, i think i’d stop right here. but the wrath from the western CONUS would be palpable all the way down here. don’t know what a CONUS is, do you? i’ve been reading weather blogs since June/July and FINALLY figured it out last night. CONtinentalUS. I know what shear is and why it is important (wish it were high right now), what steering currents are any why they are important, the lowest pressure reading from a hurricane (Wilma, 882millibars), how troughs and fronts affect our weather and why, sometimes, we really really really want a trough and all kinds of other useless information unless you’re in the land of the hurricane that i’ll stop boring you with. (grammar mavens recoil in horror at the preposition ending the sentence)

i woke around 4:30 this morning and tried and tried to go back to sleep but it was useless. monkey brain got hold of me and i bounced from issue to issue. finally i booted up the laptop and watched 94L. after that grew tiresome i gave into guilt and this is the result.

not one of these paragraphs will transition to the next. you’ve been warned (but alas, not forewarned). this is also what posting without coffee looks like. be afraid; be very afraid.

ellen has hacked away at so much of the front of her head of hair that she repulsed herself. i think we need to put some mirrors up. she actually has a BALD spot. the kids all go through a phase of cutting their own hair but hers pains me so with her amazing curls (and now, lack thereof). my folks are planning a reunion picture and i think they might decide to put her at the back of the photo, behind the tallest of grownups, where you might be able to see a one of her teensy feet poking out. if you ignore the bald spot, it isn’t so bad though, she still has lots of long curls. she loves the length of her hair and has been waiting forever for it to get long. both she and Pike have hair that grows at glacial speed so it took forever to get long. the curls didn’t help much in the length goal either. why she then decides to hack away at it is something i will never understand.

we have been getting thunderstorm after thunderstorm the past couple days, but managed to time our laundry such that the backlog was almost completely washed and dried. jesse has a lonely pair of shorts that simply will not dry; they keep getting hit with shower after shower. i really hate hanging the clothes up as the fire ants seem to have established many little summer villas along the length of the clothesline and depend on my visits to feed their expanding families. i’ve tried standing on concrete and stretching way out to the line but i always end up with 3 or 4 bites each time i hang up a load of clothes. i could (blah blah blah, i mean really, who cares???) hang the laundry over concrete but it doesn’t dry as fast as the line over the villas. there. i finished that boring story. phhhhbt.

if i never get another mosquito bite again, it will be too soon. it isn’t just the endless itch and scratch and bite again but the lingering fear of dengue…

the palapa is really coming along well. i almost wrote “bodega” as that is what everyone calls their cement room, but honestly, ours is so much larger than a bodega (storage room) that i really need to stop calling it that. jamie and i were furniture shopping recently; the salesperson asked jamie what the furniture was for and he replied, “the bodega”. ummm, no, dear. i corrected with “la recamera” (bedroom) and the confusion on the face of the salesperson was gone. i mean really, who looks for furniture to decorate their storage room? we now have two futon/sofas in there, an TV stand like thing with 4 cubby spaces and a nightstand/bookcase/computer desk on wheels. the girls have almost completely taken over the TV stand thing and converted at least two cubbies to Polly Pocket homes. i got a stand for the bathroom and we now have a place for towels that Jamie and Sissy are slowing taking over with clothing. (the sky is now light enough that it is lighter outside than basking in the glow of the laptop screen inside. i suppose civilization is just around the bend; coffee and all, and i may begin capitalization soon.)

I’ve spent the last couple days researching prices and finding lots (as in a package; not simply many many) of books for the kids. I really like the Sonlight curriculum as it is enormously literature-based. If you live in the US and have library access, you can do it really cheap as much of their literature is classics and Newberry winners. Librarians LOVE Newberry winners. I believe that Sonlight may have been (all the RV retirees’ eyes are glazing over; here’s a hint; I’m going to blather on about books for a bit so why don’t you just skip to the next paragraph? toodles!) targeted to missionaries living outside the US and they do a good business with many ex-pats. It is also a very religious curriculum with many of the books based on the lives of missionaries and turning the indigenous to God. Not so much my cup of tea but to be fair, they list books on many different religions. It is obvious that the slant is “Christianity is correct” but it is also very easy to simply omit those books. My California sister will be very happy to know I have a large spreadsheet organizing all the books in each level with prices tracked by Ebay auction, Amazon, Powell’s and Half.com. My best scores, however, have been on the Well Trained Mind swap board. Which is a very long way of saying that boatloads of books are on their way to my sister’s house and she may very well refuse us entry after all the crap we’re sending her way.

We’re changing our US address. If you need it, please email me. I had meant to do it last year but never got around to it; we rarely make use of our mailing service (to actually forward our mail; it generally sits there for months on end) and when we do, they almost always get something wrong. It helps that the new place is about 1/2 the price. As for email, I really have no excuses. I try and I do feel terribly guilty, but my inbox is a picture of horror.

Jamie and Sissy have moved to the bodega/recamera and it has been so nice to have them out of the trailer. For the first time in 3 years, I can walk from my bedroom to the bathroom and not have to crawl over a queen-sized bed in the process. Can’t go around it; must go over it. Without waking the occupants. I’m guessing they are loving the space of two double beds as the sofa/futons we bought make lovely, comfy, non-sofa bed with a bar in your back, cushy beds. The room has become a wonderful evening spot; we have room for games and cards and spreading out. They are also no longer cramped in the trailer and, I imagine, are loving the space at night. The hands-down best part of this is that if I wake at 4:30 am unable to sleep, once I give in to being up for the day, I can make myself a cup of coffee without bothering anyone. And that, my friends, is what we, growing up in Alabama in the 70’s called, “living like white folk”. Such luxury!

We really only need to finish painting, contract for kitchen cabinets (we may have Jorge do this while we’re gone…still thinking (which honestly, only leads us to indecision)) , install a tinaco (big black storage tank for water which I hope will double as a solar hot water heater) and figure a way to chlorinate our watersupply, move the electric outside the recamera and foam the access door closed and maybe something I can’t remember.

We haven’t taken food down to the Costa Maya for a week; I got sick and then the boys got sick and then Ellen decided to have a birthday. Well, she WILL. She has been counting down the days, and yesterday, tired of waiting for her birthday, decided to time travel. She changed her question from, “is it TWO more days til my birthday, Mom?” to “Pretend it’s tomorrow! When is my birthday?!!” (the correct answer is TOMORROW!!!)

Today we head to Costco, as she is desirous of smoked salmon on her birthday (which really is tomorrow) and to pick up supplies for what may be our last run to the Costa Maya. If I am unable to spend all the money you all have donated so generously to the relief efforts, I’ll post a poll so you can decide what should be done with the leftovers. I’m guessing that most of the people who donated probably died of boredom before making it this far in this post and will need a short, succinct post with a poll. I’m pretty sure my Mom and Dad are still alive. But I’m an optimist.

The police and miltary presence in Cancun was amazing. We had a family in a car advise us (when we were parked in the first location) that we were too exposed and military stopped by to check on us. All night the police were patrolling, the white, blue and red lights bouncing all around the trailer but sirens were kept to a minimum. We spent the day outside the trailer (where it was cooler, with wind and gusts) in the parking lot waiting for the gusts to die down. Finally, after more consumption at Costco we headed home. We purchased some treats for the guards and the kids loved passing them out, it took me only about 30 minutes to stick the trailer in the palapa and we’re still marveling at what the sea brought to our beach.

Tomorrow we head down to Calderitas, on Chetumal’s bay, to help a friend clear her property which was damaged in the hurricane. We’ve culled our clothing and toys for donations and will probably drive donations down in the next few days. Depending on the contacts I make down there we might start to accept Paypal donations if anyone wants to donate, but I’d first rather see what is needed. We got electricity and water back yesterday afternoon and life is good.

UPDATE:

local Red Cross reports from today (Chetumal RC is too busy with Chetumal itself)

items needed are

CLOTHING, CANDLES, MATCHES, WATER, FOOD, BLANKETS, HAMMOCKS, GENERATORS, FUEL, utilitarian clothing, non perishable food, candles, flashlights, roofing material, plastic tarps, tents, etc.

Obviously it would difficult if not impossible to send that down here. If you want to paypal with money earmarked for specific items put that in the paypal info. You can paypal funded (non credit card) to dulce@support.net You can paypal credit card to jamnkats@smarteryp.com You are also welcome to snail mail checks to my sister who will deposit them and transfer to my account, email me for info. I’ll put a spreadsheet together with amounts donated (I’ll use initials instead of names) and materials purchased and post it here.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

I experimented with paint tonight and figured out that I need to scrape the walls from all the little dots of concrete/uniblock/cement (not sure what it is but I suspect Uniblok) before painting but the wall is starting to look good. We FINALLY have a plan for the back door of the bodega and have replaced all our sewer pipe. David finished our new vigas and they are GORGEOUS. Tomorrow we followup on tiles we paid for yesterday that we supposed to arrive today for our neighbor (we’re overseeing the completion of their palapa) and head to Home Depot to buy French Doors for the bodega. I’ve always wanted French Doors (they are cheaper than a sliding glass door) and will finally get my wish. Since we can’t get anyone to make us one or even show up to see what the job entails, we’ll use our friendly local carpintero to install French Doors. He came up with a lovely idea for the installation and a use for broken glass we have lying around.

The kids are getting better; Pike was the only one laid low today and Jamie and I are feeling MUCH better. Hopefully we’ll get to the dentista and Akumal before the week is over.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jamnkats/DayInTheLife

Generally, when doing construction, or a project, or pretty much anything you do with a contractor, you pay 50% up front and 50% at the end of the project. It is a standard procedure and applies to extranjeros and Mexicans alike. The contractor (contratista) I’d hired to do our remodel came highly recommended by someone I know personally and I’d seen his work and was pleased. I’m still VERY happy with his work and would recommend him (and have) with reservations. He wanted to pay his workers on a weekly basis. As evidenced by the progression of photos in Flickr, they took their own sweet time. Sometimes they’d read the newspaper but generally, at least 2 (or more) of the 4-5 on the job were working. The week after I returned from my emergency trip to Ohio I told Manuel that I had paid all I was going to pay and that he’d receive no more money until the job was done. I had him sign a sheet of paper stating such.

But the storm clouds, always present along a summer Caribbean, hung low. Come that Saturday, when he liked to pay his workers, he insisted on payment. I refused and headed to Cancun to pick up a door for the project. When I returned at 4pm, I was astonished to find the entire crew still waiting (they usually leave at 1pm or so on Saturday). In addition, a man with a moto (motorcycle) was in attendance.

The palapa…sigh. Well, the workers are back on the job after being pulled off the job when they didn’t get paid last week. Honestly, I’m about at the point of complete payment and I am not going to pay the rest until the job is done. So Don Manuel and I had a little chat and yesterday the workers returned. They promised the palapa would be finished in two days, but unless we fall into a black hole or some kind of time warp, that simply ain’t happening in 48 hours. Though they did get a LOT of work done yesterday. On the palapero front; we wanted the staircase moved from one area to another and yesterday, when Jamie saw what Dino had in mind he stopped the work. We’ve been really lucky up til now with Dino’s ideas; he just builds what he thinks is nice and will work and we have loved what he’s done, but the new staircase just wasn’t going to work for us. Jamie found a way to spend only 3000 pesos more to get the staircase he wants and Dino and crew ripped down what they’d started and began anew.

We have block going in the bedroom, all the scaffolding (from doing the ceiling) is gone and it really is looking good. The abaniles sent me to the building supply store twice yesterday (not a record) and it is a good thing as I realized, just before we headed out for groceries, that our car insurance is done for the year. We’d planned to be out of Mexico by now, so it wouldn’t have been a problem, but ugh. We’re grounded until I hear from the agent; we emailed back and forth last night and I fully expect a policy this am when they open. Now we just need to renew the car permit to stay legal in the country.

Dayum, this was a boring entry. See what happens when my brilliance is lost (course I haven’t had cawfee yet either…)!

So, at about 1:15 in the afternoon, I headed out again to wait for him to pass by on his way home from work.  Or home from whatever.  I waited at the pool.  I waited under a coconut tree in the shade.  I got some mosquito repellent and waited in the breeze until the air stopped, waiting for rain that never came.  I spent about 4 hours waiting.  When he finally appeared, he was on the phone, talking, and didn’t roll down his window, but did give me the “thumbs up” sign, and when I mouthed, “firmo, Ud. los planes?” he nodded “yes”.  So, we’ll see.  This morning I’ll see if Feliciano has any more news; I honestly don’t think we can continue without his signature in hand.  But the rules change so quickly here that it is impossible to keep up.