Sunset in Temux Grande

Hello everyone. Today is just some random goings-on. The picture above is from a particularly nice evening as we walked back to our house. The mountain in the sea of clouds is just this side of the Mexican border. If you like it, you can click on it to get a really hi-res verson that you can download to make a cool desktop for your computer.

There is a fair amount of construction going on around here lately, both traditional and “modern”. Here we have adobe (mud & straw) blocks, drying in the sun. A team of about a dozen Guatemalans with hoes cleared a flat spot in the hillside to build the new house; they will start laying the adobe bricks once they are dry.

Our neighbor Petronella, on the other hand, decided she wants to replace her adobe house with a concrete block house. This is a pretty good idea; the adobe has terrible seismic performance, since it’s unreinforced. She doesn’t know that, of course; she wants the block because it’s modern and expensive-looking. And, I am sure she will go with the popular “dirt floor” model like everone else in town. Sigh. Here’s a picture of Pertronella in her partially-destroyed abobe house (left). So where will she stay during construction, you might ask? Simple: she built herself a new temporary house last week, out of scrap lumber and sheetmetal (right) she stripped from her old house. Her kids helped her. Can you tell? The scary thing is, though she’ll only live there for a month or two, lots of people here live like that indefinately.

I haven’t posted a gross bug in a while, so here’s one that Emily found. It makes me think of my brother Dave. Not because he looks like that, but because it’s something he’d like. I am not really sure what it will turn into when it’s done being gross, but my guess (from the size of it) is a Luna Moth like the one we saw last month.

The neighbors are drying their corn on their roof. This is a great idea, since it’s a warm sunny location safe from wandering animals that might want to eat their grains. Or ladrones (thieves) that might want to make off with it. Sounds like a lot of work for little gain (stealing dry corn), but they seem to take the threat pretty seriously around here. The old guy sitting on the stool was out there several evenings in a row, patiently tying ears together by the husk, watching the sun go down.

For the first time ever, I saw a Guatemalan exercising last week. Since weights would cost money, they improvise by tying a strap around a burned-out 5hp electric motor, and hoist that in the air a few times. The little kid is Chalio, our buddy, and he wanted to participate in the fun, even though the weight is a bit big for him. He lifted it twice, got bored, then took off to go play in the stream with his buddies. The guy on the bench is Galindo, who is continuing to recover from his hospital stay. I figure the family pressured him some to do some exercise, to get his strength back up.

Because we’re up in the clouds here a lot, we get fog and rainbows and such pretty regularly. Here are Emily and two of our local friends, walking home from a hike in the hills. Sadly, they forgot to stop and pick up the gold that is lying in the pot in the culvert just down hill from them. This picture is also on the server in hi-res format, so you can click to enlarge it and make a desktop of that one too, if you’re so inclined.

And that is all for now.