Mexico Day 8

Yesterday I wrote that this last hotel we’re staying in will do for the price. How wrong I was! I could barely sleep from all the noise! The hallways are noisy and it seemed that a group of people decided to have a party in the hallway until around 2am. We discovered that Steven can deal with noise but he can’t deal at all with light when he sleeps. I am the exact opposite. I will wake up from a pin drop but can sleep with the lights on with no problem. I don’t think either of us feel well rested though. My lack of sleep meant that Steven was kept up by me reading at 1am with a flashlight. I also accidentally scared the crap out of him when I was looking for the remote to the AC and accidentally woke him up as I was rummaging through things in the pitch dark for it. Quite a rude awakening for him.

On our last day we did a bunch more walking around town again. We started noticing that we were the only ones walking around with light sweaters. Even in the early morning, it was still only like 65 degrees out. Yet, for some reason everyone was walking around like it was snowing!

Check out this kid...

His mom was actually dressed in a puffy down jacket with ear muffs. Really? It's 65* people! Maybe you need a light sweater but it was around 10am and quickly getting warmer but the ridiculous winter gear remained all day.

During our walk that day, we finally found the only mail box in all of Mexico. [12/20 edit: we're still not sure if our postcards ever made it to the recipients!]

We also finally got some decent shots of Steven standing on his birthday street. Steven's birthday is also Mexican Independence day.

Steven also got a better video of the street crossing signs. This video better illustrates how the walking man goes faster and faster as time counts down.

We thought we were used to the things the locals found entertaining. But then we came across this...

Hide your kids, people. That is a creepy, smoking, singing, robot clown who will probably kill you in your sleep.

We could have created a whole blog based on how often people ignore safety laws. But here are a few snap shots of one building under construction.

We saw people standing at the top of a ladder that was roped together to another ladder to get extra height and a guy running a power tool by touching two raw wires together. Crazy!

We made one final trip to the fabric store and Steven realized that he never got any pics of what fabric stores in Mexico are like. I'm not sure if we mentioned before but there is a large fabric store every few blocks in the city center area at least.

I'm like a kid at a candy store!

Well after all of that walking, we picked up our luggage from the hotel storage and headed to the airport. Our taxi driver was INSANE. He was very heavy on the horn and has absolutely no patience for traffic. To him, driving on sidewalks, or on the wrong side of the street, or driving over center dividers is totally a legit way to get around. We made it to the airport in one piece though. After paying him though, we still had a couple of bucks left which we decided to blow on some airport shopping. So  Steven walked up to the register and the guy rang us up and the total came out to exact change of what we has left. It was the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me.

I am actually excited to get back home. It was a fun and mostly relaxing trip but there is no place like home. I look forward to not having to try and figure out the money exchange in my head for every purchase or make a fool of myself speaking what must sound like cave man Spanish mixed with a little mime. And as much as I hate our old mattress at home, I do still miss my own bed. And Bowie, my little Bowie! He must miss us so much.

We are also coming home to some possible damage to our house. Our neighbor said that all of our roofs suffered some damage in the recent wind storm. We found out about the wind storm when Steven’s phone was going crazy from Oxy alerts in the middle of the night. When we woke up we read in the news about the fire at Oxy and the power outages everywhere. LAX apparently lost power for over an hour and flights are still being delayed. My work at Art Center College was actually closed for the whole day since the roads left the campus inaccessible due to fallen debris and all of those old trees around were still a threat while the winds persisted.

We'll see when we get back home!

[12/20 note: the above text was written at the airport so you obviously know how our house fared]

Minor adventures in cabinetry

The house I bought was mostly renovated before we moved in with paint throughout, new flooring, and kitchen cabinets but some corners were definitely cut. My favorite example, which has vexed me since I first saw the place, are the kitchen cabinets.

The kitchen cabinets do not meet the stone floor. This is made worse by the fact that the stone stops about a half an inch behind the cabinetry so there’s a second gap casting more shadow. To keep things interesting, this is only a problem on about 2/3 of the cabinetry due to the floor not being level though the counter is.

Every now and then I would mention to Deanna how I really needed to fix this because it was just driving me crazy. Her response was something like, "You’re being ridiculous. If you’d never pointed it out I never would have seen it. It’s fine." My response to her response was something like, "You crazy. Those gaps are the worst thing ever. Ever."

So after a year of hating the cabinets and a couple fruitless trips to Home Depot looking for an easy solution I decided to do the hard solution. I got some nice and true wood (Select Pine) and basically made faceplates for the cabinets. This involved my full range of wood working skillz. There was drilling, planing, sawing, and even a little whittling. My woodshop was the backyard. My workbench was some crates. It was awesome.

I got them shaped so perfectly that there wasn’t even any need to attach them. I stained them and sealed them to match the color as best as I could and then put them in. Magnifique.

But then the second most annoying feature of the cabinets loomed larger. The cabinets weren’t custom built so they don’t quite fill the entire space. That’s no problem, you can just put a custom cut piece to cover up the gap. The cabinet installers did this in two of the five places where it was needed. This was not logically done in the top two spaces, nor the bottom two, nor the left two, nor the right two….nor with a mouse. They fixed the top left and lower middle. It’s like someone looked at it and said, well we better randomly fix 2/5 of this problem really nicely and completely forget about the rest. I don’t know. It confuses me.

So back to the Depot for more Select Pine but this time my workshop (back yard) would not be sufficient. I needed to make a diagonal 3 foot long cut of 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch. A trip out to Neil’s woodshop took care of that. His consists of his much larger backyard, a garage, a patio, and many tools that plug in – unlike mine. More staining and sealing and some inventive attaching and all is now perfect. Oh, I also had to pull out the dishwasher and level it with some shims. The nice bonus there is now the dishwasher door will stay open on its own.

Now I am happy. I ask Deanna what she thinks and she says, "Wow, I didn’t know I really hated that until you fixed it. You are right in all things." That second part I may have heard wrong.