Mañana Month

I haven’t been blogging for several weeks, as many days I felt, “mañana...”.
Mañana everyone knows is Spanish for “tomorrow” -- as in, “I’ll do it tomorrow”. Its one of the aphorisms down here that when you ask a a Mexican “When?” and you get the answer “Mañana,” it doesn’t necessarily mean “tomorrow”, but rather, “just not today...”.

A whole bunch of stuff was happening through Feb. and most days were too busy and nights too tired. Ahh, mañana...
Susan’s brother, Rob and wife Cheryl came to visit again for a couple of weeks. They have really taken to this area and once again rented a car for a week and did some exploring.
Of course we did a lot of eating, and one night Rob & Cheryl put together a Mole chicken dish, which was delicious. (Mole is pronounced like olé!)

I didn't get a picture of our plates but it looked something like this pic.
Mole Chicken is a classic Mexican dish, and over many years, I have tried it several times in restaurants and never quite liked it even though I thought I should. Besides spices, most mole contains a lot of dark chocolate, and I like chocolate. However, since that dinner a few weeks ago,I have been converted. I have even had it at taco stands, and Susan made mole chicken at home again. Maybe it is an acquired taste, but I am now all about the Mole. Of course it is not that simple, because there is mole and there is mole. At all the big food stores here there are vats of several kinds of thick, brown or green, suspect looking mole paste. I’m not competent with my culinary Spanish to make informed choices. Some of it is labeled with “dulce” which means sweet, which we chose to avoid. The one we tried the first time was labeled with “anjoli” which we call Angelina Jolie. Then we found out that “anjoli” means “sesame seeds”.

Music Update --
Our band went on hiatus when Carlos returned to Spain, and Mike’s family when for a trip to Guatamala, but Jim and I soldiered on with rehearsing a few new tunes for another Saturday Night Live. This time I brought out a Chris Smither song, “Don’t Call Me Stranger”, and a Valentine‘s dedication to Susan of Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man”.

It was another lovely night with several of our previous performers plus contributions from our neighbor, Dot, with a poem about gossip in Paamul,

and Susan recited the classic “Albert and the Lion”. Our featured set was from Kevin Shipman, who worked for years as a successful musician.

Fitting a square peg into a round hole...

For the past weeks, I have been slowly building a screen room in our loft. We love sleeping up there in the fresh air, but it was a big nuisance getting tangled in the mosquito net hanging over the bed. So I would lie there thinking about how to enlage the space. The new room takes up about half the loft. Others who have build screen rooms said that the downside was looking up to a screen that collected dirt and dust above your head. So I designed it to have a short solid wall along one side, which then becomes a solid section of ceiling going up on an angle under the roof beams. Then the balance of the ceiling and the other three walls are screen. As the palapa is build with poles, sticks and grass, its structure is not square or straight. So every piece of the framework had to be carefully measured and fitted one by one. We chose to coat the plywood sheets, frame and trim pieces with varnish. Two coats of varnish on every piece after it was measured and cut took a lot of brushing and waiting for drying. So what I concieved to be a simple framework structure, went to go on and on. It is virtually done, with just a few pieces of trim to install, but we are sleeping in the new space -- quite grand!