Saturday

I'm typing this on batteries. Outside, there is an intimately close lightening storm that is just thrilling. We just came home in it. But first: just down from the house we ate a wonderful dinner in last night, there used to exist one of Valle Oriente's rare streetlights. We think that San Pedro tries to save money on streetlights; or maybe they think of them as gauche. Either way, what they've done is fit little half traffic roundabouts here and there in the web of roads that criss and cross our mountainous terrain. This creates, nine times out if ten, hair-raisingly (again) thrilling driving experiences where east-west traffic, for example, has to circumnavigate while north-south traffic just charges on through at speed. Where we used to have a red light they are currently adding one of these things. One day, someone just poured a giant cement island in the middle of the road, surprise, then the next day left turns were cancelled: one lane had to turn into an unmarked loop that then forced them across two lanes of thru-traffic. We've done everything we could to avoid this, our favorite way to and from the house, since that second day. Tonight it was raining when we headed out to Big Slice for pizza, and the sky looked, according to Sunshine, "evil." Black clouds with a yellow cast filled the bowls of the mountainous skyline. On the way back home later, it was raining fairly heavily, and these bowls were starting to fill with the usual flash runoff that is, in itself, also fairly thrilling. The problem with avoiding the half traffic circle, is that we have to take a route where water pools instead of a higher route where it flows. We made it home okay, though. [Cavin]