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January 30, 2006
A Wireless of Our Own
After a week of waiting to have the cable run, then another two days to have the cable modem delivered, we finally have our Internet access in our apartment.
We were out shopping when the central office called to tell us that the installer would be arriving within 15 minutes. We were 30 minutes away from our apartment on foot, so we called our friend Larry and, waking him up from a peaceful slumber, asked if he'd be so kind as to go over to our apartment (it's three-and-a-half blocks away) and be there so that the guy wouldn't show up and find nobody home, thereby probably making us start over again from scratch scheduling a new appointment. We jumped in a cab and raced back to the apartment ourselves, where we found Larry by himself. We hung out and chatted a bit, and after a little over an hour, Larry called the central office to see what was keeping them. Of course, they have no contact with the installers, and we were told that they were probably delayed at the previous job.
Larry went home. At 5 PM, the installers show up at our apartment and take a look around. They tell me that they can't run the cable between the walls, so we will have to have a cable snaking around the entire living room to get it where we want it, in the middle of the room. Fine. As long as we have Internet access, I'm cool with that. They drill a hole in the wall next to our side balcony, running the cables in through there. They have run them down from the roof around the side of the building, where they are equally obvious as they are running across the top of the kitchen doorway, around the entryway, over the front door, down the side of the entryway and across the "floorboards" (what do you call them when they're tile?).
They tell me that the Internet access won't be set up until the next day, or the day after that, maybe. For some reason, they can only run the cables; they cannot hand you a box with the cable modem that takes maybe two minutes to hook up and notify the central office that you've got it going. No, different guy has to come out and do that. Before leaving though, they did share some of the soup I had made during the nearly three-hour cable running process, and we chatted about Guadalajara and the metro area. They were really nice guys. Unfortunately, I only had dinky little prep bowls and plastic spoons to serve it with.
All day on Saturday I waited and hoped. I'm getting pretty good about not really expecting things to happen, not when I want them to, nor when they're supposed to, so fortunately, you are spared a long-winded yet possibly witty description of my eager anticipation of the "big event." Yet what I didn't expect was that they'd show up on Sunday, and I certainly would have preferred that they not show up at 9:30 AM while we are dead asleep. Still, to get Internet access at home, I'd suffer much more and gladly, so we let the second string in to set up the modem.
Open box. Remove modem. Plug modem into the wall. Screw in the coax. Call the central office.
The second part took less than five minutes, and while it was very slow at first, after 30 minutes or so I reset the modem and boom! We had high-speed connectivity, put into radio waves by my nifty little AirPort Express.
From the time of placing the order, it took nine days and seventeen hours to be up and running. Not exactly speedy, but probably still better than Qwest...especially since it worked the first time.
Posted by crispy at 06:26 AM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2006
Curtain!
Today we picked up our overdue curtains from a place in Tlaquepaque called Mona's, who sewed them together from our custom specifications and a fabric we selected.
They have "blackout" on the back so that the sun won't shine through, and pinch-pleats at the top.
Closer View of Curtain
The work on them is incredible. They stuck the hooks in them at the place, but I think we're going to have to repin the hooks because they don't quite go up to the ceiling, instead revealing our tacky curtain rod. The curtain rod needs some work too. At present, the only way we can get the curtain to move all the way open is to have one person pull the cord and another pull the curtain back by hand. That is, it sticks a lot in certain spots.
Fabric Print Detail
Now I can walk around in my underwear without getting cat calls. Yes, cat calls. That has been an all-too-frequent occurence.
Posted by crispy at 12:30 AM | Comments (4)
January 22, 2006
The Coriat of Oven Khayyam
I finally got a stove in the apartment. While it takes up half of our dinky little kitchen, it's sure a beauty.
It's a Mexican professional stove brand, Coriat. It takes gas, but they don't seem to use natural gas much in Mexico, and . Instead, we use propane from the huge tank on top of our apartment building that they fill every once in a while.
The bummer is that the supply of gas coming through the stove depends on who else is using gas in our building at any given moment. I have found that this can seriously increase the time between when something is done and when it should be done, but at least it works enough to allow us to eat at home. And when it gets enough gas, boy does that thing cook!
The thing sticks out about a foot from the rest of the counter around it, but it's in a corner, so that isn't too bad. The problem is that our kitchen is lilliputian, and with the stainless kitchen rack that I bought at Costco to hold all our various plates, glasses, cooking tools and so forth, there's barely room in there for a human being.
Next will be our Internet access and cable, that is to be installed sometime in the future. We have an installation "date," although we do not yet know what the date will be. They are supposed to call us the day before, but we'll see if that happens. We're still waiting for the drapes that we were told would be ready mañana, and that was on last Tuesday.
Posted by crispy at 02:34 PM | Comments (1)
January 15, 2006
Another Strange Product
Somewhere, there are a pair of panty hose in an attic with your legs getting increasingly whiter and rougher.
Posted by crispy at 10:10 AM | Comments (2)
Request: Bathroom Photos
Let it not be said that I do not listen to the wants and needs of my readers. Yet I warn you, it's not pretty...
Okay, so maybe I lied about it being like the worst bathroom in Scotland. Yet when you're trying to keep people interested in the story of an apartment a million miles away, you have to use a little artistic license. Still, there are aspects about it that force me to close my eyes and think of England whenever I'm showering in there.
First, the general overview. Bear in mind, we've added a few things that are necessary for using the thing. You would not believe how much just having something another color than the pinkish-brown tile staring back at you improves the scene.
Note that the toilet paper has to rest on the toilet itself, because there is no device for holding it in the wall-mounted receptacle. I guess along with the stove and the fridge, that's yet another thing that tennants provide and take with them when they go.
Then this photo shows the lighting situation a little better. This is the state of ALL the lighting in our apartment at the moment.
This is the track for the door to the shower, after REPEATED attempts to clean it.
This is a shot of the "well-worn" tile and the mysterious gummy spot that I'm going to have to remove with some kind of scraper.
This is the prison shower style window that is in the shower itself...
...and the huge rusting metal lever that, in theory, is to open and close it. In fact, it seems permanently stuck open.
I'm sparing you a shot of the toilet seat that is only attached on one side, which won't stay up when you raise it, and I already replaced the showerhead that was rusted and oozing with some orange colored funk. They must have cleaned the toilet bowl between our first viewing the apartment and our arrival, because now all that remains in it is a brown line at the water level that we can't get out. Before, it had a uniform black coating of some substance on everything below the water level.
Posted by crispy at 09:33 AM | Comments (2)
January 13, 2006
Settling In
We have now been at the apartment for six days, during which we've managed to acquire a bed, a Maytag refrigerator and a bunch of things that will eventually be useful when we have a stove, a dining room table and other furniture that makes our place a home suitable for living and entertaining: pewter and ceramic serving dishes, ashtrays, a set of basic tools, buckets, a mop, a broom, knives, plastic storage containers for leftover food, a set of coffee cups and a space heater to take the chill off the high desert nights. We have also selected some fabric for a custom-made set of drapes for our bedroom, along with a coordinated bedspread. A Mexican Edith Head is sewing them: small in stature, bobbed hair, glasses, and draped with a tape measure around her neck. They should be ready next week, which will put an end to the peepshow I'm constantly giving to the people walking by and the poor traffic cop on our corner.
He has been located there to handle the traffic on our small road that has become the detour from a major street nearby while they complete a major construction project. This project is to last for another two years, so what would normally be a quiet little corner in Chapalita Sur is actually a very busy thoroughfare, with loud traffic passing by until very late at night. We hope the drapes also help to cut down the noise we get in our bedroom late at night from the street, because the wall facing Calle Cubilete is a solid wall of windows with a door that opens to one of our two balconies. The guest room/office is the same way, but we're taking it one step at a time.
I am writing this entry from our other balcony, which opens from the dining room area and overlooks Calle La Ermita. La Ermita is the street with all the traffic, and at times, especially late at night, it's like having a box seat at the drag races. When the traffic cop isn't around (after dark), people tear down the street at amazing speeds. Yet right now, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, drivers show a bit more control. A flock of doves that live in the nearby trees is currently perched on the wires running in front of the balcony, watching me intently, as if I were about to do something interesting. They will be disappointed, ultimately. Once Shawn gets out of the shower, I will fold up the laptop and we will head up to our local restaurant that has free wireless Internet access, La Terraza de la Abuela, so that I can post this entry over a steaming Ibarra served in earthenware mugs.
But the balcony, equipped with two plastic porch chairs and a table generously loaned by our gringo friends Joseph and Larry that live just a few blocks away, is the only place other than our bed where we can sit, since we have no other furniture at the moment. On it, I have passed many pleasant hours of the new Mexican life, drinking apple soda and reading Chekhov, watching the doves fly back and forth between the wires and the trees, and following the many maids dressed in their cleaning smocks as they walk to and from the apartments and houses that they maintain. Two nights ago, at about midnight, I was sitting out here and waiting for Shawn to return from a film, and suddenly a quartet of mariachi (strings and voices only) broke into song at the house next to our building. I sat and listened, enraptured by their old Mexican refrains about love and waiting, delighting in the fact that life here is so different, so imbued with an appreciation of art and music that seems to have completely vanished from the daily life of your average Joe in the United States. The musicians crooned on for about 40 minutes, not once getting any complaints from the neighbors for playing at such a late hour. I do not think that I will ever tire of hearing such beautiful music, even after years of living down here; perhaps all the neighbors were just as mesmerized as I was by the sweet music on a clear yet warm winter's night.
The next day we went to lunch at Larry and Joseph's house, where Joseph had prepared an impressive Chinese meal and we met a woman that has lived in Mexico off and on for decades, now relocated to Guadalajara. At one point, there was a riotous squawking of birds and Jospeh commented on how it must be that time of day for the "parrot migration." I laughed, thinking it did sound an awful lot like parrots, and then Larry said that the gang of wild parrots flew over their house every afternoon about that time, in some inter-city migration, taking a brief rest along the way in their trees. I didn't believe it and asked to see them, so he walked me out to the street. Sure enough, we saw a bunch of them climbing around on the branches of trees lining the streets, beautiful bright green parrots that rested for a few minutes before taking off for parts unknown.
Posted by crispy at 04:36 PM | Comments (1)