Bonus Material

TWO THINGS FROM BUCERIAS
 
Here are a couple of additional items from the south.  One is a short video  of the master of the boogie board.  (Hope you can get it to play.) The waves were not too good this year.  (Thanks P for the video!)  The second item is a picture of us with our good friend Marisol and her roommate Miriam at lunch just a couple of days before we came back north.  For those who do not know, Marisol was one of my students at Franklin University; she is a wonderful person and the reason we now live in Bucerias during the winter.  Thanks Marisol!
 
 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/sets/72157626401870693/
 
dan and rebecca

RETURN NORTH

 

 

O-H-I-O

 

As mentioned in our last newsletter we were preparing to make our way up north.  And here we are back north for about ten days – seven days of rain and clouds and three days of sun.  I have filed the taxes and am considering a ticket to go back south.  As Mrs.T relates below she is quite happy to be back among her blooming flowers and the fauna of our forest.  But before we turn to her short tale, we should mention Oaxaca again.

 

As you no doubt noted, Mrs. T was overjoyed just to see the Tule Tree and Monte Alban was icing on the cake.  But we also visited Mitla, which is an older Zapotec site, and nearby Teotitlan del Valle where there are reputedly 2000+ weavers.  (No, that is not an extra zero.)  We visited the "Bug in a Rug" studio/shop and had quite a good description of all the natural dyes and a demonstration of their rug weaving techniques.  The Zapotecs had been doing this for centuries before the Spanish conquest and the subsequent introduction of the modern spinning wheel and weaving loom.  Several of Teotitlan's artisans are world renown and are represented in public and private collections, including a nice rug at our condo.  In the pictures you will see the exquisite rug that KA of our group from Casa Ollin purchased.  R bought a pillow cover which goes well with Turkish ones we have had for some time.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/sets/72157626384102583/

 

 

On to R's brief commentary about our restart of the northern home:

 

We are home in Ohio.  We arrived about seven hours later than we first intended.  Dan was extremely, and justifiably grumpy and I was a wreck.  But after a week things are settling down.  We went through a ton of mail, most of it third class, and ended up taking 3 tubs and one plastic garbage bag to the recycling place.  Dan thought there was not room for it but I climbed up and shoved the existing stuff around and made room.  (Yes I did wipe off my hands quite thoroughly with wet wipes I keep in the back of the beluga for just such emergencies.)(I insisted –dt)

 

Arriving back in the North the cloudy weather hit me like a sledge hammer.  It was not really that cold, although Dan did grouse a lot, but grey and dreary.  And I have to admit my toes are a little grumpy about wearing shoes after five months of sandals.  The good thing is I had a lot of wildlife and flowers, some wild and some I had planted.  Also we have bats.  I hope they will eat the mosquitoes. We put up a bat house when we moved here but the bats are living somewhere else.  I have also seen lots of birds and butterflies.  I have taken pictures of a lot of the flowers; the animals would not hold still!  There has been a lot of rain this week and the pond overfloweth. (The week before we returned there had been a record setting 1.6 in./4cm in one day. –dt)  I was happy to find my goldfish made it through the winter this year.

 

Dan is busy doing the taxes and out of sorts about that, but I am happy because we get money back.  Not only that but we got a peach pie from the reduced rack at the grocery store; no pie man (or muffin man or strawberry man –dt) to make home deliveries in Ohio.  As a point of interest you know you live in a rural area when they sell seed potatoes at the grocery.  I was looking at them thinking, "those potatoes look awfully old and wrinkly surely no one will buy them" and then I saw the sign "SEED POTATOES".  This is Spring - the time for growing things.  Soon I will plant my bulbs and flower seeds that my sweet husband got me.  But first I have to go buy dirt; I suppose you know you are dealing with a gardening radical if she buys dirt to use outside.

 

Mrs. T's pictures of flowers, pond, etc.:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/sets/72157626508869244/

 

(For those of you who are not flora experts, most of the flowers are not nearly as large as they might seem by the photos. –dt)

 

Our next adventure will be a vacation to Seattle and Canada.  We are going to the Glass Art Society conference this year.  After that we will visit Butchart Gardens in Victoria and then take the nearly two day train to Manitoba to visit some of our many Canadian friends.  Those of you in that northern country should have already received an email with our itinerary.  We are very grateful to the several of you that have invited us to visit and are quite excited.  We think everything has about fallen into place as planned.

 

Hope your spring is green.

Dan and Rebecca

 

www.casa-de-terrible.blogspot.com