A Normal but Quiet Day

6:30 Wake up, coffee, read the newspaper, (the Noroeste)  feed the birds and clean their cage, make the bed, shower, all that stuff.

8:30 Walk the dogs – a mile or so along the malecon. Say hello to our usual car washers, sweepers, fellow dog walkers, etc.  Take some pictures of the preparations for Carnaval.  On the return trip, if we hadn’t already eaten breakfast we might buy pan dulces at Panamá Bakery, and sometimes  cut up fruit from the cart out front.  We like to make our own espresso at home, so some days we detour to El Faro and buy Chiapas whole bean coffee (that’s en grano.)

9:30 Paul works a couple hours for his former employer.  I putter around, do laundry, iron, study spanish, and maybe write a blog post.  Paul repots a couple plants.

11:30  We’ve got errands to do.  We need grass seed (for filling in here and there) for our back yard, and Home Depot carries it.  Then to the mall, where there is a branch office for Sinaloa state business.  We needed to pay our car tax (tenencia) and the tabs (calcomanía.) Our first time was paid when we bought the car so we haven’t done this before but the whole thing took 2 minutes.  Easy.  Stop at Mega and get a few groceries to kill time until the Thai restaurant opens at 1.  Thai food for lunch, my favorite thing about errands!

2:30  Home.  Sit around and read, sweep up bird stuff.  Yesterday I had to get the ladder out to wash down the kitchen hood that had several gecko poops on it plus dust.  Wash kitchen and sala fresca windows.  Work while listening to spanish lessons on my mp3 player.

4:00  Take a walk over to see a bench a friend had to sell.  She’d said to come anytime, but no one was home.  Walked over to a furniture store that recently moved.  It’s in a gorgeous old bank building.  Walk down Serdan to Zaragoza. Ran into a security guard we used to greet every day when we walked past a school, we had wondered where he’d gone!   Walked down Zaragoza to go to Casa de Campesinos.  Showed Paul what he should get me for my birthday…(an aluminum lime squeezer that is like a miniature of my orange squeezer and a mocajete)  Kept walking along to try to find the school we are going to on Wednesday. (We will be talking English with some Mexican  english students who want to speak with native speakers – and meeting a woman who might be our next Spanish teacher)  We had the school name wrong, but finally found it…way down near the Red Cross. (who could imagine the block with numbers in the 200’s would be next to a block with numbers in the 1600’s…)

5:00 Headed home back down Zaragoza.  Paul bought an ice cream cone at a little place that opened up about six months ago and is always full of kids as they go to and from school.  Five pesos, chocolate chip.

5:30 Sat in Zaragoza park while Paul ate his cone.   We love that park.  Walk home.

6:00  Paul waters the grass, Nancy feeds the dogs.  Put on some music and talk and hang out in the back yard.  Work on making new header graphic for the blog. Not sure exactly where the time goes, sometimes.

9:00 Dinner is whole wheat blueberry pancakes from a mix.

An hour of tv and then to bed.  I just started David Lida’s First Stop in the New World and I stayed up  past midnight reading.

Josh & Jocelyn of Epic Adventures suggested this blog topic…thanks, guys.