Tuesday

Today's energy was primarily directed toward the act of moving. Much the way the theme of "moving in" was worked to death in this blog's first year (acquiring bookshelves, cooking and cleaning and decorating), it will now become tiresomely full of "moving out" talk. Sunshine came home at lunchtime to meet some surveyors today. We walked though the house, pointing out things that were going to go into storage or be shipped on to Vietnam. We thought we would be making these decisions the day they were actually packing and moving us, but it seems we made them all in a half an hour today. I suspect that a year from now, this blog will be rife with complaints about ramifications of things that happened between two thirty and three thirty today. In the news: six police officers have been ambushed and killed in a rural area of southwestern Michoacan.* While the drug war between battling cartels has been, for over three years now, violently boiling in border states, the little state of Michoacan has been making recent headlines for its flamboyant gift beheadings. This brings the number of narco-related homicides there to almost four hundred and fifty for the year. Why Michoacan? Well, it is a rural Pacific Coast state with deep inland access, for one thing; it tends to be the beginning of the narcotics smuggling route that leads to the cartel drug war at the border. Also, I believe that the Sinaloa Cartel lives near there (in Mazatlán), meaning that the Gulf Cartel's fearsome henchmen, los Zetas, along with their enemy-of-my-enemy amigos in the Tijuana Cartel, are taking the war to the enemy gates. Like the seventeen heads found in Michoacan this year, the riddled bodies of the six police were accompanied by a note. [Cavin]