SABADO

On Saturday evening Kim and Richard came over for a bite to eat and a drink (on the house) and then we went to a guitar concert at UNAM in Juriquilla.  You may also note that the outside of the kitchen/dining room has been painted:

This is Hilario Yáñez, the soloist of the evening, with a link to one of the pieces he played.  A couple of weeks ago he and his girlfriend were at Shelley's for lunch just before he set off on a tour of France.  El sr J sat next to him and they spoke of obscure guitariana.  Shelley is his former English tutor and biggest booster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQvsDobXiII

MAS COCINA

The guys say we'll be able to move into the kitchen this weekend.  We'll see.  Two doors and a window arrived on Wednesday:

They were installed on Thursday:

Some leftover azulejos for the steps to the garden/rubble piles:

The carpenter has put in doors and drawers:

The exhaust fan, a complicated affair, has been puzzled out and installed:

A fan/light for the dining room:

Lights in the dining room:

Lights embedded in the top shelf:

The glass man is supposed to come today to put glass in all the doors and windows.

THE CIA

I'm reading two books about the CIA at the same time!  When one becomes too depressing, I go to the other one to get depressed in a different way.  I've known for most of my life that the CIA did evil and misguided things, but I didn't know how dumb its agents were.  You'd think Yale could have done a better job educating these men.  But then George W. Bush went there.  What happens when dumb, evil men have unlimited resources and no accountability?  Read this book and find out:

The CIA has been good at buying and arming "friendly" governments and assassinating perceived enemies, but the agency has been tragically inept at gathering information about other countries, i.e. spying.  No need to understand the culture or speak the language, just activate your hubris, kick-start your anti-communism, and get some covert action going.

Want to know what it's like to live in a CIA family in which your parents and all their friends are CIA-connected?  Want to know how these people are connected?

JFK

Timothy Leary

Mary Pinchot Meyer

Then check out this book:

The CIA, viewed from the outside and the inside.  Read and weep.

CORNISA, PUERTAS, PLANTAS, AZOTEA, ETC.

When the architect, who is mostly absent, does come, he is full of fancy ideas to jazz up the project.  Mostly we reject his ideas.  And if we forget to reject them, Trini usually does.  One thing we forgot to reject was the cornice on the top of the building, and Trini didn't either.  A few days ago the architect brought two long, metal molds and the guys attached them to the top of the building somehow and are pouring cement in them.

After the Saturday kerfuffle with el sr J, the carpenter came back and fixed up his major mistake, a pantry that didn't go all the way to the wall:

He also put some doors on the storage spaces:

Meanwhile, the front room was almost empty of cement, sand, gravel and lime.  Then a knock on the door and the call, "MATERIAL."  "MATERIAL" I yell to Trini and the guys, and now the front room is filled up again.  What for, we wondered.  Well, it looks like the roof is getting another layer of cement:

El sr J is doing the pathways in the garden, spiriting off some of the sand and gravel from the front room.  He's using the stones that used to be on the patio:

I bought a plum tree at market.  Of course I have no idea what variety it is, but it has big thorns.  Can you see those little plums on it?  It's comestible, said the guy standing beside me.  I certainly hope so:

Rosa María, our landlady from the casita, gave us a criollo avocado, which she promises will bear fruit before we die:

SABADO

I don't quite know how to explain this, but after 5 days of living with 5 or 6 or 7 workmen, we really look forward to the quiet weekends.  Why is it that watching men work, staying out of their way by hiding out in the bedroom, paying for each delivery of cement, sand, gravel, debating how we want things done, just tires us out.  Around 4 pm on Friday, I begin to fantasize about saying "hasta lunes, buen fin de semana, etc" to the workmen.  At around 5:30 I can actually say it.

Friday night we went to the symphony and then out to eat.  Came home and I read the book I can hardly put down about the CIA's murderous practices.  I was up until 12:30 a.m. or so.  Saturday morning I got up before el sr J and puttered around in the garden in my jammies.  Around 8:30 I heard a knock on the door.  Now, sometimes I answer these knocks, sometimes I don't.  Who knows why I answered this one.  It was the unexpected arrival of the carpenter, his wife and their grandson, Manuel.  In they came for a day's work, greeted by my bare-chested, bleary-eyed husband, who, it turns out, is not at all satisfied with the work.

We are, however, satisfied with the aluminum roof guy's work.  He will be back on Monday to replace the 5 skylights in the house.

The cantera tile patio is almost done:

We recycled a door from inside to the garden storage area:

Tomorrow, Monday, el sr J will inform Trini, the patrón, about the bad carpentry work.  How many men will we see tomorrow?  Trini and the 4 albañiles, Sergio, the plumber, the carpenter and who knows who else will come with him, the skylight/roof guy, and we never know when the architect will show up.  But, looking on the bright side, once all these guys finish in the kitchen and dining room and the herreros deliver the doors and window next week, we may be able to move into the kitchen.  Let's hope we live so long.

DETACHMENT, JASMINES, JASMINOIDS, TECHADOR

Yesterday we saw Detachment, starring Adrien Brody, at the International Film Festival.  Brody plays a substitute teacher in a school full of aggressive, foul-mouthed, ignorant students (except for the sensitive one who commits suicide) and burned-out teachers.  I forgot to bring tissues.

Look at this face.  Isn't he perfect for the part of a detached substitute teacher? Or front man for an emo group?  I love the way his nose kind of tilts to the left:

Later, Skyping with my sister, we discussed how different this picture of school is from the schooldays we remember.  Back then the teachers were in charge, for better or worse.  My sister got spanked with the "board of education" in front of her class in third grade.  I had a male teacher in junior high who would drag girls by the hair from their seats to the classroom door for talking in class.  No marks resulted from this treatment, so the teacher was able to get away with it.  The math teacher went off the deep end and threw a kid in the trash can in front of a room full of students.  He, at least, was fired.

Pete, my brother-in-law, went to St. Cassian's in NJ.  His classmate, Howard Cavallero, had his head banged into the chalkboard numerous times by a nun for not doing his homework.  When Sister Mary Kevin, a/k/a Sister Tank, threatened to beat up Tim White, he called her a brute and walked out of the room and the school, headed for home.  His parents went to the diocese and that was the end of beatings at St. Cassian's.

We finally got our new, mostly transparent, shade-providing, rain-defeating roofs (see top of photo).  That's the contractor in the middle distance.  Next he's going to replace our skylights:

Speaking of my sister, she knows a jasmine from a jasminoid, so the following photos are close-ups so she can tell me what we have:

TECHOS, CANTERA, JASMINE, LAVANDA Y UNA ROSA

A different guy from the regular crew, an aluminum guy, is putting up see-through roofs outside the back door and over the space where the water heater lives:

Trini's gang is making a surround for the lime tree:

And they are putting in cantera tile on the patio.  Check out those plants:

The nursery that is within walking distance had 5 different kinds of jasmine.  We got 6 jasmines and 10 lavenders.  We have the impression that plant varieties are not significant to buyers here.  The jasmines were labeled "jasmine, planta de sol (jasmine, sun)."  We'd really like to know the varieties.  One of them looks completely different from the rest.  But nobody at the nursery seemed to know.

The steps look done to me.  We need a banister though:

El sr J falls in love with certain plants at first sight.  He saw a big one of these--a desert rose--for many pesos.  Then he found a smaller one which was much cheaper:

I am thrilled to live in a climate in which I can grow jasmine.