Hurricanes and kittens

Yesterday Esperando said to me, ‘Ah, here comes Hurricane Jimena.’ At that point, Jimena was beating off the coast down by Acapulco, too far out to sea to be much of a threat. She was so far away I didn’t expect to hear anything about her for another week. Today a day later, Jimena is imminently nearby and will be here tomorrow night. She is currently projected as a Category 4 hurricane which sounds pretty awful. The news is that La Paz got a lot of water yesterday. San Carlos on the Pacific is the targeted landfall; they got whopped up last year by Hurricane Norbert. It seems unfair they should have two such nasty weather events within 8 months of one another. We have to develop a wait and see attitude, we are far enough up the peninsula that often hurricanes fall off their projected path before they make it this far. In any event I have ordered lots of flashlight batteries and 5 big jugs of drinking water just in case we are left without water or electricity. I have told the girls that if it is raining tomorrow morning when they get up not to bother coming to work. We were to have a full guesthouse, we have told people about the hurricane and flights will probably be cancelled. I just don’t want to have to look after a house full of people with no electricity (i.e., no water or lights), no household help and no cook!

Yesterday before we knew anything about impending hurricanes we went to the beach at Punto Chivato. We went to the shell beach as I hadn’t been there for at least the last 7 months and thought the time might be ripe for good seashell gathering. The first time I went there, about this same time last year, there were millions of beautiful whole shells carefully stacked upon one another in a cache near the rocks. Yesterday the tide was extremely high and the first 15 feet of surf was churning brown dirt. On closer inspection it turned out to be a masses of seaweed grossing up the water. It looked very unappealing and since the shell offerings weren’t particularly auspicious, we got back in the car and drove to Santa Inez in hopes the water would be more swimmable. There were bits of seaweed floating here and there too, but nothing like it had been at Punta Chivato. The water was inviting although the surf was rough. There was enough of a breeze that we could sit on the beach under the umbrella with a foray out to the surf every 20 minutes to cool off again. So we spent the morning frolicking in the waves, Esperando tried out his new kayak but found the surf too rough for it to be very enjoyable, then we ate our lunch (downed with a few beers) and rested between swims. ‘Is it true that you shouldn’t go swimming after you eat, that you might get cramps?’ we asked ourselves and decided it was an old wives tale, but when we got home we just had to look on the internet. It is just as we suspected, not true. If you are of a certain age look back on all those times as a child that you had to wait out your lunch for an hour before you could go back in the water. Isn’t it a shame that you had to mind then?

My friend, the mother of Don Diego, was here visiting me the other day and mentioned that she needed a kitten for her ranch. So I asked the girls if they knew of any nice kittens that might be available and immediately they said, ‘oh yes there is a beautiful white kitten with blue eyes that hangs out where my brother works.’ When they tried to grab it, it apparently scratched everyone and they couldn’t catch it. I fear I may be giving my friend a bunch of trouble and that this kitten is not very tame. She is coming by in an hour to pick it up, and I am still waiting for it to show up. I hope this works out for the best, in that no one has come with the kitten by now, my gut feeling is the kitten is not cooperating with the whole business of being caught.

I remember last time we had a weather event, it was last August when Tropical Disturbance Julio came through. Esperando and I spent 24 hours mopping up the house as water came in from every direction, first from one side, then when the storm shifted, from the other. It was pretty exhausting. Since then we have taken some measures to make the house more waterproof, but who knows.