Merry Christmas!!

As if I even need to add words to this photo... Paul and I are getting excited for family coming. I finished my class today so we are officially on vacation until Jan 3. Thought we would get you in the Christmas spirit with this, the cutest photo of 2006 (although Kate´s photos are a close second!).

Merry Christmas!

Melissa

Kibbles Update

I didn’t want to mention anything before but it has all worked out now so here is the story:

The day I posted the ‘Gecko Naming Contest’ was the last day we had seen ‘Kibbles.’ I was thinking, oh crap, here we finally named him and he was eaten by a crow or something! But not to worry he was finally spotted in the bathroom last night (practically gave me a heart attack)and seemed healthy, I mean for a gecko. Phew. Thought we had jinxed him!

More soon

Melissa

Here’s what’s new with us.

Paul is officially on vacation until next semester, which only means he doesn’t have to get up at 5 in the morning to go to class and can work on the real reason why he is here, his dissertation.

A short-ish rant:
My Spanish class ends this Friday (Dec 15) and then we will be anxiously awaiting the parents to join us in Mérida for the week tour of the Yucatán. I have been a little frustrated with this class because it is a little too academic at times. I mean, I want to know how to speak in the real world before I start spouting off theoretical stuff, you know? So anyway, some of the vocab etc. is pretty worthless and some of the grammar is so complicated I don’t even know it in English (and yes, I am an ESL teacher, but that’s not the point). My other beef is that I am in the Yucatán and my teacher is from Mexico City – the DF. That’s fine and all but the book is very DF centered, which makes me mad at times especially when the lessons are all about indigenous language – meaning nahuatl. Teotihuacán is cool I’m sure, but we can’t visit it on the weekend. I missed a homework exercise about tenses because the sentence had to do with cars being able to circle on certain days. This is a DF rule and does not apply in Mérida. Cars can be on the road any day of the week here. God! Then there was the day we starting talking about the “indigenous problem.” I said, what is the “indigenous problem?” and the teacher went on this schpeel about how the indigenous respect nature and the mestizos who work for companies sometimes cut down trees and don’t replant them. Confused, I repeated my question, what is the “indigenous problem?” And she said the same thing again. Sounds like a mestizo problem to me… ugh. Then there was the day we were supposed to read these quotations, which were taken totally out of context and say if they were good or bad representations of Mexico. Well, I got the first one which was from Jose de Acosta (although they called him Joseph de Acosta in the book, anyone know why?) And I said, well the language is positive but the tone is not. Well, you would have thought I had shown up to class naked (which I did not) because I was WRONG, it was a positive quotation of Mexico, duh! Fine, whatever. I’m not going to argue but I know what Joseph (?) de Acosta is all about, yo.

In other, less controversial news, our hot water heater is fixed after almost a week without hot water. I had to get my hair cut so I could wash it in the sink without it going down the drain! The heater works better than it has the whole time we’ve been here, so it was worth the wait.

The weather is great right now. It gets warm, sometimes hot, during the day and stays cool at night. I actually got a little chilly last night. We keep our windows wide open all night with the fan on low and it is perfect. Of course, the Mexicans here are suffering from the ‘cold.’ They close their windows at night and wear scarves and sweaters all day. I’m not poking fun because if this were the only time I could wear a scarf or sweater all year without sweating so bad I passed out, I too would be part of this fashion scene (alas I’m the blonde girl in a tank top in winter) but I’ll save my scarf and sweater wearing for the air conditioned freezing-ness that is some of the restaurants here.

Since the weather was nice and cool tonight we went to Noche Mexicana for tamales and apple pie (I know, but it’s cheap and yummy) and we decided to walk home. We think it might be 2 miles but it is flat here so it takes no effort. It took under an hour and was a lot better than riding the bus.

We are getting some things together to send back with the parents at Christmas and New Years, and although we have a lot to send back, we (that means I) did a good job not over packing. Mostly we’re sending back things we’ve bought here – Paul’s books, my shoes, and my Carolina blue cowboy hat!

We had been going through this ‘bad movie period’ but I think we are out of it now. I realize I’m no rotten tomatoes but here’s my two cents: Some of the bad movies we saw included: Pirates of the Caribbean – did not live up to the previous one; Wicker Man – so terrible I can’t even go there; The Devil Wears Prada was almost cute except that she still looks like a runway model when she takes her “real” job at the newspaper and I actually own that “dumpy” blue sweater AND I really like it and I WILL continue to wear it because I live in the real world… see, you shouldn’t have gotten me started. We watched Inside Man (Clive Owen, Denzel, and Jodie) and I thought it was good, interesting at least. What else, oh yeah, then we saw Babel, which was good, though because of all the hype, I was excepting something more. Not sure if it is obvious enough for an American audience to realize the Americans were the only ones whose lives weren’t ruined. Then Thursday we saw Children of Men. OMG – great movie – you must see it. I won’t say anything about it because I think I liked it so much because I hadn’t heard all of the hype. Really, go see it. The only other thing out right now I’d see is Déjà Vu. Anyone seen it? Is it worth seeing? ok, well, let me know.

In other news I finally broke down and bought some peanut butter (and if you know me, 3.5 months was a long time to go without it). It’s so yummy. Organic peanut butter has not hit Mexico yet but every time I go to the grocery store they have something new. This week they had Arm & Hammer Toothpaste whereas before you could only buy different types of Colgate. And the only mouthwash they had for a long time was Listerine but now there is Plax – which is worse but a lot cheaper, if you’re curious. So it can’t be too long before organic p-butter hits the aisles. That and medium force bristled toothbrushes. Well, and tea…

In still other news 120 inmates escaped from a Cancun prison over the weekend during a prison riot and only 80 of them have been recaptured. Glad we don’t live there… lock your doors!

Oh yeah, I can’t forget to update you on our rummy game. For awhile I was getting spanked pretty hard (hence the silence). We were tied at one point in October but then I let it slip and was behind over 2500 points at one time. However, December has been treating me well and I have had some simply lucky hands. The lead is now down below 2000 (which, when you’re playing to 100,000 isn’t all that much) and the scores are as follows:

Paul: 87,165
Melissa: 85,205
(as of the evening of 9 Dec 06)

More soon!

Melissa

Y'all are Poop, well, some of you...

I have to say I was a little disappointed by the puny amount of emails I received with suggestions to name our gecko. (Who, we hope didn’t drown in the deluge we received last night – so much for the ‘dry’ season). I had imagined floods of emails with witty quips and ideas that would leave me in a pile of entries that I would have to sort through carefully, taking up AT LEAST an afternoon that I had planned to work on the thesis, but alas, the thesis is coming along. That said, many thanks to the contributors!

So without further ado…







(you have to scroll)










First Place goes to: (drum roll!!!)
The only non-humans to vote, Mr. Sutton and Miss Ellie of Bloomington, Indiana! The gecko’s name is Kibbles – but we are NOT going to eat him, pups.

For the record, Paul liked Roy Williams but we thought it might be strange to say every evening, hey, there’s Roy Williams, see him? We might look at one another as if one of us had gone crazy and then remember oh yeah, the gecko!

In other news, we have our TV back, though we had to pay for the repairs (?). I mean it’s not like we can bring it home with us in the summer… but whatever – 6.5 weeks to repair and the labor is guaranteed for 30 days, ha!

Paul is recovering from a pretty bad cold and is trying to get his project moving, but you know how complicated the life of a graduate student is... it’s a massive amount of work.

That’s all I can thing of right now – the café closes for the siesta (don’t even get me started) so I better try to publish this before we get kicked out, besides as much as I like tea that tastes like warm water with a dash of ash, I could use a cup of real flavor at home...

More Sooner than last time

Melissa