Hair Wizard & Return Itinerary Linked

Saint John, left.

The date that we leave San Carlos is almost entirely dependent upon when Julie was able to book an appointment to rescue her hair in Phoenix with her trusted long time guru and personal savior Saint John, aka John Pace of Gulick Brothers. I think Julie first saw him in about 1986.
You may have noticed in this blog the lack of close photographs of Julie. Shortly after we arrived here she went to a local hair dresser and got a perm, or the perm got her. Julie has taken to calling it Palapa Hair since it looks sort of like one after a hurricane. She will not let me take pictures of it. Whatever chemicals were used on her head were not friendly to her hair. No bueno.
So, we looked at the date of her appointment with Saint John, backed up from that to “X” days with Mom in Tucson,added into the equation only going through Los Angeles on a weekend to limit our exposure to the chances of a four hour traffic block and “Poof!” we have the hair date and the departure date from San Carlos. Now one drawback with this methodology is that we end up one night in Blythe. I have never stayed over night in Blythe for good reason – there is nothing of interest there except bathrooms, gasoline and maybe some fast food. I suppose if you had a keen interest in cotton or citrus fruit it would be a destination. I like to wear cotton clothes and drink OJ, but have never taken it to the next level.

Ramblings

Yesterday while Julie was kayaking the bay, I spent some time around town with the camera. This was taken from my perch on the west side of the anchorage looking toward Marina Terra while looking for signs of Julie's return. (She was late and I worry)

The most photographed rock in all of Sonora, from in front of Tony's.

Juan Jose.

An animated JJ.

If you look closely at the bottom left of the photo you will see new concrete, yes c o n c r e t e , on the ground. After the second floor palapa bar deal did not work out JJ has decided to spend a few pesos to upgrade his outdoor establishment. He is also thinking that it will not be long before he has a license to sell cerveza. Yes, I know that discussion has happened before, more than once, but it could happen.

I asked JJ where I could get one of those "Arriba ! Guaymas" stickers for my truck, even though I would prefer an "Arriba ! San Carlos" sticker and the light bulb went full on. Nobody makes one for San Carlos. He said, "Who gives a f__k about Guaymas when you live in San Carlos?" I am expecting to see one of these stickers before we depart. JJ is no slouch when it comes to making money, although a sticker might arrive with some additional graphic not suitable for viewing by children.

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.

Communication limits & weather report

Some thoughts on living temporarily in San Carlos: This has so far been an El Niño winter, with several cold fronts moving through Southern California and Arizona managing to drag the tail end of the front through Sonora. This means that we actually had a few days with sprinkles and a couple of days with rain and cooler temperatures. Not cool enough to not wear shorts and not long enough periods that we didn’t wait a few hours and manage to golf at least nine holes. But it has been a bit of a surprise compared to last January when temperatures were pushing close to 90°.

Having internet capability in the rented casa has been a vast improvement and I am certain that our four months here would be very different if we still had to go somewhere to get access like we did last winter. Having most of our bills and all of our mail managed for us back in Florence is fine, but it has been personally difficult for me to give up that control for such a long period of time. I am now concerned about business tax filings, even though we were able to have Alisha take some checks back to the States and have FedEx delivery from our accountant to Alisha in Washington D.C. so that the government could receive our payroll taxes on time. February 15th is the next upcoming date for business income taxes and it has me checking my memory and relying on Eric back in Florence to sift the mail for things that need to be mailed to our Eugene tax guy. The other things that I have tracked all year in QuickBooks® will be emailed. This brings me to the lack of a timely, reliable mail system in Mexico.

People here rely on many different methods to send a receive mail. The most common is a loose knit group that has picked a business location, like a Realtor®, to accumulate mail that is gathered at a similar point in a place like Tucson or Nogales. This seems to work reasonably well except when nobody is going or coming from that direction for long periods of time. Things pile up to the point where all of it will not fit in a passenger car. Really. Then there is the issue of some people shipping boxes. What is in the box? Is it legal? Will it get me thrown in the jail? These are serious questions. Another comment I have heard on this mail delivery problem is that the group may have worked 15 years ago, but with aging of the participants fewer of them make the trips north, thus bigger loads when someone does finally get there.

The mail system in Mexico was used as the model to construct UPS with its central collection point, or at least it seems so, but UPS works and Mexico’s system does not work so well. Apparently, everything coming into or out of Mexico goes through one central point in Mexico City, and then it is distributed out from there. So it is not uncommon for a letter from the States to take a few weeks or a month to reach San Carlos. That is far too long for any business purpose and one would never consider sending anything of value through the system because it could become “misplaced”, permanently. It seems to me that this lack of reliable cross-border transactional commerce would have a significant negative impact on the country’s economic development. I do not think that I would willingly opt for a more permanent residence here when such a simple thing as mail is such an obstacle. The fact is we still have a few things that need real signatures and are time critical. I have talked to several people that just accept the fact that they drive to Tucson monthly just to get mail and justify it by also using the trip to buy a few products that are difficult or impossible to buy in Mexico.

Bleachers & Backstop

The Paradiso Resort folks moved their aluminum bleachers over to where we play softball...
...and moved and installed a backstop for us.

They then sent a young man out with a table covered with water and cerveza for sale. All of this was due to the fact that the previous Saturday we had about 50 people in attendance. It also may have had something to do with our friend George putting a bug in the managements ear about how large our twice weekly outings had become.

We were rained out this last Saturday, so we have not had a chance to test out the new seating capacity, but it was probably a good thing because the bleachers needed a good washing after sitting under some trees for who knows how long.

Who knew?

Growing up in Tucson with bilingual Grandparents in Nogales and a bilingual father from the same town, I always felt that we Edmonson's had a foot in both Arizona and Sonora, despite the claim to Scottish roots. Well, I had a revelation today when Julie returned from Tony's open air market with the bottle of Crema de Tequila. Tony was feeling a little tired and remembered that he had a bottle of this stuff handy, so he shared a swig, or two, with Julie. Julia liked it a lot and ran pronto to the store to purchase a bottle.

This is really good stuff, way better than Baileys although along the same lines, and now I know that a good Scotsman, as my Great Grandfather surely was, would never have downed an Irish liqueur when something of this magnitude was available. Surely when Neal Munro mustered out of the army in Arizona Territory and operated a dry goods store, the future financial fortunes of the family would have been entirely secure if he found a source of this nectar to sell. OMG.

Softball