The ant wars, the train crossing and reading for fun and education

The local ants were not too thrilled when the patio area was converted from dirt to concrete recently…they apparently had a happy little home there. Of late they have erupted in the dining room, the downstairs bath, the stairway and two spots in the cochera. So we have been actively spraying for the little rascals. For a while there, they seemed to be winning the war, but I think they have retreated at least out to the street. While taking the garbage to the curb yesterday I noticed no less than five anthills at the curb around the tree. Hmmm. Sprayed them too, maybe I can get them to move even farther away from the house!

There is a railroad crossing that we pass several times a week in our travels, though we rarely every catch the train itself, perhaps once a month. The train crossing has lights telling you to stop because the train is approaching and has rather sturdy crossing gates to prevent you from trying to cross in a brave but stupid moment. The crossing gates are very heavy reinforced metal and are operated by counterbalance with a guy coming out to push them down and lean on them to force them back up again once the train has passed. There is a little building along side the tracks where there is someone on duty 24 hours a day just to work the gates.

Of course, while waiting for the train to pass all that empty space on the right of the traffic fills up with motorcycles and bicycles and they are the first to get across once the train is gone and the gates are lifted, beating all the backed up traffic by several minutes sometimes!

We have discovered of late that there is a book exchange in the Golden Zone! We sometimes get starved for English reading materials so this is really an answered prayer for us. The paperbacks are $56 pesos for new releases, $46 for older books, but only $23 with a trade-in and we have trade-ins!! So we recently went down and browsed their racks and came home with some new books to read. Yippee!

In our Spanish classes this Spring Javier encouraged us to read in Spanish as well, particularly the newspapers so that we can be aware of things happening around us as well as build vocabulary. It also gives us something to talk about with the neighbors! So we’ve been buying the paper more often, and now rather than taking the dictionary and a week to get through it, it now takes the dictionary and a day or so! Not too bad.

By reading the paper though we learn more about the bad stuff happening around us, like a breakout of Dengue Fever to the south of us, which prompted city officials to come to every home and inspect possible sites for standing water (mosquito breeding ground) and to make sure we had insecticide powder in every one. They also wanted to know if our tinaco (water reservoir on the roof) had a cover on it as they can also be a breeding ground for mosquitoes. We knew it didn’t have one because the telephone installer told us it needed a cover. The Dengue folks encouraged us to get it covered soon. Since we have no access to the roof and no ladder, we talked to the landlords and they have installed a spanking new cover for us.

There’s also been narco-violence aplenty and a plain old fashioned murder at a business near our neighborhood. But also lots of weddings, baby showers and quince anos, which is a huge party given for a girl on her 15th birthday. All of these are covered in the paper with photos and stories…a whole section of the paper devoted to them.

One of the famous Getty family recently visited to produce and debut a play he’d written. They are talking about starting passenger train service from here to Tucson. That would be pretty awesome if they get it off the ground. They are starting to think about the problems of traffic and access as they have a huge housing boom happening here and no real plan in place to deal with the increased traffic. Pretty cool to have a better working knowledge of what’s going on around us.