Weekend

We are home safely again. First of all: happy birthday BB Todd, as of Saturday afternoon. You were very much a part of our celebration of Sunshine's birthday this weekend. Xilitla was great, and it rained nearly the whole time we were there. Beautiful long immediate rains that only let up exactly when we needed them to (and really cooled everything nicely when we needed that). I'll talk about this more in the future. Right now, here is a warm detail: in the little concrete bus station at the edge of town--where we waited a half hour for a ride to Ciudad Valles earlier today--there hangs a loving chalk drawing of one of the line's green-striped busses. It's a loving ode to this brand-ex public transport system, hopefully done by someone's kid. In the picture, the gleaming bus is careening down the mountain, straddling the yellow lane marker as it veers violently close to the sheer rock wall with the front tires, and dangerously close to tipping into the verdant precipice with the back ones. It was actually pretty accurate. Over this weekend across Mexico, the torrential rains that we saw in San Luis Potosi state were also seen everywhere else, causing flooding and massive hardship in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Ciudad Juarez. In the first two of these, ongoing protests were dampened but not abated: teachers in Oaxaca have begun hijacking government cars and relocating them in the occupied zócalo, and AMLO's camp in the streets of Mexico City had to relocate some of their own tents because of accumulating water. On the AMLO front, the federal judiciary charged with the outcome of this year's presidential election voted unanimously not to allow a full-vote recount. Predictably, AMLO vows to escalate his present foot stamping, which he refers to as "civil disobedience." [Cavin]