• 30Jan

  Let’s talk!

  blogging, resources 4 Comments

  
• 30Jan

  Friday update

  blogging, culture/music, language 3 Comments

  It’s just been regular life around here, but we like it.

  The weatherman in the newspaper says that it won’t be cold anymore, and will just get warmer and warmer.  This year has been very mild, I have only worn pants in the evenings a few times and never got out my socks and shoes like I did last year.  There has been some blustery weather though, but the temperatures were still mild even though the ocean got very choppy.  A picture from yesterday is below.

  

  Paul has been working quite a bit for his former employer – more than he had been lately.  They are doing a redesign of their public website so he has been helping with testing, doing the intranet, and helping on the public site as needed.  He’s still managed to steer clear of stress so all is good, and having extra income is nice, too.

  I hurt my elbow when I got knocked down by a wave a couple of months ago (I wasn’t watching) so I haven’t been knitting as much.  It’s feeling a bit better now so I have picked up the market bag I hadn’t worked on for a while and then sewed a seed catcher for the bird cage.

  

  Something other bloggers might be interested in has to do with web traffic to my blog.  I got a notice from my hosting provider that I was close to going over my bandwidth limit that made me go and investigate my traffic.  And what I uncovered is that the increased use of RSS feeds and readers mean that there are automated checks on my site all the time, which made my bandwidth use jump.  There’s really nothing I can do about this, but I have reduced the number of posts on the main page to three because each time they check my site they hit all the items on a page.

  I also had an incident where a bunch of my posts were taken without permission and I had to request that they be taken down right away.  Made me mad.  If you’re a blogger you should keep an eye on who links to you, if only for this reason. (There’s an interesting story to go along with this that I’ll link to when it comes out.)
  

  I have made a calendar page (see the menu bar at the top) and have been really trying to keep it up to date with activities I read about in the paper and hear about here and there.  I’d love feedback if locals are finding it useful.
  

  Paul is taking a printmaking workshop from Glen Rogers next week, and is really looking forward to it.

  I’ve been focusing more on studying Spanish – while Paul’s gone next week I am going to spend even more time on it.  I learn more when I can focus on my books and it will be a chance to work at it without distraction.  Paul is planning to take a two or three week immersion class out of town sometime this spring, but he hasn’t booked it yet.  One liability of being a couple is we talk to each other in English.

  So that’s a bit of an update of what is going on in Mazatlán.

  Copyright Countdown to Mexico 2009
  All rights reserved

  
• 27Jan

  Flamenco!

  culture/music 4 Comments

  Last Saturday we went to the Angela Peralta theater for Romance de Tablao, a flamenco performance by Compañia Profesional Miura Expresión Flamenca, a Méxican dance company.

  

  This was our first visit to the theater, and it almost wasn’t.  Paul had gone into the ticket office and inquired about tickets a couple of days before, and was told that they were sold out.  Lucky for us, our friends also inquired – the same morning – and were able to get tickets for all of us.  We compared experiences, what was said, etc. and still can’t understand why Paul was told there were none.  So, the lesson learned was ask twice!  And don’t think you can go to the internet to buy tickets, the website doesn’t usually keep an up to date calendar of events.  End of rant.

  The theater is an absolutely lovely building.  It was restored in the late 1980’s, and is really worth seeing.  Our seats were in the center of the second balcony, and for $150 pesos were a great value.

  

  The show started out with some excellent flamenco music – a guitar, flute, violin, and drums.  Two singers, Omar Pérez and Ana Elena Morales, sang beautifully, and the program began.

  For me, the first part of the program was special mainly for the music and singing.  The dancing didn’t feel as emotional as what I had expected.  Not much passion.  The clapping seemed to mask the sound of the dancing and the sound was a bit muddy.
  

  But the second half, starting with “La Conquista” I really began to understand the story they were telling, and the passion came through loud and clear.  Their feet just flew! I tried to get a picture of the backdrop to some of the scenes – Picasso’s Guernica. No luck, though.  The pictures above were taken with my camera set on “sports” with no flash.  (Sometimes I really want a better camera.)
  

  There was the disappointment of a man taking a woman away from another man, a rose thrown in a man’s face,  a disappointed lover picking up a rose, and a dancing duel.  It was wonderful.

  Afterward we enjoyed a couple of beverages in the Plazuela Machado, and I can honestly report it was a wonderful evening.

  Copyright Countdown to Mexico 2009
  All rights reserved

  

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