A wasted Sunday

I awoke early Sunday morning with a raging blood sugar and then spent the entire day trying to get it down somewhere near normal. As a result I didn’t leave the house. Instead I dozed, read back issues of the New Yorker I had brought down with me, dozed some morek, tested my blood, read, dozed, tested, etc. Finally, around 6 PM things clicked. It being Sunday, the Patient went uptown to buy the usual tacitos for dinner. Alas, none of the wagons was in evidence. This is undoubtedly because our village has decided to (gasp!) pave the main street and right now the area around the jardin is nothing but a pile of rubble. The paving from the seafront to the presidencia is completed; from there to the railroad tracks is either under construction or will be soon. Now, instead of the charm of cobblestones we have a charmless slab of concrete. And in order to do this horrid thing they have removed all the trees that lined the street, giving shade and beauty to the town. And believe me, it needs all the beauty it can get. It now looks like a fake “seedy Mexican village” stage set; blank, sterile fronts in a blank, sterile street. Jack had told me about it but it looks far worse than even he could describe. All that by way of an explanation of why we couldn’t get dinner from the taco wagons. Fortunately the Patient had made some delicious bean soup earlier in the day and that was dinner.

Today was my first tiangues of the season. AWalking through the usual stalls, greeting the old vendors, it’s as though I had never left. The begetable man asked when I got back, how long I was staying, and charged me 25 pesos (about $1.75) for my week’s worth of produce, not including the big avocados which I bought from a different vendor and paid 35¢ each for.

I am still trying to locate stuff I brought down~ AA batteries, some meds, the CDs (although I loaded most of them onto the iPod so who knows? I may have decided to leave them home. It’s all such a blur . . .). I finally located my shorts, packed away and left here, and some T-shirts. Add sandals and a hat and that’s how it goes here at the beach.

Tomorrow morning all the local gringos are being asked to show up at the Biblioteca Las Palmas to reshelve all our books. A couple of years ago we got booted out of our space in the local library and were consigned to a tiny space in the foyer. Since then, however, the use of our original space has been abandoned and we have been invited back. The shelves have all been moved back= and the books moved into the room but all in a jumble. So if you know you’re a-B-C’s, come on down and help us reclaim our library.

Neighbor Nelson’s son arrived today so I may have internet at home by the end of the week.

43 days until 1/20/2009: End of an Error