El Niño

The weather pattern that has developed this winter, where cold fronts are aiming for Southern California, is reportedly due to an El Niño pattern that has set itself up in the Pacific Ocean. The tail end of these cold fronts have been dragging through San Carlos, and even further South, with moderate rains and a little bit of wind at times. No complaints from me, because it is still very comfortable, but it causes a few delays in our outdoor activities and the locals talk about it a lot. We had a whole inch of rain the other night and last week there was even a bit o’ hail. It totally freaked people out that this could happen here.

One of the little stories that is so Mexico came when a road grader bladed our little neighborhood streets about a week ago. I asked the fellow across the street from us if this happened often, or was it perhaps due to the erosion ruts from tropical storm Jimena being just too much for the new San Carlos Commisario and he decided to spend a few pesos. He said that in the ten years he has lived here he had never, ever seen a road grader work on the streets in the Caracol Turistico sector – never. A few more days later a dump truck started delivering little piles of fill material at strategic points along our streets and, having spent most of my career in the rock and sand business, I commented to Julie that there was far too much silt in the piles to make it useful for road fill. I also shared my belief that it was intended to fill ruts and that when it rained we would see a muddy mess. Guess what? I almost had to use four wheel drive to get up our street yesterday. The Suburban has thick, gooey mud thrown unevenly around its wheel wells, and the streets look like something out of the film “Patton” when the Third Army was moving equipment in the deep mud of the winter roads to get to Bastogne quickly.

Of course today is sunny and 70-something degrees and Julie is out kayaking the bay with a new Canadian friend while I dink away at the keyboard. What am I doing? Hasta luego.