Mazatlán’s baseball team, the Venados (the deer) won the fourth game in a seven game series to win the Pacific Coast League championship!  The team now proceeds to the Caribbean Series, where they will compete against the winners of the Dominican Winter League, Puerto Rico Winter League and Venezuelan Winter League.

The newspaper reports that the Caribbean Series will be played February 2 – 7 in Mexicali.  Wikipedia says that each team plays each other twice, but we don’t have the details of the schedule yet.

We’re thrilled that they made the playoffs and have our fingers crossed for a good tournament!

Copyright Countdown to Mexico 2009
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Paul and I love plants and gardening.  When we lived in the US we had ten acres and we worked outside all the time.  Part of the time we loved it but there were times where we realized we were working in the garden or yard so much we couldn’t do other things we enjoyed.  With our move to Mexico we decided that we’d try to be a bit more in balance.

Our central courtyard was planted just about a year ago.  All the plants are new except the windmill palm.  We remove palm fronds frequently and with regular watering it has grown quite a bit.  We planted a bright red coral vine at the base and now the blooms show through the top of the palm.  My hummingbird feeder is in that tree, and between the blossoms and the feeder, it is a popular place.

On thing we’ve noticed about gardening in the city is it is a bit trickier to get rid of the trimmings.  In the picture below the plastic bags are stuffed to bursting with the palm fronds; the stems are bundled together next to them.  The garbage men will take them if we do it this way.

Our backyard project is almost complete.  We still need to have the back wall scraped and painted and plant cannas at the base of the wall.

Last weekend we went to El Quelite with friends to visit an old man with a nursery-picnic area.  We found the place easily, found the old man charming – and fell in love with his gorgeous cannas.  Paul and I bought 12 beautiful deep red cannas to put against the wall.  And guess what we paid?  $120 pesos, or about $8.75!  For 12!

We are going to need to buy a lawnmower this week – the grass is growing beautifully.  I think we’ll enjoy mowing our little patch with an electric mower.

The one thing I do miss from our farm up north is our worm bin.  Next on my list is to figure out where I can get some worms to get a bin started here.  I know all my plants would love the compost.

Copyright Countdown to Mexico 2009
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My transition to the MacBook is going really well.  I expected it to be a lot bigger hassle than it has been.

Music – I had put all of our cd’s on our pc’s when we moved, but unfortunately I used windows media player, so they all had the .wmv file extension.  I should have used software that brought them into the pc in .mp3 format, but I know that now…not then.  So I converted all the music to .mp3, added in all the recent music already in .mp3 format, and imported them into iTunes.  Then I imported the artwork for each album and went to the web for art for the ones missing it.  All in all quite a project, but all 7,500 songs are in there and we are having a blast playing music 24/7 it seems!

Word Processing/Spreadsheets – I downloaded a free 30 days trial of iWork, a Mac product that costs about $80 but have decided that I´m going to go with the open-source NeoOffice for this function.  It is a really nice and familiar interface, quick, and for a small donation I am able to do anything I will ever need to with spreadsheets or word processing.

Picture Management -  As a longtime Photoshop user I was a bit anxious about changing to Gimp but it seems excellent so far.  It is also open-source, and although I haven´t donated yet to support it, I will. (Martha and Consuelo, below)

Even if you’re not planning a change to a Mac, these programs are worth a look for their ease of use and moderate cost.  Check them out!

Copyright Countdown to Mexico 2009
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