Scorpions

On Tuesday, we went with Kate & Jack to Super Burrito Restaurant. It is just up the street from where K & J live and is regarded as authentic Mexican restaurant. It is not fancy although the garden, where we ate, was nice with a big fountain. One of their specialties (which I had) is burritos. However, I think that I was told that burritos are TexMex, not real Mexican. It was a good experience and very inexpensive. Then K & J were over for dinner Friday night, their last night in Mexico as they left on Saturday morning. They were the last of the Nova Scotia snowbirds.

Part of our conversation on Friday was about scorpions. There are lots of them in Mexico, especially outside the more densely populated areas. We were saying that we had only found 5 or 6 in the 11 months that we have been here. Moreover, all of them were fairly small, about an inch or so. Then, late Saturday afternoon, I looked in one of the sinks and there was quite a large scorpion, the biggest I had ever seen. It was about 3 inches long with the tail straightened out. They are interesting because they have big claws in front, kind of like a lobster. We have no idea how it got up and into the sink.

Today, we had the 3 girls (Fatima seemed recovered); a couple of them wanted one of the bigger girls to come. At the center they arranged for Araceli, a ten year old. She was excellent in helping us with the little girls. As it happens, she is an older sister of Fatima and the baby, Yuliana. We did the usual--fed them and then let the little ones play in the pool for a couple of hours. During that time, Araceli seemed happy to be colouring with crayons. She is learning English and has a fair vocabulary. After the girls finished in the pool, got dressed and had ice cream and cookies, we bundled them into the car and took them to the waterfront in Ajijic. We were lucky to get a parking place and took them all for a walk along the nearly completed malecon. They seemed to enjoy that, especially when we came to a man throwing a fishing net. It takes quite a bit of technique to twirl it around and fling it out into the water. He had 4 or 5 medium sized fish.

Barb’s computer packed it in (we had it almost exactly 5 years). Fortunately, I had been suspicious of the way it was acting and just a week ago, I had spent all Saturday afternoon backing up everythiing onto our iPod. The computer went rapidly downhill this week. At first I thought it was just the hard drive (and that certainly reported that it had a fatal error). However, I called a computer guy. He came on Saturday and confirmed my suspicion that there was more wrong with it and that it probably was not worth tryng to fix. He reported that Macs were a lot more expensive here than north of the border. I looked up what I thought would be a good replacement and checked prices in both Canada and US. When I contacted an Apple dealer in Guadalajara, the price difference is not as great as I had feared (less than $200 and the prices north of the border included the educational discount; there is probably not much difference in the regular prices). Also, we would have no economical way to get one down here until Barb goes back to Nova Scotia at the end of July. We are planning to go to Guadalajara on Tuesday; the dealer said that we could get one immediately. The new one will be a big improvement as it is right up to date while the old one was getting obsolete. I should be able to transfer everything that was on her old computer to the new one.