Friday

It's been one of those low-key days. The kind where we get take-out and we watch DVDs, read, and do a long and difficult crossword puzzle slowly. I spent the afternoon sucked into a new email beta, necessitating a browser upgrade. That is the sort of thing that takes ten minutes and the rest of the day to pull off (and the rest of the week to get used to). Now it is dark and late and I am whiling away the rest of the day reading the news. The New York Times reports that there may be a buckets of money for private corrections corporations tied in with the skyrocketing concern over undocumented foreign nationals. I hate to use a bumper sticker term like "welfare mothers," but at ninety-five bucks a head, estimations of containment earnings can be projected to the ninth digit. Snap up your stocks in firms like Geo Group, formerly Wackenhut's Corrections Corporation. Less depressingly: apparently the germ behind Nacho Libre is one of truth. Reverend Sergio Gutierrez Benitez, AKA Fray Tormenta, is the 23-year, and four thousand bout, secret church padre and wrestler. I love this country: I love that the clergy can sneak off into the ring; and that, conversely, the wrestlers can also come off the mat for local causes. Social Wrestlers are ones who may never even execute espanos planes between the ropes, but who nevertheless lead demonstrations for the real plights of the real people. One of the most famous, Super Barrio, recently came out of retirement to stand behind presidential hopeful Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador on the night of the elections. This is probably why Obrador keeps jumping onto the turnbuckles and telling the audience he will not stop till he gets that belt. [Cavin]

Thursday

No host dinner tonight at Genoma for a DC career development bigwig. First, am I the only one in the world unfamiliar with the term "no host dinner," or is this one of those swank beltway neologisms the Starbucks crowd is inserting over the dubious-sounding "dutch"? No host dinner: you pay for what you eat. You know, like regular dinner, only mandatory. Second, Genoma is not my favorite restaurant. To be fair, I have finally discovered the thing that I consistently like on the Genoma menu, so the food is now reliable. But its sister place, the far superior restaurant Evolution--which used to serve the sushi cubes--closed down while I was in NC over Christmas (and January), and now eating at Genoma is a frustration of lost comparison. Still, the company is always good--Sunshine's coworkers, Olga--and tonight was mandatory but fun. The bigwig was not at all stuffy and dull. When Sunshine and I go out to eat by ourselves, especially lately, she tends to talk about beauty pageants while I listen and ask questions. Tonight, at a mandatory work dinner, she still talked about them and everyone listened. Looking around the table, most eyes were on Sunshine. Especially the bigwig, who also seems to harbor a healthy interest in the upcoming Miss Universe event (on Sunday, don't worry, I'll remind you again). So now I am back home stuffed with reliable green curry. I can't seem to stop tweaking this blog now that it is done: I added a New York times news feed to the sidebar of the Update Stuff main page. At least it only took about sixty seconds. Ain't technology grand? [Cavin]

Wednesday

Back on July third, the day after the federal elections here, I was nonplussed to learn that a majority of the event's news coverage in the US waxed breathlessly gleeful that "this young democracy" had managed elections notably marked by nonviolence. To me, this seemed a little pejorative. Since the election, officials have officially tallied the official tallies twice, putting the incumbent party's hopeful in a slim 250,000 vote lead every time. The opposition, formerly the mayor of México City (and having a pretty huge support base there), has fought these results every step of the way: he is legally requesting an actual ballot recount, producing videotaped "evidence" of vote fraud, and inciting huge weekly rallies in the DF. Yesterday's rally saw angry rioters allegedly attacking the opposition party's car as he was whisked to safety. Turns out that not only were the American papers pejorative, they were wrong. While I'm at it: teachers in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca have been holding the center of town (sometimes through force) since May 22 in an effort to secure a one-time hike in wages. Currently, the embattled Oaxacan governor (and current persona non grata in Teachertown) has decided to suspend a popular annual Indian festival, the Guelaguetza. This is a week-long celebration of the customs and folklore of several indigenous tribes featuring food, dance, stories, and etc. Or it was. It will not be starting this Monday for fear that the striking teachers will attack, or otherwise annoy, flocking tourists. This is probably the best way to make your indigenous population, annoyed to violence by marginalization, feel they are getting somewhere. [Cavin]

Tuesday

Today turned out both more and less interesting than I thought it would. I did not go out to dinner at a new restaurant--we had been invited by a favored waiter from our favorite San Pedro restaurant (which closed down to renovate shortly before Semana Santa and has never reopened). Instead, Sunshine came home late from work with half a root canal. A few days ago she finally mentioned that her tooth was aching, and with this lapse in stoicism came the end of her being able to put up with it. While I watched her struggle with a Subway Sub last night we both seemed to come to the realization that Monday was going to be too long for her to wait on a dentist's appointment, so today she made an emergency stop after her workday. Sadly, she did not look or sound at all funny when she got home. There was almost no way to tell that anything had happened. I am concerned that this dentist appointment will add to Sunshine’s badass points because of some back-alley assumptions of Mexican medicine. He did not disinfect with the Cuervo anesthesia. He did not cauterize the wound with a cheroot. Do not be fooled. She gets badass points for just going to the dentist at all--any dentist. She would like everyone to know that she is just fine, and that the Mexican dentist was as swell as possible. [Cavin]

Monday

Woke up ready to move this new blog stuff out of my workshop and onto the net where it belongs. But I ended up having to put it off until tonight because of a long conversation with my friend and common in-law Bet about this, an on-line photographer's ersatz discovery of the farm Sunshine grew up on. Then Sunshine came home wanting to go see Superman Regresa at the mall (Jesus, another lily-white Christ). In honor of this I have written a play:

Lex Luthor: Hello? Is this Rand McNally? This is Lex. I would like to order a map of the US for the planning room on my yacht, please. Yes... yes... only I need you to draw most of the country under water. Oh, no reason. Thanks.
Exeunt

So now I am finally making good on my latest firm launch date for this bloggernaut. All the problems are solved and everything is looking right. As soon as I post this, I will make the shift that will let someone out there, somewhere, actually be able to see it. Then I will spend ten hours retro pasting code into all my old posts. Hey you, Someone, I hope you are ready to hit your computer with a bottle of champagne. God knows I am. [Cavin]

Sunday

Late last night one last large and overlooked blog concern dawned on me while I was out checking out the night sky (I think I have the big dipper incorrectly done in my globe icon at the top of my info bar, but I don't care at all about that). The photos on my previous previously... entries are not going to fit within the new template. I can always hide them, along with the text of the posts they are attached to, but I don't really want to. This is a bummer because I was expecting to toss this bitch out of the nest tonight, and now I have about a dozen little tweaks to do before it all works like it wouldn't yesterday and might tomorrow. Then I have to write a damn post (first one in months and months, not counting this informal stuff), and then I can finally start transferring all of the new code over. I suspect it will take me the whole day to finish applying all this stuff to the actual living blog, but I might space it out over a couple of days. I have trained everyone to wait months between checking for content, anyway, so I don't imagine that anyone will peek in while it is all half-done. Oh, in the real world: we went out to dinner with Olga tonight—-at the great little Greek place in the Barrio Antiguo—-and on the way there a little man juggled limes at us in the intersection. He kept dropping them under the cars leading me to suspect that he needed to choose a more level intersection. Dinner conversation centered around beauty pageants because—-don’t forget—-Miss Universe is a week from today. [Cavin]

Saturday

The storm yesterday was a doozy. There was hail. Ice fell onto our house, loudly, in the middle of the Chihuahua desert. Fell into it, actually. The wind, rather spookily, was blowing in at least two different directions at once, and one of those direction was straight at every gap in every door. Before the storm got too bad I took the Cat out in it, but the Cat didn’t like that too much. It isn't like I let her get wet or anything, and usually lightening and thunder don't scare her. The beast of the kitchen hills is sort of a pantywaist in the wilds of the patio area. Anyway, I did not work too much on this thing today because I was feeling secure about being finished on-schedule (Sunday), and because I have been neglecting all other things all week long. So I took the day to do some real writing and to watch some Deadwood with my sweetie and eat leftover pizza, all highly necessary but ignored activities from my weekly to-do list. She did a good deal of writing in her beauty pageant manuscript; and, to be fair, I did wash the dishes. It rained again today, but nothing like last night's howling ice-filled deluge. I'll bet I could have taken the Cat right out in it today. [Cavin]