August, 2012
What a bad blogger I can be! For a while we were too busy to
write, then work gets in the way, then I get so far behind it is too much to
catch up and it gets put off some more. Well, here goes. It has only been 20 months or so.
First of all, Casa Den is done, is pretty much all we hoped for
and is in good shape for guests. Since
I left off blogging we have made much progress for furnishings, landscaping,
and so on. We managed to get the place
livable before the first guests arrived in December 2010: Toronto
artists-friends Jan & Dan and Kurt. We
were still short a fridge on the second floor as nobody sells one
narrow enough with a reversible or left-opening door in Mexico, but eventually (2011) Derek and I managed to reverse one that was made almost reversible, voiding the
warranty immediately after figuring out it would work. We got some more furniture bought or built by the local woodworker,
the remaining necessities and furnishings hauled or found, and we -- and Casa Den -- are ready to
go.
We had a great time with the visitors, seeing the sights,
hanging at the beach, enjoying sunset refreshments, and the rest of living in a tropical
paradise. One day we took a long beach
walk east, to the mouth of the Colotepec River, forded it, to patronize the little restaurant, see the beached whale spine and mangrove pathway, and walked part way
back into town untill we could find a ride. After they were gone we went back into fix-up
mode for a while, but in late January had to drive off ourselves for the trip
home. We did rent the second floor apartment to adventurous retired friends from Oregon, Ward and Cherie, for February. Derek is assisting our renters when we are away. Ward and Cherie took language and cooking lessons, and left us with some great photos of their time.
After we had returned home I had a lot of work on my plate,
one of the reasons I did not do any blogging.
But it does help the bank account.
In February 2011, we heard from Vicki at Zicatela Properties (who helped
us obtain our 3 lots) that the fourth lot, just above the house, was up for
quick sale. We bought it (so much for
nice bank balance) and now we have half the block, a 60 meter by 20 meter piece
of the tropics. That lot was dominated
by a large tree (half on the roadway) that dropped yellow flowers daily that
the passing goats would scramble to eat.
A few weeks after the lot was ours, the tree blew over in a windstorm,
fortunately missing the house but damaging the chain-link fencing on the south
side. Oh well. This lot is actually the
best of the four, being the highest, and on the better road. We would have
built there if it had been in the original purchase, but so it goes. We had Derek arrange to get it fenced and
have since been working on planting trees and bouganvillas and attempting to
control the worst types of weeds. Maybe we
should have kept the goats; since that winter the goat herds have left the neighborhood. At least without them the nasty weeds they encouraged by eating everything else have become a smaller fraction of the total.
Work here in Canada, driving around Ontario looking at
energy savings projects, on-line examination at energy use patterns in Oregon
schools, and lastly in the Seattle area installing energy-use monitoring
equipment for a residential study kept me pretty occupied all of summer and
fall 2011, through the first 10 days of November, so it wasn’t a long visit
home before we were driving south again.
We arrived back in Puerto for US Thanksgiving dinner with Derek,
Christine, and the kids.
The drive south had gone quite well, with no problems
through the US (after my long work stay in Seattle I had lots of hotel points
for free nights). We took my new
favorite inland route via Pharr, TX, east and south of Monterrey through Linares
and Inturbide for all three trips since I last wrote.
A few hours short of
Puerto Escondido, on the very steep, narrow, curvy road from Oaxaca – also
sprinkled with groups of bicycle pilgrims heading to the famous church at Juquila along the
way – the screeching from the brakes became hard to ignore. We found a riverside mechanic in a small
town, who found the front brake pads shot. I went all over town with a moto (3-wheel motorcycle
based taxi) driver in the unsuccessful search for parts, then got on the phone
to Derek. We left the van by the river, surrounded by pilgrim-campers for the
night and we took a hotel room and waited, while the new brake pads Derek had
managed to find in Puerto made their way by bus overnight. In the morning, reassembled, we finished the
drive, to the casa and then to Christine and Derek’s for Thanksgiving dinner.
Once more it was a few weeks of furnishing and preparing for
guests...this time my family was coming after Christmas. My sister
Peggy planned to come down with her husband Mike and younger son JJ, to meet their
daughter Molly, who was finishing up her extended time with the Peace Corps in
Guatemala, and catching the bus to Puerto. Also, they brought our father, Tom,
86, and none to ambulatory. My brother
Dave and wife Sue would be coming in February. Kurt wanted to come back, too.
It was a busy time. Unfortunately, before they all arrived,
the Quest minivan became unavailable.
One day I heard a clunk when I put it in reverse. The next day I heard a quieter clunk and
reverse was not happening. It was a
challenge to get it turned around on our downhill, no-way-out street, but eventually I got it to the only automatic transmission shop in Puerto, run by
Tico up above downtown. About 10 days
and a pile of pesos later, we got it back.
Reverse worked fine! Too bad it now never shifted to first gear
or to top gear...it had become a two-speed instead of four. Back to Tico.
This time it was a bigger problem. The first attempted repair with a new
control module cost a bunch but did nothing.
Then he determined that it had to be fixed in Oaxaca (!) and carted it
over the mountains. They couldn’t fix it there either, so they eventually
bought a used tranny from Mexico City and put that in. All of this took money and weeks and weeks of
time, meaning we had no vehicle while my family was in
town. We became much more familiar with
the various public transportation systems around Puerto, and it actually is
possible to function quite adequately without a car. Not so great for someone like my dad, but if
you can walk a bit (like a few hundred yards downhill) you can get around town on the buses, colectivos, and taxis.
Maybe we should have kept the van as a two-speed, but up the steep Puerto Escondido
hills first gear is rather useful, and the highway miles home would be more
economical with fourth, and in any case it was hard to have confidence
that the rest of the gears would not fail too.
I rented a little VW car to go pick up the fliers from the Huatulco airport (HUX) and we made the best of it. Dad mostly wanted to sit in the sun with a cool drink but was game for dinner out or other adventures we could arrange, like birding at Manialtepec or sticking a finger in the Pacific, which he had not done for decades. We found a new favorite restaurant, with about 6 tables and a different small menu every night, where we became regulars. With the swimming, shopping, eating, and beaching the time went fast but well. Still without the Quest, we sent them (in Molly’s fluent and capable charge) back to the HUX airport on the bus.
Molly returned to Puerto after getting them all on the plane.
Her bus left Puerto later. One of the
neighbor’s daughters was visibly expecting, and her sister brought over an
invite to her baby shower across town.
Actually we think they were hoping we could drive them over in the van, but of course we had no van. Liz and Molly decided to go, bought a little baby
outfit in town, got dressed up a bit, and walked next door. Daisy and I would
have a quiet evening, it seemed, but then Liz called the cell saying that they
were taking taxis over, men were invited too, and I should come. Liz, Daisy and I had been staying in the
palapa while the family was visiting, so I quickly changed and left Daisy up
there with her food and water and hurried to join them. It was a cultural experience, I guess, but it
is a wonderful thing that most bridal and baby showers do not include men. (By
the way we learned the local term for “Baby Shower”. In Mexican Spanish, it is spelled and
pronounced “Baby Shower".) Enough about that.
We finally got a cab back home and I rushed upstairs to free
Daisy, who was no doubt worried, as she is attached to the point of neurosis
and never happy alone. But I found no
Daisy in the palapa! It was dark by now so we turned on all the lights and
found flashlights and began the search.
The palapa level has no walls on 3 sides, just a ledge about a meter up
from the floor. Presumably she had gone over the edge. Depending on where she went off if was a 4 to
8 meter drop to a hard landing on rocks, railings, or concrete surfaces just
about everywhere, and we feared she would not have survived. Then Molly found a scattering of palapa-palm leaves
on the first floor terrace and it was pretty clear that she had come
down there. We fanned out in the yard and beyond with the flashlights, wondering
where she has managed to crawl to, calling her name, asking the neighbors if
they had seen her. Eventually, I heard a
noise in the weeds of the vacant lot south and east of us which turned out to
be Daisy….alive, limping, and absolutely covered in burrs and fuzzy-sticky twigs. But apparently mostly OK.
She had panicked while we were gone, and jumped up on bed
and then the ledge (knocking over a lamp). Making her way around the ledge she
came to the post in the middle of the north wall, attempted to go around it to
the outside, and slipped down the slope of the lower palapa roof. Her luck had
a mid-air change for the better, as this trajectory took her to the only
possible soft landing (or soft enough) which was in the camping ‘bag’ chair
that had been set up for my father at the head of the table on the first floor terrace. That chair broke her fall
enough to keep her with us and from there she limped off to hide in the
neighbor’s bushes full of burrs. Liz, Molly and I spent the next hour or so
extricating plant debris from fur, and she limped a few days, but seems none
the worse for the aerial adventure. No
more Daisy alone upstairs! From the ledge to the terrace is about 6.4 meters, or
about 21 feet. Even from the edge of the roof to the chair it is about 17
feet down. Lucky dog.
I had brought down a pile of irrigation valves and fittings
and with some local PVC pipe and some fooling around, managed to assemble a
watering system for the various plants we were putting in. We planted our first two palms, a Neem tree,
a ‘Flame of the Forest’ (orange blossoms all winter), some papayas, jasmines, a
lime tree, some shrubs called Copo de Oro (cup of gold) along the rock walls, and
bouganvillas all along the fences on the new upper lot. The place is greening
up. We made a small herb garden by the
stairs too.
Another major effort was a rock walkway along the west side
of the house from the sidewalk above and to the stairs and also around to the
bodega / parking area. Later I also built a rock-covered ramp down to the lower
lot and a rock stairway down the rock wall to …where the new art studio is now
built! More on that later. A lot of the rocks came from the street, where the
town was installing a new water system.
They brought in a backhoe, dug trenches, installed the pipes, backfilled
with some sand they brought in, and then went away, leaving huge berms of dirt
and rocks along both of our streets. This made the streets narrower and set up
all this loose soil to wash downhill in the next rainy season. We had another backhoe to excavate the studio anyway so we
appropriated a lot of ‘spare’ dirt from the roads and hand-harvested a lot of rocks for those
various walkway and stairs projects.
Another project was the solar water heating
system. We replaced our boiler last fall
in Port Hope, and one byproduct of that was an old galvanized expansion tank, about
a foot in diameter and three feet long, which I propped up in the back of the
van for the trip down. Painted black, and placed in an insulated box (which Derek and Mike helped me build while the family was in town), it can sit in the sun all
day on the second-floor south deck warming up, and be covered at night
to keep the heat in. Since the ‘cold’
water is about room temperature anyway, it doesn’t take a lot to boost it up to
shower temperature, and sun is free and there are few complexities…not much
worry about freezing, for one thing, nor too much city water pressure since it
is gravity fed from the tank atop the third floor bathroom.
Not that all we did was work. There were waves to dive into,
meals to make and enjoy, sunset pina-ritas and cervezas, and a few books to
read along the way. We brought down a
used breadmaker, so we could have fresh bread without needing a car to get to a
bakery. I did some running on the beach
on low-tide mornings. The bikes were
handy for some errands, or just to get up to the highway to catch a colectivo into
town. Derek was accommodating when we
needed something hauled by car.
I went out several times with what Liz called the Geezer Swim Club, which was four to six of us older gringos who put on swim fins and paddled out past the breaking waves at the point one weekday afternoon each week. We would discuss events around the colonia and beyond, first over the waves and eventually over beachside cervezas. I learned a bit about stinging jellyfish as well as La Punta politics and swimming in breaking waves. One evening I went to see local
politics in direct action. The Colonia election is held annually to choose a local rep to the local municipality. All who show up get to vote for various offices and decisions, by holding up your hand while volunteers walk around and count. The past year's budget, income and expenses are reported. No secret ballot, but no registration, no campaign, no real easy way to cheat (well, except through the rampant corruption to get people there and raising their hands). The previous year my neighbor was chosen for one of the offices; coincidentally, no doubt, the absurdly steep road past his property got paved that year.
Then there was this other little project. Liz wanted a studio, a
dedicated art space, plus we could use a bit of overflow housing at peak (Christmas to New Year's) times, and maybe a
place to park a vehicle if we ever want to start flying instead of driving back
and forth. I wanted a flat roof, both
for use as another deck and as a place for a telescope observatory. The logical
place for it (as it grew bigger on paper to accommodate all these possible uses)
was the lot below the house, as it had the least potential view, and could block the least attractive part of
the neighbor’s place.
The plan became a rectangle, 6 x 9 meters (20 by 30 feet) with
the long side placed a meter off of our west boundary. It has a south side (nearest the casa)
exterior stairway to the roof/observatory, a half-bath under those stairs
accessible from indoors or out, and that south interior wall unbroken to allow a large
art surface. The west wall has a row of
high windows for light and air (above another art surface), the east side has a large window, a passage
door, and on the north a large door to allow a car inside. It has its own
septic tank (fosa septic) and water plumbed from the house above. It may get its own small solar water heater
later. On the north, three large windows
will let in lots of that desired north light. The south half of the roof is
shaded by a slatted wood covering on four round concrete posts with posts, and
rails around three sides and a half-height wall on the west, to not block the
view west to the beach from the casa.
The final coat of stucco, inside and out, is white concrete.
We did the measuring and moved the building around a bit,
and plotted out the excavation areas with lines of lime on the ground while
Kurt was visiting (Kurt is an easy guest, able to be completely independent
around Puerto now, and coming down for a third visit this winter.) About this time Dave & Sue arrived at HUX, and although they got sidetracked by the legalized thieves one meets
exiting the customs area at the airport (go past those guys, and walk out to
the highway!), they eventually got on the Sur bus to Puerto and I met them at
the station. Kurt was still around so we
left him on the first floor and installed Dave & Sue on the second, while Liz,
I, and Daisy (never alone) stayed in the penthouse.
Kurt had to go home too soon to see it, but we had a backhoe
operator out again while Dave & Sue were around, moving some of the
previously piled-up rocks out of the way and excavating for the footings, fosa septic,
etc. The studio was going to
happen. Also, we finally got the Quest back! It
had been over a month since we had last driven it with 2 speeds, and two months
since it originally went to Tico’s. He wanted more money than quoted, since the
trip to and from Oaxaca and the replacement transmission had cost him a lot,
but after some conversation with (with Derek’s translation help) he settled for
the original quote. What an ordeal.
We went on a dolphin-spotting boat ride with Dave & Sue
one day, but too soon their time in the south came to an end, and our own was
running out. We had one more set of
guests, Gayle & Joel from Toronto, to meet and greet and get settled in on
the second floor, while we madly put away as much of everything else as
we could, packed the van, enjoyed our last days, and said our goodbyes around
town. Though with Liz deciding not to
teach this year we were able to stay a few weeks longer than usual, until just
after Valentine’s Day, it still felt too soon to drive north. But drive we did, pretty much without
incident, retracing the steep, slow mountain road to Oaxaca and the fast,
smooth toll-road route from there around Puebla, to the Arco Norte bypass of
Mexico City, up the inland highway, through Inturbide and the canyon, and up
via Pharr, the rest of Texas, Memphis, Indy, Sarnia, and home. That part of the
experience (Texas & north) is getting a little old, but it is part of our life now.
The gentle global-warming winter of 2011-12 gave us easy
driving all the way, but a storm was forecast overnight when we arrived after
dark. In the fall, we had barely crammed Liz’s Prius into our garage down the steep driveway from the street (I had crawled out the
back hatch as the doors couldn't open), and it seemed prudent to get it out of
there before the snow came. As wonderful
a vehicle as the Prius is, it is not to be left alone for three months. It turns out the smallish 12V battery which
runs the locks, etc., goes dead by then, so the key clicker didn’t work. With
the back closed and the doors blocked there was no getting it going that night.
In the morning, with the snow starting as expected, I was able to get a key
into the lock on the driver’s door, open that enough to unlock the back door,
then squeeze in, crawl back and open the
rear hatch from inside. Then we could uncover the 12V battery to jump it with
the van. By then the van could not then
make it back up the snowy hill but luckily a neighbor had a pickup with a winch
to help it up and then the Prius with its snow tires could get out. This year I am disconnecting the battery and
leaving the hatch unlatched!
We were home by Leap Year Day when Gail & Joel were
returning north, and Derek and our builder Lencho could start draining my bank
account and turning cash into studio. It
is a simple building and went up quickly, with the walls and columns up
by late April and the last of the white stucco on before the end of May and the rainy season. The windows and doors are taking a bit longer
but it should be ready for me to install he light fixtures, and Liz to get it
painted if she chooses to, by the time we get there this fall. We had hoped to make a rainy-season visit
this summer, but various events conspired to push that back to September, at
which point it seemed silly to quick-visit a place we will be returning to in
six more weeks or so. Our plan is presently to head south about November 1.
One visitor we missed by staying north was named Carlotta. Hurricane Carlotta actually, who came ashore at Puerto on the night of June 15 as a category two hurricane with winds of about 100 mph. The long term map of hurricane tracks below shows a swarm of storms offshore, parallel to the pacific coast and the occasional odd storm heading inland. The last storm to hit Puerto, in 1998, went parallel but just onshore, but Carlotta had her own plan and headed pretty much straight north, and right at Puerto Escondido, the eye passing right over town. We were fortunate enough to have little damage: a couple of the new trees were knocked over, a few leaves of the lower palapa were torn up, and the runoff from a foot of rain carved up the roads. Inside the palapa fans swung around and collided with each other, knocking loose some blades and breaking the lamp glass on one. The palapa shelving unit got tipped over onto the bed frame. The studio was under construction, but as a concrete box without windows it was pretty invulnerable to wind and rain damage.
Derek and Christine, with their commanding hilltop view, got it much worse. They are OK, but had to replace their large palapa, and clean up quite a mess upstairs. Their great room is a large space with a round front facing southwest to the pacific with tall windows, except no glass, just screens. They knew trouble was coming, moved most everything they could into the bedrooms and hall, and took shelter in their lower floor with the kids. One of the pins locking the French doors shut on that apartment was broken so Derek and Christine had to physically hold the doors shut for hours as the wind-driven rain ran over their feet into the apartment, while the kids and pets were scared, and all of this in the dark as the power failed. After, their living room was a mess, with leaves, water and debris all over, the roof damaged, the pool full of mud, the screens all blown in, etc. Many of the lesser-built places around town and in our neighborhood lost their metal roofs some lost more; the place across the street to our south had their retaining wall fail, spilling rocks and mud into the street. Overall there were amazingly no fatalities in Puerto, though Brad the grill cook took a nasty fall from his roof during the preparations and is still recovering from his injuries now, hoping to be turning ribs this fall.
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Carlotta, and another rainstorm that dropped a foot rain August
10th, have made it a busy summer for backhoes and builders, one of the reasons
the studio doors and landscaping are not yet complete. Our neighbor and friend Gordon is coordinating
some road improvement efforts nearby. Go Gord!
Up north, from April through much of June I was working for
the Ontario Power Authority under a contract with Nexant again; so far I have had no road work out west
this year so there has been no air travel and only one major road trip to visit
family for a wedding in Minnesota. As the mornings start to cool and August
turns into September we are starting to gather up the things we want to haul
south this fall. Liz is busy in her northern
studio getting some work done to be dropped off for exhibitions she is showing in this winter.
We plan to head south about November 1. Nephew Dan Gooch and partner Jenna Reid are
planning to come down; Jan and Dan, a friend, and Kurt, will all be coming
around the holidays as well – it’s good we will have the studio for use as a
spare apartment. Before and after the
school-Christmas holidays the apartments are pretty much open, though, so if
anyone reading this wants to come down and enjoy the beach life, do get in
touch.
If you are in Canada, Air Canada
is flying direct from Toronto to Huatulco weekly this winter; I understand United
is serving HUX from the US, having taken over Continental’s flights from
Houston. A travel agent might be able to get you there on a charter flight. There
are also options from Mexico City to Puerto Escondido, though they may require
an overnight stay in Mexico City one or both ways. Or if you have a few weeks, it is an interesting drive.
Each of the floors has the bathroom in the SW corner for ease of plumbing runs. The kitchens of the first and palapa levels are on the west but we moved the second-floor kitchen to near the entry door on the south to preserve the possibility of maybe making that space into two bedrooms someday. 
The second level has the big wrap-around deck. I see now this plan was from before the kitchen got moved to the south side just to the left of the entry door on the east. The bath stayed put, though. This level has a little better view to the Pacific over the neighbor's house, though you can see the water from the first floor terrace as well. The reduced floor space inside allowed for the large deck on the west. Also changed from this drawing, the deck actually continues along around to the north portion of the east wall and across the south to the kitchen window or so. There is a solar water heater on the deck there. 
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