The rainy season arrived in the form of tropical depression no. 4. As I've mentioned before tropical depressions and storms can be more worrisome in some ways than hurricanes. They are, it seems to me, more likely to cause serious flooding as they hang around for days just dumping buckets of water. As did tropical depression no. 4. But while we got, literally, buckets of rain, and while everything turned to mud and the waterfall expanded like The Incredible Hulk, we didn't have serious flooding in our area, or, as far as I know, on the coast of Veracruz.
We did have substantial phone and electric outages, and in fact, this past week has been something of a lost week. I don't think we ever had more than a couple of hours when everything was working as it should. The electric outages may well have been caused by storm-related problems, but it turns out that the phone outages were caused by vandals cutting and stealing the cable from the main road to our colonia. The police station is right near where they did their damage. When one of our neighbors asked, after the second incident, that the police Do Something, the police said someone would have to file a complaint. Huh? Anyway, the President of the Colonia is up in arms, and a Community Protest may be in the works.
The electricity outages appeared related to weather-damaged wires. Living without electricity for more than a few hours is pretty interesting. No computer, for one thing. What do we do with ourselves? We managed, actually, and it started to seem pretty pleasant to spend the evening with no more than the flicker of candles in the house while we watched the sky drift ever so silently into darkness.
By yesterday I was feeling a tiny tinge of panic creep around my edges...strange odors wafted from the fridge when on very rare occasion we opened it. What if we couldn't call anyone if one of us needed some kind of emergency help? What WAS happening between Obama and McCain?---Nah. That wasn't an issue. That was a relief.
We did miss real coffee, though. I boiled water on the stove for Nescafe because we couldn't grind our beans! I know, I know, if we were really desperate, we could have used our mortar and pestle.
Today everything appears functional for the moment, but it's too nice a day to be staying inside wallowing in electricity-dependent activities.
Now the water...that's another issue.
It turns out that our very clean spring water doesn't have sufficient flow to provide daily service to the two colonias using it, so we have been on a day-on, day-off schedule. We are lucky because we have a tinaca, or tank, on our roof which stores a few days' supply. But a lot of people just save it up in buckets and barrels and such. HOWEVER, when I read this review in the NYTimes, I thought it best not to complain. We get water literally from a mountain spring now, though I'm still leery of using it unboiled, though when I look at what you folks have in yours, I wonder who really should be concerned! The review also mentions a town in Maine up in arms because a bottled water plant is co-opting its fresh water supply for profit. Coca Cola does that here. I HATE COCA COLA.
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