MeXscape

We are finally both mostly healthy and recovered. Just as I was starting to recover a little, Chuck started with a high fever. Sheesh. At least I was well enough to walk around a little when it started, so I could care for him like he did for me.

I have to get over this need to do everything bigger than everyone else, this grievous self-centeredness, this apparent need to be the center of attention at all costs – what else could drive me to get Dengue twice in two months – with pneumonia sandwiched in between? Or maybe I just need better luck.

Over the past three years a lot more American products have become regularly available in the stores here. I can go and buy Blue Bell ice cream, Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, and now even Wheat Thins any time I want. But there are still a lot of things that are difficult, if not impossible, to find, like canned pumpkin, which really throws a wrench in Thanksgiving and Christmas preparations. I even have a hard time finding pie pumpkins to make make a pie from scratch. Carving pumpkins are plentiful around Halloween, but pie pumpkins, well, no. How can it be Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie?

Sometime last weekend I finished the book I was reading and set out to find another one. I checked all of our shelves of books and the places where where books get left even though they shouldn't. I had read them all. I continued to search and discovered a box of books that had not been unpacked – since we moved to Mexico.

It's bee season here in Mazatlan. Over the past couple years we have grown used to seeing the fruit and pastry carts bothered by bees. It's not unusual to see 15-20 bees hovering around them. I am allergic to bees and am grossed out by the little buggers crawling on everything so I stay away, but the Mazatlecans don't seem to find them a nuisance; they don't seem to notice them at all.