PUERTAS

The carpenter is slow, as in three weeks after promised, but good.  This is our bedroom double door, with panels that open:

This is our bathroom door:

I am happy to be sleeping now in our bedroom, instead of the kitchen/dining room.  In the middle of the night I can walk through the closet room to the bathroom without going outside and unlocking multiple doors.  Friday the carpenter will install the window in our bedroom if life is good.

Today I was all by myself in the kitchen/dining room.  No hammering, no Mexican radio, no talking.  The silence was. . .well, deafening.  I heard the silence.  I crocheted, I meditated.  It didn't last for long, but . . .

LECHOS ELEVADOS

Raised beds, formerly large cat boxes:

When el sr J discovered the wild cats using his raised beds for cat boxes, he went to the hardware store and bought a roll of tela de gallinero or chicken wire.  So far, so good.  One cat wailed all night long, though.

CLOSETS

I've never cared much about shopping or clothes.  Or at least that's how I thought of myself.  I got rid of most of my professional garb when we moved here.  But now that I've been living with the same small wardrobe, piled on two shelves of a bookcase, with the rest stuffed into bags in the pantry, I'm very excited at the prospect of a closet.  Here are two, a his and hers, from the bathroom end:

And from the bedroom end:

And some boxes for the overflow:

El sr J has started to move his stuff in, but I'm not moving anything until the cutting of tile in the front room is finished.  Here's hoping that's tomorrow.

TORONJA, ETC.

I wanted to write "toronjo," because in other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, "toronjo" would be the tree and "toronja" the grapefruit.  Here they're both "toronja."  Anyway, I'm ecstatic to have one:

With two big grapefruit on it.  I never saw a grapefruit tree loaded with fruit until I moved here.  They are amazing-looking to me:

El sr J walked to the viveros/nursery yesterday, about 3 kilometers, because he wanted to buy six grape vines to climb up the back wall.  They only had two--who knows what variety because they don't distinguish--but they're purple, so that narrows it down:

We had asked about grapefruit trees twice before when we were there, and the guy said both times they'd be in on Wednesday.  It became a joke with us.  But, lo and behold, he had them this time and it was Tuesday!

El sr J also bought some groundcover, rocio, or aptenia cordifolia:

The back yard is shaping up.

PUERTAS Y VENTANAS DE LUIS

Luis, the blacksmith, has made all our doors and windows--a lot of them.  And, unlike many here, they have screens (except for the ones in the front of the house--not allowed by the historical accuracy police):

Starting at the back of the house, here is the door for the storage space under the stairs:

The back door to the dining room seen from the patio:

From the inside:

The dining room window from the outside:

And from the inside:

The kitchen door from the outside:

And from the inside:

The guest bathroom door:

This door presented a problem.  Luis didn't want to put a screened window in it, but el sr J insisted that a screen was necessary for ventilation.  So instead of a pushrod to open the upper window, which might put someone's eye out, the screen is in a hinged frame that opens to the inside, and the awning window pushes out:

You may remember the "mother of all doors" that Luis made for us first.

From the patio:

From the inside, which is the back room of the main part of the house.  We don't know what we're using this room for yet:

The front door is not installed yet.  It arrived Saturday:

The front window is hiding panelessly in back of the door:

The grille for in front of the window is behind all the ladders in the front room:

The grille for the door is installed:

As you can see, the men have started to scrape the front of the house.  One more week? 

ARAFAT

 Have you seen the Aljazeera documentary about what killed Arafat?

.

I'm so intrigued with this story.

The guy who narrates the documentary is an American, Clayton E. Swisher.

 He is a former Marine reservist and federal criminal investigator, and he was a VIP security guard at the Barak+Clinton/Arafat talks in Camp David in 2000.
Now he's director of programs at the Middle East Institute in D.C.

Here he is with Arafat:

He wrote this book which I'm reading now:

In case you don't want to watch the 50-minute documentary, I'll give you a brief resume along with some of my questions.

Swisher went to Malta (Malta!  Wasn't that where the Lockerbie bomber bought some stuff?) to meet with Arafat's wife, Suha.  Suha was kicked out of Tunisia by the former dictator.  She had Arafat's gym bag with his belongings from the hospital in France, where he died in 2004.  Underwear, toothbrushes (yes, plural), his hospital hat--all had blood, saliva and/or urine on them.  This was all that remained of his bodily fluids.  It turned out that the French authorities who were providing his final care had disposed of all the fluids they had drawn from him.  Hmmm.  Wouldn't you have saved that stuff?  It's Yasser Arafat for Pete's sake!  Suha was not in charge of Arafat's body when he died.  The Palestinian Authority took him back to Ramallah and buried him.  No autopsy.

Swisher took the gym bag to a lab in Switzerland (as carry-on or checked luggage?) and the scientists there found unusual amounts of Polonium in Arafat's stuff.



Polonium!  Remember this guy?  Alexander Litvinenko.  We watched him on tv as he slowly died from Polonium that he ingested somehow in a sushi restaurant in London:



This is how he looked when he was healthy, before the KGB (allegedly) poisoned him:



Not everyone has access to Polonium, as you might guess.  Only countries that produce nuclear materials have it on hand.  Well, they better not have it literally "on hand."  The amount needed to kill someone is so small you can't even see it.  It can be inhaled or ingested.  How would you carry it?  How would you, as an assassin, make sure none got on you if you wanted to kill someone?  So few victims have been studied that scientists don't even know exactly how it affects the body.  Arafat's symptoms included vomiting and diarrhea before all his systems shut down.  His first doctors in Palestine thought he had the flu.  No one could figure out what was wrong.  Not mentioned in the documentary is where he ate his last meal before he got sick or who was with him.

At the end of the documentary, Swisher tells Arafat's widow of the Polonium finding and asks if she will ask the Palestinian Authority to exhume his body.  Yes, she says.      

And now it is reported that the Palestinians are going to allow Arafat's body to be exhumed, which will allow scientists to examine his tissues to prove definitively if he was poisoned with Polonium or not.

ERLUM

To celebrate an occasion that arrives with unwelcome regularity, el sr J made a surprise (for me) reservation at Erlum (pronounced "heirloom" for non-Spanish-speaking readers), located on Arteaga between Guerrero and Allende (for local readers and eaters).

We sat outside on the patio:

The dinner menu:

Alcoholic drinks:

A nice wine list, all Mexican:

El sr J chose this cabernet from Baja:

My ensalada jitomate:

El sr J's vichyssoise:

His filet mignon:

My pulpo a la plancha:

Champagne with the cheese plate:

An excellent place to eat, Erlum is relatively new on the local gustatory scene.  The young couple who run the place are trying to specialize in locally produced stuff, an effort worth supporting.

ZEMPASUCHITL

are marigolds:

They look like marigolds:

They smell like marigolds to us and to the butterflies:

But they're 5 feet high!  It's a marigold jungle back there: