Birthday Weekend Blowout

Here we are in Carlsbad celebrating my Mother’s 102nd birthday. After the cool days in Denver last week, it is hot here. Yesterday was 100F, more like Baja than Denver. It has been a busy couple of days catching up with other family members, like a long visit with your best friends. Today when we were visiting at my Mother’s an old family friend, Sally, dropped in to wish my Mother a happy birthday and tell us about the Mescal Roast and Mountain Spirits Dances event sponsored by the Living Desert Zoo & Gardens State Park on the north side of town.

Worthy of a visit

The Living Desert Zoo & Gardens State Park is a zoo and botanical garden displaying animals and plants of the Chihuahuan Desert in their native habitats. It is located atop the Ocotillo Hills overlooking the city and the Pecos River. The zoo features more than forty native animal species, and the gardens feature a greenhouse and hundreds of cacti and succulents from around the world.

The Mescal Roast and Mountain Spirits Dances is a Powwow put on by the Mescalero Apaches and features a dinner with traditional Native American food, dances and singing of the Apache peoples. The mescal was essential for their survival in the harsh desert environment of the Southwest. Historically, both the Pecos River Valley and Guadalupe Mountains here were the traditional hunting and gathering territories for the Mescalero Apaches. It was the Apaches' dependence upon the mescal plant, better known as the familiar spiked-leafed agave or century plant, for food which led the early Spanish explorers to call these people the "mescal makers" or Mescaleros.

Dances at the Powwow

Their mescal roasting pits are the best known archaeological sites in the Guadalupe Mountains. Mescal was a very important and nutritious staple food for the Mescaleros. The roasted mescal was sun dried and used in much the same manner as the Plains Indians used dried meat or jerky. Recent tests by New Mexico State University found that dried mescal leaves contain 85% soluble carbohydrates, 1% protein and 14% insoluble fiber and are roughly equivalent in food value to oats.

Chopping the leaves off the plant in preparation for roasting

Our friend Sally said the celebration this weekend was a noteworthy event. In the conversation that ensued my uncle piped up with, “I thought mescal was a drug.” “No,” said someone else, “you are thinking of peyote.” ”Well what is peyote?” someone else asked. I said, “I will look it up on my new Blackberry phone.” Sally said, “Gosh, I’m hooked, I can’t leave until I know the answer.” It turned out peyote was the dried fruit of a kind of cactus which produces halucinogenic dreams and was incorporated into the southwest Native American culture about 100 years ago from the indigenous peoples of Sonora, Mexico.

“But what is mescal?” my sister Hermana asked. “Oh,” I said being the know-it-all I am, ”that is like Tequila, it is distilled from the agave plant from anywhere in Jalisco state. Any other agave, or blue agave produced elsewhere in Mexico is called mescal. First they roast the agave cores, from which a sweet honey wine is made, then they distill it to make the hard liquor. I know this because we went on a tour of the Jose Cuervo distillery in Tequila,” I added. (Dumb me, the Mescaleros were eating mescal long before anyone ever thought of making alcohol out of it.)

“Wow!” said my niece. “I never thought I would come to Grandmommy’s room on her 102nd birthday to talk about drugs and alcohol!”

California, California, the hills send out the cry, we're out to do or die. . .

Once again we are on the move. Tomorrow we will start out early for our drive to Ensenada and then on to the States for my Mother’s 102nd birthday in May. She is still sharp as a tack.

My Mother last month holding her newest grandchild, Paloma.

After that we go to Esperando’s son’s graduation from California Institute of the Arts. (Established in 1961 by Walt and Roy Disney, it started as Disney's dream of an interdisciplinary "Caltech of the Arts" and provides a collaborative environment for arts disciplines including music, art, contemporary dance, experimental film, video art, animation, theater, puppetry and creative writing). After 4 years with his nose to the grindstone, Youngest Son will be awarded a degree in film animation. Hot Damn! I wonder if he will remember how to sleep long hours again, since he has been splitting his time between studies and work?

But that is not the end of the odyssey. Once all the pomp and circumstance has died down we will drive on to Northern California where Esperando will be working so he will not have to travel back and forth so much while I remain a nearby camp follower and get to see him more often. We will spend the next 3 to 4 months up in the Bay Area: time enough spend some quality time with our families and friends and take in a cooking class, puppy training classes, and Pilates classes too. I always think of the Bay Area as my home since I graduated from high school and spent the next 30 years there before moving away to start this life of a vagabond.

Baby mangoes waiting for the hot summer to come so they can grow big and ripen. Yum!

However happy I am for a temporary move back to ‘Upper California,’ this will be the third summer of mangos ripening on the guesthouse trees that I will miss. They are still only about an inch long. Last year I saw one almost ripe mango when we were here for a week, but when I came back several weeks later it was gone. I will be sad to leave all of our pets (little Lupita gets to go with us) and our new planted garden. It is such a small start on greenness for us now in this new house. We have planted several hibiscus trees, a couple of bougainvilleas, a bird of paradise, some Siberian iris, wandering jew, rosemary, oregano, mint, thyme, a serrano pepper bush, 3 olive trees, a mango tree and my two roses that I brought down here from Estados Unidos almost two years ago and that have been struggling along in pots until now. I hope our plants survive our absence. Hopefully Francisco will keep them alive, but he only is here three days in a row and when the hot summer comes it may devastate everything without more frequent watering. Last week I gave my friend Don Diego’s mother over to the care of two little Jacaranda tree sprouts that I have been nurturing for the past few months. They were about 3 inches high each. She assured me that they would get excellent care and she has a green thumb, so if they don’t make it with her I won’t know why.

Esperando worries that no one will fill his hummingbird feeders properly, that the sugar water will ferment from lack of a proper bottle scrub and our little feathered friends will have to go back to getting their food from more natural sources and forget about us. The orioles, too, love our feeders and spend a good part of the day squabbling at each other because one of them wants to feed and the other won’t get out of its way.

Beautiful oriole at the bird feeder.

I won’t be here for the hot muggy summer, but I want to be and it is already hotting up. I took the extra blanket off the bed last time I made it up. It is hard having these homes in multiple locations, feeling guilty for each one you have abandoned, knowing that they are not getting all the care you would give them if you could stay put day in and out. I don’t see how people enjoy having multiple homes if they don’t need to do so. This morning New Cook started crying when I gave her instructions on caring for the pets. She said,"I don't want you to go, I'll really miss you." Bless those dear souls that take care of everything we leave behind everywhere.

Our Wedding Anniversary

Esperando was out of town in Washington, D.C. on our wedding anniversary. Bummer! And that was the day I thought I had discovered that I had—worms! The thought that my body might be infested with an alien life form was almost more than I could handle. It made my skin crawl. I told Esperando on the phone that I didn't want to live here anymore. I made a doctor’s appointment for 11:30 am and sat in his office waiting until 1:00 pm for him to arrive. I stifled the urge to cry.

Street food vendors are always suspect

One of the hazards of living south of the border, or anywhere where the food or water can be suspect, is parasites. To avoid this problem, one is encouraged to soak any raw vegetables in a microbial water solution, don’t eat street food, drink only purified water, wash your hands after going to the bathroom and before eating, etc. Which of these I failed to do properly is hard to say, except that I did eat sushi made from yellowtail that was freshly caught here in the Sea of Cortez by The Cowboy several months ago. At the time it was delicious, but afterwards I read you could get roundworms from ocean fish and you wouldn’t be able to see them in their flesh.    

Ascaris--it said that an adult female may measure 35 centimeters

 in length and lays up to 200,000 eggs per day.

The doctor finally arrived, ushered me into his office and asked what was wrong. “I think I have gusanos,” I said. “No, here we call them ascaris,” he said. That he seemed inclined to agree with my diagnosis and confirm my worse fears was devastating. After checking me over he said that my intestines were inflamed and that I needed to follow a bland diet he gave me: lean meat, eggs, no pork (but ham was ok), white bread, plain pasta, clear fruit juices, no sodas, fruit purees and cooked vegetables, none of it with any salt, pepper or any kind of seasoning at all. Ghack! Then I was to take a poop sample each day to the laboratory for testing, because I might have more than one kind of worm. Double ghack! He told me to come back on Monday at 11:30 am and we would figure out what I needed to do next.

Stargazer Lily carries a heavy perfume but are poisonous

to humans and cats if ingested. Who woulda thunk it?

I drug myself home. When I walked in the door there was a big bouquet of pink roses and Stargazer lilies sitting on the dining table. Those were in my wedding bouquet. The room smelled wonderful from the lilies. But I was so stunned that all I could do was wallowed in self pity. I looked up ascaris on the internet and found out it comes with living in unsanitary conditions and having poor hygiene. That made me feel like I was the scum of the earth.  Then I saw a photo of a young African boy with worms coming out of his nose and mouth. That made me gag. I decided after reading over the symptoms that I had had worms for a really long time, like maybe ever since we moved down here. (Did I mention I have hypocondria in my genes?)

For the next several days I dutifully followed the diet and took my samples to the laboratory. The diet was extremely dull and I didn't even lose any weight, but in the next few days I began to feel better. Then yesterday, Monday, I went to the lab with my last specimen and told them I had a doctor’s appointment at 11:30, since they normally don’t have results until 1 pm. I didn’t know how they would handle that. They said, come back at 11:00 and we will have your results to take to the doctor. Sure enough at appointed hour I showed up and they folded up a little piece of white paper and stuck it in an envelope for me to take to the doctor. Unlike the U.S. I was to carry the report to the doctor, and unlike the U.S. the envelope was not sealed. When I got outside the clinic I opened the envelope. It said:

1– negativo
2– giardia lamblia
3– giardia lamblia

Giardia lamblia-If the organism is split and stained, it
has a very characteristic pattern that resembles a
familiar "smiley face" symbol. Is that a peculiar or what?

Aha! I did have a parasite, but it was not worms! It wasn’t a serious parasite. I’ve had it twice before when I was out of the country. It made me feel sick then too. It comes from bad water. We don’t have bad water in the guesthouse, nor in Casa Abeja as we have filters to treat the water in those places and we drink bottled water. Our ice is also made from bottled water. I must have gotten it sometime somewhere when we went out to eat. Maybe ice cubes—who knows? At 11:30 am I trotted over to the doctor’s office. This time the office was crowded with patients. Bad sign, now I would be waiting forever. The receptionist said, “What are you doing here?” “Well the doctor told me to come on Monday at 11:30.” “I don’t have you down,” she said, “He never told me. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

Today I went back. The waiting room was even more crowded. It appeared all these people had been waiting a long time as one woman got up and left and told the receptionist she would call to make an appointment. The doctor arrived and the whole group raced into his office. The receptionist called out to them, "no wait the Señora here has an appointment." Ah, all these people were waiting without an appointment but me. It didn’t much seem to matter because they went in and I was left out in the cold. After about 20 minutes they all came out (it seems it was one large family) and I finally got to see the doctor. He said you have a protozoa, not worms. He gave me a precription and said I would have to be retested in 15 days. He told me it was a hard parasite to get rid. Great, but I’d still rather have that than worms.

I hestitated to write this blog about such an indelicate subject, but Esperando said I should. He said this is part of life down here and you should tell people. If you don’t live here and just visit as a tourist you are far less likely to contract these weird things. It’s the daily grind that gets you.

Why can't our credit cards take better care of us?

Mastercard: Elephant | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com

With our frenetic travel lifestyle, Esperando and I have a real issue managing to keep our credit card accounts from being frozen by the bank. I am sure it is confusing to fraud divisions worldwide, as we, especially Esperando, travel so much. Our cards get charged in each new location. We are constantly calling up credit card companies to verify charges we have made.

We keep telling them, “We travel constantly, couldn’t you make a note our file that we travel all the time?”

“No, no, never, we could never do that,” they say.

But, when we say, “Oh, he is in Mexico now, next week he will be in Korea, and the week after that he will be in the U.S.”

They say “Oh, we will make a note of that in the file.”

I can’t fault the card companies, although lately they are getting much worse about freezing our account to the tune of every 4 or 5 days. The other day it was two of them in a row. It was sort of embarrassing. I was at the pharmacy trying to pick up a prescription. The first card I tried wouldn’t go through, and then the other wouldn’t work either. I am sure the girl at the drive-up window thought that I had stolen them or that I hadn’t paid my bills. I was amazed to have two cards rejected in a row. “You’re kidding!” I said.

When I got home I called the first card. Esperando had been charging airplane tickets for Korea. It was a pricey item and the card company declined to pay it as fraudulent, so the airplane tickets were hanging in limbo. In their favor they had both called and emailed him; unfortunately at the time he was on an airplane so he couldn’t respond either communication. After I got that straightened out, I called the second card company and I couldn’t remember my social security number properly. I gave her two variations before I could remembered the right one. (Travelling erodes your brain.) That really set the alarm buttons off. I had to answer five more security questions and I was very hopeful I could manage those. Luckily for me they were things I could answer, not some esoteric question such as ‘if you could meet anyone living or dead, who would that be?’ (Yes, we did have question just like that on a recent credit questionnaire. I was going to enter Cleopatra because I had been reading about her at the time, but realized that probably wouldn’t stick in my mind so I went with Jesus Christ instead.)



It’s the little things like this that really screw up the flow of life. You know that TV ad where everyone is using their ATM card, a long line of people buying things and the flow just keeps humming along? Then some jerk wants to pay cash and puts a big wrench in the flow of operations. That ad implies that credit cards make life move along smoothly. I wish I could say that was true but it just doesn’t work for me.