New pool and new computer

The rain has slowed down greatly. There has been only small amounts in the last 10 days and nothing for 5 days. As of yesterday, the lake level was only 25 mm (10 inches) from the high mark in 2008. Even without much more rain, the level will keep rising until near the end of September.

The new computer arrived on Wednesday. I needed to ‘migrate’ all the stuff from my old computer. I wasn’t able to get any of the direct wire connections to work and thus had to use the wireless network, which is slower. It took about 14 hours until about 6 a.m. to finish! The next morning I thought that it hadn’t worked because I couldn’t see many of the files. I spent about 4 frustrating hours. Then, I did a reboot and ‘Voila!’, everything was there. On Thursday night (as in the photos), we set the computer in the living room and watched a movie--the rationale for buying the new computer! It worked very well. We have only a few DVD movies that we brought down from Nova Scotia, but the Lake Chapala Society has a video library and lends movies. We’ll see what they have. Also, there are several sellers of videos in the tianguis and at the plaza in Ajijic. They are almost certainly bootleg copies and are pretty inexpensive, about 50 pesos or so each. They are illegal of course; I have heard that in Guadalajara from time to time (to appease the Americans I think), the police swoop down on sellers in street markets there and confiscate their videos. I haven’t heard of that happening here.


A couple of weeks ago, we bought a new little wading pool and this was the first time we used it with the girls. Fatima is helping me to pump it up. It is very nice and a big improvement on the old one. However, a week from tomorrow, the twins have a birthday coming. We were told that their good shoes had not returned with them. We went to a shoe store; it was a bit of a nightmare with 3 little girls running around, looking at and handling the shoes. Barbara wanted good, solid sandals, but they were too boring and besides only the boys’ sandals were really solid. The girls sandals were all flimsy. Finally, we saw some sneakers (Princess no less and with flashing lights) that were fairly solid. We finally got ones that fit for each of the 3 girls (Fatima too). When we got back to LIA late this afternoon and gave them to the girls to take in, we discovered that the box for Dariana had only one shoe. In the confusion of multiple shoe boxes, one shoe had been left out. We had to go back to the shoe store and get the missing shoe! This afternoon, we transferred recent photos and videos of the girls to the new computer with its big screen. They loved seeing themselves so clearly.