Happy Planting Everyone

Good Monday Morning.  I was actually a little cool this morning, for about 15 minutes !!

The power was out for 12 hours on Friday, hit by lightening, and that probably won't be the last.  Not too bad without the fans as long as it keeps raining, but the bugs can be annoying.
Long skirts that cover your feet, and long sleeve cover ups help, or just go to bed and tuck in the mosquito net. Not much reading in there unless you want to examine the different bugs up close and personal ... which I don't !

Raining and stormy most of the week, except the 3 days I was in PV.  Yesterday being Sunday is the local day for the playita.  It was raining lightly, with thunder and lightening in the distance but they kept heading down the path, infants and children and teenagers and mothers and grandmothers and great granny bringing up the rear.  I was tempted to follow them out to learn how to picnic in the rain.  

Diego was the Tuna King this week.  Now that the kids are out of school there is much excitement on the pier when the big catch comes in.  I was snooping around too and managed to come away with his Mom's Baked Tuna recipe, although I'll have to go over it with her since it was dictated in Spanish.  That's all the fish there is right now it seems,
besides Pulpo ( Octupus ) and Goros ... ??
LJ, my helpers who live up river ( El Paso ) still come down after dark and fish off the rocks
till midnight or so.  I don't know what they are catching right now, but I know they don't go home empty handed.

My computer has a mind of it's own this morning.  I had a hard time posting the photos
correctly.  Candio, The Master of Trees, spent nearly 5 hours, with one helper, and cleared
the view, which I have been planning on for sometime now.  It took me a couple of days to get used to it, and I admit when I went to bed the first night I thought I may have made a big mistake !, but in the morning, it was mind blowing, and I live here ! 
The view is really terrific, like so many Palapas in Yelapa. 
Now the planting comes in, more bougainvillea, 2 colours, white ginger, red ginger, hibiscus,
2 colours, and all kinds of other plants I don't know the names of !
Not to forget all the baby banana trees that Silverio will dig up and transplant, so one day
the hill will be all bananas, I hope. The avocado tree looks dead, but it's still stuck tight in the ground, so maybe it's not lost, and the Tapachine, the flame tree, is growing like wildfire!
It's all very exciting !

We are still picking mangoes, but they are getting harder to reach, and we've all had our fill
by now.  Blackened Tuna with Mango Salsa was a big hit this season !

I missed my kayak adventure since I was in PV, and my friends have to go in for a new phone and modem since theirs was hit by lightening, so will get to it this weekend.
PV is busy !!  Lots of Giant Tour buses, and the traffic is insane.  It's nice to have the car, if you stick to the tunnel.  The old/new tunnel that was completed last year is closed due to a landslide ! no one was hurt, and the crews are in full swing digging it out !
JM treated for dinner at Archies Wok, the first night. Only half the restaurant is open and the place was full ( og gringos ) when we left.  Archie ( r.i.p. ) was the personal chef to John
Huston, back in the day ....
Back to Yelapa, from Boca , ( I still haven't gotten on or off at the new pier in PV ).
Boca is way more convenient, ( esp. when friends pay for a taxi ) but the bus is easy too.
On the 2:00 o'clock home Thursday, ( one of the best drivers ) there were 8 young tourists
heading to Las Animas, a man with 4 kids going to Yelapa, me and three Yelapa Elders,
Icons you could say, transplanted long ago ...born 1927, 1932, and 1934 ! 
They all arrived around the same time, when I was about 9 or 10 years old !
What a place !

The cicada insects, the males, are so loud, so shrill, it's hard to take it all in, but impossible to block out ... you have to laugh.  I haven't heard the toads much lately, but that is another incredible Yelapa sound. They should be " going off " anytime now ...
I've lost two bars of hand soap from the kitchen sink to land crabs, so I've given up on that for a while.  A good advertisement for liquid soap in a bottle ... safe from land crabs !!
The house is holding up pretty good in the rain.  There is the occasional flooding of the bathroom floor, but i just let it dry up naturally and sweep up the mud later !
Besides having to squeegee in the torrential downpour, I have few complaints !  The last one,
when the power was out, and it was pitch black, and the bugs kept diving into my candles and putting them out, I just took off my clothes and squeegeed by feel and experience !
I had to keep my eyes closed, mostly, to protect then from the blinding flashes lighting up the sky ! Not the most fun I've had on a Thursday night !

Oh and the 3rd thing I don't like about living here, ... the same thing I most love ...
that you have to get here by water ... no cars ... but when it's rough and wild with 6 foot waves and boats full of people and luggage , and two big big men get up to hold the front ropes and then they tie the rope around themselves, and everyone and everything is getting very wet and the water is coming into the boat, well I don't like that. No one does I suppose.
So far this year I haven't had a ride in the rain. It hurts.  Last year I got caught on my way home from visiting Vancouver !  My big suitcase wrapped up in the garbage bags I carried with me , just in case.  Mostly I can avoid those kinds of trips, but you worry for others.

I gotta go.  This blog has taken me hours .... but a very happy birthday to my dear RM in Santa Monica,  who I met on my first trip here 15 years ago .... friends for life, and
happy 90th to Byron .... another Yelapa Icon and Elder ....

until next week much love
k