Critters

This is a fairly long read for my blog, so unless you have time you should probably not start right now, but save it for later.

I have not thought much about outdoor critters, especially crawly biting things, since we moved to the Oregon coast nine years ago. Even in the summer there it does not warm up enough to allow many types of pests the luxury of survival. We have one type of small green snake there that comes out for a few months and it seems to make a living eating slugs so we encourage them mightily and provide good places for them to hide. We do have some nasty spiders so gloves are advised for some activities, but really nothing there that is too dangerous like the things I grew up with in Tucson, although we do have some big things that are to be avoided like Black Bears and Cougars. But the Sonoran Desert has things living in it that are especially adapted to a tough environment. Like scorpions.

Julie reminded me how much she disliked scorpions when we noticed one between us and the television set a couple of nights ago. It was small, maybe 1 ¼ inches long, and not smart as we define it because I walked right up to it with a book and smooshed it easily. Of course this activity put a temporary stop to the video we were watching and required that we scour the condo with a flash light and remake the bed, but I was able to rationalize this episode as just an occasional bump in the road if you want the warm climate of the Southwestern Desert in February. Julie was uneasy with the event, and my explanation, but she is a really good sport about our adventures so she was able to sort of put it behind her. She hardly slept a wink. Besides, the next day we were up before the crack of dawn anyway to go fishing offshore so she did not lose too much sleep at any rate.

Even though we were fairly pooped from less sleep than we have grown accustomed to and we had been fishing all morning, tiring us further, we just had to eat some of the fish we caught for dinner that night and settle into another video. Lo and behold another little bugger crawled out in the same general area between us and the TV. Julie screamed while simultaneously jumping from her chair and in one continuous motion flattened that scorpion as though it was nearly molten metal on an anvil. No second thoughts, no apprehension, just instant death to one of her least favorite of God’s critters. In fact, I am certain that she believes that God had nothing to do with the placement of the scorpion on Earth.

Well, the next day we spent a considerable time looking at the possibilities for other rental properties and, finding nothing suitable, getting the joint sprayed and certain openings properly sealed. In Mexico one does not have easy access to many of the types of things one would find any day of the week at Home Depot, so our Canadian host / property manager graciously tried his best to find the finest things in his arsenal for sealing up the many cracks around our patio door.

Construction techniques here are different and they would give the building inspector back home an instant brain aneurism from the sheer ingenuity of what can be accomplished with sand, cement and a few rudimentary tools. But these techniques sometimes leave gaps between windows and walls, doors and their frames, roofs and supporting walls - gaps large enough to be mistaken for a kiva doorway in some instances, and which would be big enough to handle the world’s largest scorpion migration. Luckily we did not witness such an event or at this very moment I would be writing this from Barrow, Alaska where those creepy crawleys do not exist in February.

I find it interesting, in a morbid sort of way, that contractors here can build an entire house using a concrete beam and column system, filling in between the columns with fired adobe bricks or concrete blocks, put on a solid concrete roof and then decide where electrical appliances will be needed. Once determined, the workers then chip away routes through the bricks to run electrical wiring, which is all eventually covered up with a sand / cement stucco. I believe that this sort of thinking is derived in part from the structure of the language. Compared to our use of English, Spanish is sometimes backwards, which is why we see roadside stands advertising “Taco Fish.”

So, this is a long way around to bring you to my Taco Fish Theory of Scorpion Invasion and why we may be spending the remaining month of this vacation in Alaska. The gap in the house construction is brought about by language structure. Think about it. We in the States have standardized our window and door sizes and build our openings to those sizes, while here in Sonora they mostly build the structure to some pleasing dimensions, then fill in the holes with custom made doors and windows. Thus there is a propensity for gaps around these areas and scorpions are just curious enough in their pursuit of a meal to sneak there way into our vacation dreams. Taco Fish everyone!

(Next Issue: Why the Britts drive on the left side of the road and how that thinking affects their sense of humor – or as some would say – the lack thereof.)

Humbolt Squid for Korea & Japan

There were several of these pangas 5 miles offshore handlining for Humbolt Squid. Our Captain told us that they had been there all night pulling up squid from about 300 feet and they would not leave until their boat was full. They get paid about 5 cents a pound by the processing plant in Guaymas and all of the squid are shipped frozen to Korea and Japan. There is very little local consumption. We pulled a few of these up ourselves using modern gear and can attest to the vigorous nature of the work involved. Ours were released, however.

Julie is practicing Mojo moves on the "fishy's"

More Photos - Fishing

Humbolt Squid

The gallery at fish cleaning time.

Yellowtail (Julie's is the larger of the two).

Landed with much screaming and yelling.

Recent Photos

Sailor humor.
Eating tortillas, of course!

Looking across the San Carlos Club de Golf toward Lee's Hacienda house.

Julie's Cuban rum and the Award Winning wine.

Space Invader House

I am certain that this house was the original inspiration for the layout of the video game Space Invaders. The blue nose is a logo for Cyber Company Security and the flat mouth is an unevenly weighted bar bell. All coincidence?

Shrimps & Margaritas

This is about four bucks worth of local shrimp. You can imagine that we may have enjoyed them just a little bit and that there are more in the fridge. There are several mobile vendors around town that sell seafood and vegetables from the back of their trucks and our guy only has the “big shrimps.” We also have mahi-mahi on ice, enough for about a week, all at very modest cost.

If you are wondering, yes, we could get used to this. Very used to this. The bounty of the Sea of Cortez is unbelievable, making us happy campers.

Margaritas

You will notice in this photo, taken at sunset at Charley’s Rock, that Julie’s glass is empty – but what is not obvious is that it is empty for the second time. We moved on from the sunset venue to dinner at Picalo’s which included yet another margarita for the passenger. This proved to be too much and it took a firm arm to escort the lady to the Suburban for our get-a-way.

Raining Palo Verde – Club de Golf

On our most recent lap around the San Carlos golf course under a bright blue 75˚ sky Julie encountered a Palo Verde tree that sprinkled on her. We had been playing buddy ball, both hitting consistently to the right side of the course, and I was preparing to once again get back into the fairway from a little mogul while Julie stood somewhat behind me to help track the actual direction of this next whack. On this day my aim and the actual trajectory were conflicted, multiple personalities. There happened to be a relatively small, not tall, Palo Verde tree on the top of this mogul so Julie stood in its leeward shadow and before I could take my swing she said “It’s raining, I can feel it!.” Well, that brought a halt to golf right then and there because it was not raining anywhere else within a hundred kilometers.

I joined her in the rain shadow of the tree and sure enough we could see the small water droplets issuing from the thin little branches of the tree. But this is golf, a serious business to some, and we had been holding up the folks behind us with our zigzag play so I stepped back up and whacked the ball to the other side of the fairway, not too much closer to the hole. This is golf.

I grew up with Palo Verdes and cannot remember ever having one rain on me unless there were clouds above doing the actual raining. These trees offer as close to zero protection from rainfall as one could get - sort of like hiding behind a toothpick. But this was not rain from the sky above. My present theory is that these trees are equipped to suck up as much water as possible in a short amount of time when it happens to occasionally rain in the Sonoran Desert. But, being irrigated by the golf courses watering system, this one had no more room to hold water and had to release it somehow, so it decided that mega-transpiration would save itself from just splitting open. It’s a theory.

If any of my Tucson family knows a professor specializing in this sort of thing, please ask about our raining tree. It would be interesting to know the mechanism and reason for this phenomenon. We would have never experienced this except for the fact that we are not very good at the game of golf and do not know the local rules about whether or not one should pick up and take a drop from these moguls consisting of ¾ inch minus gravels. So the Golfish Theory of Palo Verde Mega-transpiration has been born on the San Carlos Club de Golf and who knows now how this may benefit humankind in the millennia to come. Where breakthroughs originate is sometimes just plain serendipity and who are we to judge the alignment of cosmic forces that get us past our simple curiosity and into the real mud of the universe. Nonsense, you say! I agree. But our tree did rain on us and how cool is that?

Nacapule Canyon

Canyon Entrance

Yesterday, February 17th, we drove the six kilometers north from San Carlos to Nacapule Canyon for a short and beautiful hike.

From the center of town you turn north at the street next to Rosa’s Market (I’ll find the street name later) and just follow the paved road toward the airport. The Airport is the dirt strip with a windsock. (If you are reading this from your loft in New York City, the “paved road” is the one less primitive than all of the others, the one you would never go down in a million years. Potholes abound on the beginning section.) There are several scarred, graffiti tagged blue directional signs pointing the way, and one such sign at an intersection requires that you make a little turn to the right before the bent portion shows an arrow pointing left. Do not do anything too fast or you will probably make a wrong turn. Remember to try to keep heading toward the mountains and you should get there. It helps to use Google Earth in advance to sort of see where you will be going.

The mountains around this area appear to be a combination of metamorphosed claystones and conglomerates, with some obsidian intrusions and other “stuff”. The cliff faces reveal extreme folding of the sedimentary deposits under heat and compression. Even on a micro scale many of the rocks show folding and metamorphic transition. The obsidian is highly fractured. I would like to know more about the geology but did not have time to really crawl around much. The landscape suggests that the area once experienced more rainfall than it presently receives, with the erosion of hundreds of caves cut from the cliffs.

This was a mid-winter trek and I can imagine that summertime would make it a somewhat grueling hike, even with a fire hose of water dragging along. Bring water even in the winter.

The canyon is beautiful with its overhanging cliffs studded with palm trees, cactus and trees while a small trickle of water at its head makes you think twice about being in the Sonoran Desert. I did not bring a fishing rod. We went in the afternoon when the southerly half of the canyon is shaded and the rest is bright sun. The large tree found there, the one that almost looks like a fig tree, is called a Nacapule, which is, in fact, a fig tree.

The only drawback to the adventure is the graffiti found on some of the rocks and signage. So sad – why can’t people figure this out? This is not my country, but it is the world that I live in and it would be a better place without spray paint used inappropriately. I know that Jose’s love knows no bounds for Maria, but do I care? Buy her some flowers fella!

If you want to take part of a morning or afternoon, this is a very easy outing, even for me with my gimpy knee. Two thumbs up : - ) ♥

Vibrant City - Guaymas

Our New House

On Tuesday we went to Guaymas to find the Pearl Farm next to the technical college and to go to the bank since the only one in San Carlos is perpetually out of pesos in their ATM machine. What a hoot! Guaymas is a vibrant, packed town with what appears to be a median age of about 22. It was not quite what I was expecting in terms of the density of people and traffic. We got totally lost.

We crawled past the Ley supermarket and into downtown, past a thousand little shops, and to the harbor next to the Plaza of three Presidents. Forget parking, there is none for a Suburban. I thought that I could just make a few right turns, go around a few blocks, and get headed back toward San Carlos, but the roads are all under construction and the detours guided me South. We found the beisbol stadium and also learned the time the schools all let out. Since we eventually were headed out of town in the wrong direction and I did not have a permit for the truck to go further south than Guaymas (the “Hassle Free” zone only extends to Guaymas) we turned around and used the broadcast towers on top of the mountain behind the Ley as our old style GPS. It worked, but we had still not been to the bank, so I headed back toward the harbor on the same road we had used on our first attempt.

This time we found the bank I was looking for (Santander – a B of A affiliate) just a few block past Ley. Their identification sign only faced east so that explained how we missed it the first time through. Victory! We found pesos and the baños. The inclusion of the bathroom stop allowed us to continue on to our original destination and we found the pearl farm without any real complications, except the one where you do not have enough cash in your wallet to actually buy anything they have on display.

We took the shortcut back to San Carlos, around the bay and the estuary and found that although shorter in distance, it too was under construction and took a bit of extra time. No problem. The drive was beautiful as well as educational and I will take learning something new each day over almost any other experience.

Canyon Hike

Valentines Day at Marina Tera

They got it almost right.

My computer is sleeping…

Well, it has turned out that my computer is not dead, but just taking a little siesta. How appropriate. It will not be useable until a month or so until after we return to Florence because to awaken it will require that I ship it to Hewlett Packard for a little corrective surgery.

When I bought this laptop it was precisely so that we could take some trips and I could still take care of business from afar. I registered my purchase with HP and signed up for their monthly email news just in case there was anything new they wanted to tell me about my slick new machine. In the ensuing two years their emails have arrived each month touting new gadgets and new computers that they think I should purchase, but not much in the way of useful information. They have not been honest with their customers – well, not entirely forthright at least.

It seems that there has been a know problem with the algorithm used to control the fan that cools the motherboard and a lot of these models just shut down in a self-preservation attempt. That would have been really useful information to have included in their monthly email. Another morality dilemma for a big company, “Should we tell our customers that we goofed, or just let them find out the hard way?” I would like to sit in on those types policy meetings and be a moral compass, sort of and Ombudsman or advocate for the people that have trusted the company with their money. I would feel a lot better about HP if they had just put that information in big bold letters at the top of their email – YOUR COMPUTER MAY FAIL AND HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. WE’RE HERE TO HELP. That would have been useful.

The information about the problem is on their help web site and with a little digging one can learn about the problem, some possible home remedies, and that they will fix the problem for free, including shipping costs and sending me a special box, if I call their help tech line.

If you are ever in San Carlos and need some computer help just look for the “Computer Help” sign near the Oxxo store near the second Pemex station. Sonny Felix and her compadre on the phone are very helpful and reasonable.

Mi Computer es Muerte

In the middle of organizing photos on my laptop it just shut down - muerte - dead. Nothing that HP has suggested on their help site has done anything to bring power back. My power supply is fine, as evidenced by good readings from the multi-tester I brought along. It was a last minute thing that I threw in the tool kit.

I have dropped off the laptop at the local computer repair shop which is staffed out of the back door of a house owned by a lady named Sonny Feliz. She got right to the initial diagnosis and did the exact same things that HP recommended, which did not work, then got on the phone to someone in Guayamas. In machine gun spanish I recognized enough words to know that this will take a while to diagnose. So my computer sits at Sonny's and I am rudderless; reduced to using Julie's antique tank.

Lat. 27° 58’ Lon. 110° 55’

A raindrop was spotted in Southern Sonora yesterday, prompting the Governor to issue an alert, while the ever enterprising merchants rushing to sell umbrellas to tourists at every corner. We are 17° latitude further south than our home in Florence and are beginning to notice that things are a little different here. For instance, we have found less Mexican food so far than we have on the Oregon coast, although one could argue that it is ALL Mexican food here given the location, but what I have sampled has been excellent compared to the poor replicas in Oregon. The other night at the La Posada concrete slab and kitchen palapa on the beach, the fare was entirely Greek, with a south of the border twist. Yesterday’s breakfast at Barracuda Bob’s was a croissant, egg, ham and cheese thingy. Eating something there substitutes for payment to B. Bob for usage of the wireless connection. I have not yet found a free internet connection – or anything else free for that matter. The person that came up with the saying “There is no free lunch”, was Mexican.

We golfed 18 holes on Friday at the San Carlos Country Club, using their discount for the afternoon special at $39 (US) per person, including cart. That sounds like a real bargain until you realize that the desert is consuming about $10 per hour of golf balls, each. I brought an old, really old, 2 iron for just this occasion. It is the go-to club for the portions of the fairway that do not have grass. Some of the greens were greens only in name and looked like they were made of lettuce, while most others would be comparable to Scottsdale – well, almost. This was the first complete round that Julie and I have played together and it was great fun, and it was also the first complete round I have played since about 1997.

We were a little pooped when we finished the 18th hole at sunset and did not feel like cooking dinner so we went to Jax instead, where Tortilla Soup, Chicken Enchiladas w/ rice & beans, plus a Corona costs a grand total of $10 (US), with a tip. (Good call, Chris) Julie and I split up this small meal and shared things, trying to keep our portions low. I have been trying to have just one real meal per day, which is noticed by my brain as various organs scream for attention to the details of survival. Being back in the desert I have also had to remember to hydrate since just breathing here does not increase the intake of water like it does on the Oregon coast.

This is all great research and we will be happy to stay and report to our friends and family in this manner for quite a while.

Cats – Pesos – M. Mulligan - Kayaks

Cats & Dog
For some reason San Carlos has a lot of really healthy looking cats and a dog or two. The one dog we have seen out and about, besides our neighbors, was camped out on the roof overhang of a little grocery just south of the marina. He would bark at customers as they left the building and if people had not noticed him when they entered, they certainly were startled at his announcement of superior positioning when they left.
The high cat population makes me wonder how they are making a living if not relying upon humans for their meals. I will not share with Julie my suspicions.

Pesos
We went into Guaymas two days ago to do our major grocery shopping and I really enjoyed the relative purity of the things we purchased at Ley versus what we typically buy from Safeway at home. The few things we put in the cart that had any kind of sweetener potential, had cane sugar, not corn syrup. I bought a kilo (2.2 pounds) of shrimp for about $5.25 total, which was less than the two boxes of imported #4 coffee filters. The Peso has dropped 40 % or more over the last six months and it is very noticeable in some venues. Of course in San Carlos there are some restaurants that have simply raised their already high prices to the tourists, but that may not last long because from what we can tell during our brief time here it does not seem very busy.

Mark Mulligan
There is a palapa on the beach next to the remains of the La Posada Hotel, and it was here that we got a chance to see Mark Mulligan play to a packed house (think big open air shed) and spin his Buffetesque style songs to an enthusiastic crowd. In my memory, the La Posada Hotel is where Chris and I stayed with our Aunt Joanne and cousins Steven & Tammy in about 1958 (?). The old structure is melting into the ground in a way that I have only seen in Mexico, while a remnant slab of concrete is serving as the basis for the Mulligan venue, and hundreds of meals and drinks served several nights a week. When we first came to this spot as children with our Aunt, there was not any other choice of a place to stay outside of Guaymas.

Kayaks
Yesterday Julia and I spent many hours at several coves exploring the shoreline from our kayaks. It was another perfect weather day, about 75°, with crystal clear, but cold, water. Julia really likes looking for shells along the beaches and at one point I began to get a little concerned about the buoyancy of her life vest when I noticed that she had just about filled every pocket with shells. We paddled around several coves and probably covered a few miles in total at a very leisurely pace. I sat in the kayak and watched a panga as one occupant donned a wetsuit and the other worked oars and made sure that the small air compressor kept running. The diver stayed down for at least 45 minutes and my guess was that he was stalking small lobster.

Nogales & San Carlos

I wonder if there is another place in the world where one can cross a border directly from a developed country like the U.S.A. into the third world portion of a country like Mexico? (Some call it a “developing country”, but that is questionable after so many decades stuck in the same time warp.)The contrasts are precise at first, like a laser has defined the divide between the wealthy and the impoverished. But then Mexico has so many other facets of the modern world that are separate and apart from the living conditions of so many of its people that I wonder if this is really third world, developing, or some hybrid of the two. I would argue for the latter. Of course, parts of the U.S. may appear the same way.
Nogales is certainly a jumping off place for the senses to take a detour from our normal expectations in the States. Things are different in so many ways that the adjustment is slow. I cannot take it all in at once and must rely upon some primal, subconscious cortex root to guide me through the tangle in survival mode. I get nervous. The seemingly chaotic scene at the border crossing is functional in its own way, sort of, and everyone quickly goes on their various and assorted ways. So it works in its own odd way. For the gringo, do not look for too many things in English that are explanatory to help you along on your merry way. Some exist, but not enough to make me completely comfortable.
I really like the new border crossing and bypass that Mariposa Road offers. What a treat! No delays and just a breeze to get to the Kilometer 21 checkpoint where we were one of only two couples filling out immigration forms. Paying our immigration fee took a little longer, although the Immigration Official told us we could pay it at a bank in San Carlos instead of at K21; I wanted it out of the way so we burned a total of only ½ hour at this waypoint. We did get the “red light” at the K21 customs choke point, but the uniformed gentlemen peering into the lifted tailgate of the Suburban only asked me where we were going and then politely told me to leave. I am certain that they did not want to rummage through the volume of belongings adequate for a terrestrial circumnavigation of the globe any more than me.
Today we will scout a little of San Carlos because there are so many new things since my last visit twelve (?) years ago, and to find Barracuda Bob’s so we can get some internet time to make these posts and check emails. Tomorrow we will be grocery shopping in Guaymas and finding the B of A affiliate Banco Santander to get a better exchange rate. Oh! I almost forgot. It will probably be in the low 80’s. Pffhhtt.

Tucson

On driving our leg from Ojai to Tucson we made it through L.A. without breaking any records. The traffic there thwarted my plan to enter the basin post-rush hour and breeze along at good speed on the 8 hour run across the Great Stinking Desert. Instead we crept along at a speed that a geologist would find alarming if it was crustal movement, but that in the real world where people actually live would be called dead slow. We lost two hours. As Alisha would say, “It’s sucking the life out of me.”
The visits with family in Tucson were too short, as always, but a good time to get caught up on our speed-talk skills. There was never a lack of stories, both current and old, to spice the air with and learn of the latest news from afar. For us, since we have almost always seemed to be the ones further away from the Arizona nucleus, there are always so many new things to learn about what everyone is doing. Since I did not take notes, much of it will probably be lost in my scrabble network called a brain, so on the next visit it will all be new news again!
We are still faxing and calling Oregon, trying to get the entire tax burden prepared before communication options become more limited. Alisha is taking the brunt of organizing the input forms. I hope that our efforts to pay our due does not go unnoticed by our elected representatives and that they utilize my money wisely for something like repaving the overpass at I-10 and Zzyzx Road (one of my favorite names for a road) to create jobs for this sagging economy. This post is getting out of hand and I am afraid where it might go next………….bye. Taxing blogs might be the next stimulus move – a useless verbiage tax would put me out of business.