OCTOBER UPDATE

As promised, this is the second of what I hope will be a series of regular postings should anyone care. At the very least, it will serve as a bit of a journal for myself which is something I should be doing anyway.

We have been back in Oaxaca about a month now and we have settled into a weekly and daily routine. Three days each week Kate travels to the out lying villages (pueblas) and visits with local artists and purchases work for our internet store and e bay. Sales have been quite good for the first 3 weeks and have exceeded our expectations. Auctions normally close on Sunday (Domingo) evening. I pack on Tuesday and ship at the local post office on Wednesdays.

Thanks to local union problems (and the state's poor handling of them) the city of Oaxaca had many months of traffic, demonstration, and political problems. The result was defeat for the unions and an almost total loss of tourists. Tourism is a major factor in the local economy and U.S. tourists have been scared away by State Department advisories. There are still some European and Canadian visitors but local hoteliers say business is down about 80%. Many hotels and restaraunts have closed and lots of other businesses are struggling or failing. It will take years to recover (or at least that is the local opinion.)

Weather has been great. Thanks to a couple of storms in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Pacific coast we have had a nice extension of the "rainy" season this year. The valley of Oaxaca only averages about 37 inches of rain per year so the term "rainy season" seems a bit overstated for those used to tropical seasonality. In any event it has been great for cooling off the days and keeping things green a bit longer than normal.

Kate has gone bonkers with her gardening. To date she has planted lettuce, tomatoes, sunflowers, potatos, chives, watermelons, corn, cucmbers, parsley, carrots, and peppers (green, red and yellow.) In addition, she continues to trim and care for her mini banana plantation which was planted a little over a year ago. We look forward to a nice harvest of regular bananas as well as apple bananas we transported from Belize a few years ago. Nothing like fresh veggies!

The lemon trees on the farm have been giving us an almost endless quantity of lemons. For some reason they are larger than in years past. As usual they make for great lemonade. We mixed it with rum last week and discovered it makes a drink that is close to a great margarita! Yum.

Have visitors on the farm this week from Idaho. They are a young well educated couple. The young man is on sabbatical from his public school counselor position and she works from the internet as a personal counselor. They are very pleasant, have two Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, and seem to be having a blast. Headed south I think to Belize and Guatemala eventually.

Kate and I like to share what we call, "The most interesting thing we saw today," after our outings. I would like to share a few that might be fun. The other day Kate saw a farmer walking two large oxen in the center of our village. What was odd was that as he encouraged them with a stick, he was listening to music via ear phones on his MP3 Player! Talk about merging cultures! I was entering the little store (tienda) up the street when a small boy (whose parents can't afford to send him to school) walked up. By all appearances he is a shirtless barefoot street urchin who just hangs around most days bored out of his mind. Just when my brain was moving in the direction of parental neglect thoughts, a curious thing happened. This little guy stopped at the front of the store and carefully wiped his bare feet before entering the store! Obviously his family has taught him well. They must have class. They are just dirt poor. Sad yet uplifting at the same time.

Am following the Michigan State Spartans fortunes in football this fall and (as usual) anxiuosly await basketball season. We should be great (as in good chance for the Final Four) again this year and have some of the best players in the country. Great fun. We get ESPN and its affiliates via our dish network and great internet via our satellite. All the creature comforts without a telephone to bother us! We even have that service via SKYPE when we actually need to call the states. Cost is about 2.1 cents per minute for international calls.

Guess that is about all for this issue.

Hasta Noviembre!
Del