A Lost Marathon

We don’t have a TV in our La Manzanilla house. Well, we don’t have a TV that gets reception we use the TV just to watch movies. Most movies are available on DVD here within a day or two of their theater release. But that’s another post.

This is about our recent Lost Marathon. I have to admit I’m addicted to the series Lost. On a recent trip back to the US for business, Rick bought season 4 and 5 on DVD. I’m not sure if you’ve ever watched a series on DVD but it’s the only way to go! Just when that anticipated commercial break happens….boom, you are on to the next scene, its commercial free heaven.

I feel terribly guilty admitting to doing something so wasteful as watching TV all day, but alas, Rick and I watched 5 episodes on Saturday!

Any other Lost fans out there?

FM3 – get it right the first time.

We live in La Manzanilla Mexico, 10 months out of the year. We have FM3 status and we need to get to Manzanillo to renew our papers. Only problem is we’ve moved and we moved last year while immigration had our paperwork so we just “neglected” to mention it when we received our FM3’s. We figured, “why gunk up the process, we’ll take care of next year.” Well, it’s next year and we finally got around to taking care of it….sort of.

We thought we’d just go to Telemex in Manzanillo, change our address and then have them print out a new bill with our current address. But drat, it’s tough to get to Telemex during the day without having Lyle miss school. So we kept putting it off.

Today I called the office. Guess what? You can change your address over the phone, easy, yeah! After it was changed I asked in my best Spanish if we could stop at the office next week and have them print out a new bill with the new address that we could take to immigration. NO, the address isn’t updated in THAT computer system, we’ll have to wait for our March 8th bill…but our immigration papers expire March 7th!

Weekend road trip to Comala

La Manzanilla, Mexico is great, nice beach, warm water, coconut trees…ok so it’s paradise. But Mexico has so many different places to explore. We've decided to take advantage of our life here and travel around the country as much as we can. Last weekend we went to Comala.

We left La Manzanilla at 11:00 a.m. and arrived in the main plaza of Comala at about 2:00. Just in time to sit at one of the restaurants that line the plaza and order a beer, and then enjoy the parade of free food that comes with drink orders. And I don’t mean chips and salsa, I’m talking Ceviche, Taquitos, Taco’s dorado, chicken burritos, fruit…and it kept coming until we had to say, “stop!” This is the normal gig in Comala from 2-6 pm every day. Order and drink and the food is free. Now granted, the beers were 32 pesos ($2.70 USD), we usually pay 18 at the beach, but we were served a heck of a lot of food!

We stayed at a lovely B and B Casa Alvarada. The next day the host of the B and B acted as our tour guide and gave us a “highlights tour” of Comala. We had some great views of the volcano, coffee plantation education, a village specializing in wooden mask making and a marvelous museum which is the ex-hacienda of the famous
Mexican artist Alejandro Rangel Hidalgo

Lyle makes his first phone call and it’s all in Spanish

He has a friend who lives a couple of blocks away and because Lyle’s been a little sick I didn’t want him walking down there. So, Lyle went next door to the boy’s grandma (on his own accord) and asked for the phone number.

He then picks up the phone and makes his call.

The mother answers the phone and they proceed to have a detailed conversation, in Spanish, about why Yeir can’t come over to play, his homework isn’t done. Lyle explains that he has finished his homework and urges her to get Yeir going so he can finish his and come over to play.

It’s the thought that counts---Happy Birthday to Me!

Been in a funk all day because today is my birthday and I’m 43 and not happy about it!

Worked most of the day, canceled my Spanish class because I didn’t have the energy to spend an hour speaking in the past tense!

The afternoon was dragging on when a friend (who is a reflexologist) called and said she would like to give me a treatment for my birthday. What a treat! I think I like reflexology better then massage.

Moving on to dinner- we bought some nice and expensive steaks for dinner. I sauté some spinach, Rick put the steaks on the grill. Unfortunately, the fire got away from him...(see the picture) that’s burnt steak and vegetables. I got a HUGE laugh out it! Funk gone!

He’s in town trying to find a pizza for dinner.

Happy birthday to me 

A quiet moment….and chips

Usually when the kids are playing here in La Manzanilla it’s a herd of them out in the street playing soccer, hide and seek, or war games. The common denominator of any of these games is that they are loud, raucous and wild. Lots of screaming, “da me lo!” translation- “give it to me!” “el me pegó” -translation “he hit me!” Followed shortly by a parent yelling “no, peleando!” translation-“no fighting!”

Imagine my surprise when I looked out the window and witnessed Lyle and Gael sharing a conversation, a quiet moment…and a bag of chips.

A new beach vendor in town!

We’ve been beading and making jewelry as a family for a few months. We made bracelets for grandmas, I received a lovely glass bead bracelet, “just because” and Lyle made some cute little rings that he handed out to his many girl friends.

He’s been talking about wanting to sell his creations at the beach, and today was his first day. He packed up 5 necklaces and 4 bracelets and announced that he was going to sell them at the beach. So, we headed to the beach for lunch and after an hour of playing in the water and enjoying some shrimp quesadilla’s at Quinta Valentine Lyle decided to try his hand at beach vending.

We left the beach with 3 necklaces, 3 bracelets and Lyle had 50 more pesos then when he started! Who knew, Lyle was such a good salesman!