CALENDARIOS

In Spanish 101, for the chapter on days of the week, months of the year, seasons, I bring in a calendario in Spanish. I point out that the week begins on the far left on lunes (Monday). I offer a few points of extra credit to anyone who can research and tell us why the weeks on our US calendars begin on Sunday. (I can't do this anymore because they all pull out their iPhones/Blackberries and chaos ensues. Some of them are desperate for extra credit since they've already sensed that they will be unable to conjugate verbs). The question of what day the week begins has never been answered to my satisfaction. They usually say it's in the Bible; I say show me, and that's the end of that. I was mentioning the topic of this post to señor Jubilado and. . . . .

I, iPhoneless but iMacable, Googled a bit and found out that there is indeed an International Standardization organization that decrees such things as weight and measures (metric system, anyone?) and calendar organization. Monday is the first day of the week, according to it, and most European countries' calendars thus have Saturday and Sunday at the right-hand end of the 7-day week, forming (of course) the weekend. Calendars that split the weekend--Saturday right, Sunday left--as is the case in the U.S.--are sometimes seen in Europe, and are thought to be an artifact of an earlier and less secular era that, in thrall to a reading of the Christian Bible that accepted the Jewish designation of Saturday as the Sabbath, made it the day of rest and thus the last day of the week. I'm sure there are other explanations, just as there are certainly as many different ways of counting days/weeks/years as there are religious/cultural justifications for doing so. In the end, though, it seems that the students who claimed the the calendar has something to do with the Bible are not off the mark. Perhaps they deserved that elusive extra credit that the professor so cruelly denied them. As for conjugating verbs, why wouldn't that concept have been taught in elementary school? But that's another subject, so to speak, entirely.

But, wait! retorts profesora Jubilado. When did all this calendar stuff start? Who made the decision to begin the week with Sunday in the US? Señor Jubilado, a historian, should have included this information in his report. No extra credit for him.

What? No extra credit? (Not that such a thing even exists.) cf: Pope Gregory; his calendar; the acceptance of it by European ("Christian") countries over a several-century period; England's adoption of it (1722, I think) and consequent adoption in the American colonies; the subsequent standardization of time zone, weights and measures, and calendar organization--and eventually currency--in most of Europe (positivism, anyone?); the reluctance/refusal of certain areas of Europe (Great Britain, most obviously) to adopt any or all of these changes; the reluctance/refusal of the U.S. to change its weights and measures (in popular, not scientific, usage) and calendar to conform to the government-imposed system employed by those cheese-eating surrender monkeys and denizens of Old Europe who blithely discard the methods that have been used since time immemorial to tell the peasants when they can take a day off. Don't tread on us. Meet me at the Lincoln Memorial. Fox News, Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, AAARRGH!

¿DE DONDE ERES?

Spanish 101, chapter 2. How do you respond when someone asks you where you're from? With a state? a city or town? or a county, as some of my students in NC and WV did? "Soy de Tucker County."

And do you respond with the place you were born? The place you lived the longest? Or the place where you are now? For some people those would all be the same place, but not for los jubilados.

In Spanish class I usually said, "soy de Philadelphia" because I was born there and I like to think of myself as a rootless cosmopolitan (pace Mao), even though I'm not. Not sure what I'll say in Mexico. Folks there have never heard of WV. In fact some folks in the US, I've found, haven't either: "Oh, western Virginia."

In rural NC, where we lived for 22 years, people used to ask: "Where y'all stayin'?" As if we were itinerants (perhaps we were, as it turns out) or migrant laborers living as seasonal tenants. It may be the case that they had it right: where you are staying--residing at the moment--just might be where you are from, in the only sense that matters. Where we are is where we are from.

EL ANIVERSARIO DE LOS JUBILADOS

48 años. And still standing. ¡CARAJO!

¡ADENTRO!

Mornings and evenings are getting a little chilly, so we've moved inside to eat.



Oh, what's this?


A little bottle (on the left) of something one of us uses to ruin the other's perfectly seasoned sopas.

EL ENTIERRO DE SAN JOSE, PARTE II

Instrucciones: bury him upside down, facing the street, close to your "for sale" sign. Not for nothing is St. Joseph referred to as "the underground real estate agent." And you can list your house on-line with the California outfit that sells the St. J. kit.

Say a few words--"my house is sold, my house is sold, my house is sold"--and ta da!

When (not if, prayerfully) the house is really sold, we have to dig him back up and install him in a place of honor in our new house. Above ground.

Stay tuned for the outcome.

¡SORPRESA! ¡SORPRESA!

Guess what came in the mail today. From mi querida hermana in CA.





According to the booklet that came with the kit, the tradition began when the monjas led by Santa Teresa de Avila (a Spanish connection!) needed land for a new convent. They buried a medal of Saint Joseph. Today, statues replace the medals.

There are precise instructions on how to bury him which, of course, we didn't know when we buried the paper images. So I'm off for a shovel. Mañana I'll show you what I did.

Gracias, hermana.

BOLSAS DE PLASTICO

It is now illegal for stores in Mexico City to give customers merchandise in plastic bags. That's 20 million people who will not be lining their waste baskets with plastic bags. Some of us (Donna, Pete) know that many Mexicans put their toilet paper in waste baskets instead of in the toilet. A good thing, really, but. . . .

Mexico City joins China (the whole country!), Australia, Ireland, Bangladesh, Italy, South Africa and Mumbai in this effort to cut their use of plastic. What about the USA? Too socialist an idea?

It takes 12 million barrels of oil to make 30 billion bags. The US uses 84 billion bags a year.

Now let's visualize those US military officers sitting in air-conditioned tents in Afghanistan.

BURY A SAINT JOSEPH!

Our daughter-in-law told us that when her parents were trying to sell their house, a friend told them to bury a Saint Joseph. SOLD! Hmmm. . . . Will it work for us? Where to get one? Instead of trying to find one in 3D, I copied 3 images of him and asked mi esposo to dig a hole. Face up or face down? I decided face up. Here he is with the mint:

That was last weekend and, so far, no luck. While I was at it, I took a picture of the zinnias:



And, from the second floor, one of the garden which is winding down a bit:


No big garden in Mexico. Boo hoo.

ANTES Y DESPUES

Look what arrived today at 8:30 a.m.:

And look who was in it:

They're taking all our decent muebles to our hijo menor y su mujer in AL.

So here we are in a house with rooms that used to look like this:

But now look like this:



We are divesting ourselves of our material possessions before relocating to Mexico. Repeat after me: "I am not my stuff, I am not my stuff, I am not my stuff...."