Casa de Terrible

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Last evening Mrs.T had a very enjoyable time attending the visiting circus in Puerto Vallarta with our neighbor Chuck. Unfortunately today she is at the dentist for a root canal. In the past you have heard us speak of the high quality of health care here, and Dr. Adrian the dentist is certainly as good as anyone in the US. Mrs.T's tooth adventure began a week ago when she was eating some hard candy and one of her several crowns fell out. We were able to see Dr. Adrian rather quickly – it was even busier than usual at his office as they were removing the double glass door - and after a preliminary exam he determined that the tooth had decay and that it would need further work and the crown could only be temporarily attached. Indeed, temporary was a short time as the crown fell out later that day as R was eating an avocado and shrimp salad. Today Dr. A's endo specialist is in town to do root canals and related work. Thus, Mrs. T is there … we interrupt this to announce that she has returned from the dentist with an even more exciting story that she will report in the next installment.

So we will continue with some of her latest adventures:

We had an official meeting to incorporate the condo. There is a specific way you do this in Mexico (Probably in the US too but I wouldn't know). Most of the owners were not there but there were a lot of proxies some for Luis and some for Dan. At the meeting were Luis and Joannes, both essentially trilingual although Luis is better in Spanish and Joannes is better in English. I was sitting between Dan who was pretending he didn't understand Spanish and a Mexican owner who was pretending he didn't understand English. About halfway though the meeting I finally figured all this out and stopped trying to explain. They both may not have been able to speak very well but they knew what was going on. Well the upshot is that Dan was elected president of the condo association (Maybe, I think I was just president of the meeting. dt) and the Mexican owner, Ulysses, and I are the vigilance committee. This means we can stick our noses in anything and ask what is going on. I warned them that they might regret having Dan be president because he is pretty bossy but they ignored me or pretended they didn't understand me as the case may be.

I went to the unfinished furniture store (Muebles Rustico) and bought another bookcase and two little tables to match the bookcase in our spare bedroom. They come with carvings on the wood and I paint them with my oil paints. With the new mixer, the widescreen TV, the new microwave, and this furniture the condo is shaping up nicely. We have a renter already for April who we hope will also stay for May and June. The long term renters are best from our standpoint.

I went snorkeling with two of our neighbors Crystal and Dianne. We took bananas to feed the fish. They were mostly king angelfish and chubbs. We found that if we held the bananas out the fish would nibble from the end. This worked pretty well until Dianne was holding out the banana and a large chubb came along long and took the whole thing (Why do you think they are called chubbs!) At any rate we had a good time. On the way to snorkeling we saw the Indian pole dancers. These swing slowly around upside down tied by one foot. Slowly unwinding from the top about 150 feet in the air and descending to the ground while hanging upside down playing their flutes. I am unsure exactly what all this portends but anyway we watched them do it.

My favorite dive shop is dissolving is a disagreement between the two owners. Because of this my favorite divemaster Alex is starting his own shop with a Canadian lady, Donna. This is a bad time to start a tourist type business but I hope they make it, and right now it works for me because I am diving with Allex every week. This week we dove at Las Mariettas and went through a cave which had an opening to the sky. There the waves splashed through the rock and fell back down on thin rock shelves making music that sounded like marimbas, it was amazing, this music of the sea! We were swimming along underwater looking at fish and suddenly the sea darkened and we saw a cloud above us. It was a school, no a veritable college of bat rays. On the way out to the islands we saw three groups of whales and a sea turtle. When we came to the third group of whales, I heard the divemasters and the captain muttering in Spanish whether to stop or not. "We better stop," one of them said, "the more whales the better the tips." I was glad they did because one whale came up about 30 feet from our boat. Let me tell you whales are BIG!! On the way back the wind had picked up and it was pretty rough. The captain rearranged us to get the weight even. In these situations I always sit on a bench in the back of the boat in the center. In fact he was moving all of the passengers further back in the boat. Keep those engines down in the water and the bow up I always thought. However as I sat getting splashed by every wave, another thought occurred. Perhaps I am not merely a weight but also a makeshift screen for the captain (Emilio) who stood directly behind me steering! We had gotten about a third of the way back when I heard Emilio mutter, "I see a bunch more whales but I'm not stopping!" In spite of the cold return it was a good day diving.