I’ve just released two Golf Tournament sites for the City of Joy Foundation, one is in English and the other is in Spanish.

The City of Joy Foundation is a local charity which has a very interesting mission. They have a large property here in Cancun and on it they have built separate homes which each help a different group in need. They studied the local population and determined where the greatest needs were, right now they have a home is for battered women, a residential home for the elderly, and a hospice. They also have a distribution center which they use to distribute donated goods to the needy here. The City of Joy is planning to build several more homes to help other groups in need, so stay posted.

The City of Joy’s main (non-golf) web sites are slated for replacement soon, hopefully I’ll get working on them this summer.

So we’ve been really good environmentalists for a long time…we have shared one car for almost three years. But for the last 8 months it’s really been just too much, I have had to spend half my life in the car ferrying the husband to work and the kid to school and to the tutor. Forget about having a life.

About a month ago we decided to buy a second car. We wanted something short, so we can fit it length-wise across the front of our house and still get our other car in and out of the driveway. We wanted something that sips gas. We wanted something that didn’t suck. And we wanted something cheap. So we looked and we looked and we struggled to even find anything to look at.

We looked at a one-owner Ford Fiesta that is in great shape and has low miles and is literally owned by a little old lady. It’s a short enough car, and gets decent enough mileage and we can afford it. The only problem is that it’s a Ford and it’s a Fiesta…which means that it has sucky visibility, it drives like a truck and it’s absolutely boring…”but it’s a good deal” says my husband. In short it sucks.

And then we looked at a couple of those little Chevy hatchback things, I think they have various names like, Pop, Swing and Joy depending on which important features they don’t come with. When you drive one of those little Chevys it makes you think that the Ford Fiesta is a high end car. Perhaps they should rename them Putt Putt, Swerve and No Joy. They suck too.

We were trying to avoid looking at VWs because we’ve both had several in the past and know exactly how unreliable they are. In fact the last car we had before our present one was a VW Pointer. The Pointer was fragile, unreliable and, up to that point, had been the worst car I’ve ever owned (besides a 1986 Jeep CJ-7 which could climb trees but rarely ran more than a month without breaking down). The Pointer had the amazing technicality that the steering wheel was not actually centered above the driver’s seat, talk about getting a backache from driving.

But after a month of looking we started wearing down. We started caving in and looking at VW Golfs. But all the ones we saw were overpriced and someone had altered the odometer. Then finally we found this Jetta. And we became fixated on this Jetta. We convinced ourselves that it made some kind of sense to buy the thing. I still don’t understand what happened. Something about it’s being a good deal, or having had one owner or some illusion that it was in good shape.

It’s too long for us to get the other car in and out of the driveway while it’s parked in front of the house, so now we are constantly out there shuffling the cars around to get the other one out. The car has a bigger engine than we need and uses too much gas. And it’s not actually in that good shape…

So I guess it all depends on what you call a good deal. Since buying it last Tuesday the following things have gone wrong with the good-deal-Jetta:

• A rear bearing died, luckily the replacement was only $4 usd
• One of the two mufflers died, hubby got someone to weld a straight pipe in it’s place and now the car is a little louder than before
• The alarm failed and was going off every 5 minutes until we disconnected the whole thing, so now there’s no alarm at all
• The locks failed and hubby got locked out of it for hours after working a 14 hour shift; hubby replaced one of the door handles but it’s got a different lock cylinder than the other one, so now you need TWO keys, one for the door and the other for the ignition
• The glove box lock failed, I won’t even tell you how hubby fixed this one

The only thing I actually like about this car is that my husband can now drop my kid off at school. So I don’t have to leave my house every single morning…

Just pray for me that nothing else will go wrong with that hunk of junk out there!

Good God but do Mexicans love their mothers. Sheesh! Today is Mother’s Day here in Mexico and I swear these people don’t know how to quit.

My daughter’s school had a Mother’s Day program this morning. Thank goodness my 9:30 client canceled because the thing lasted for 2 whole hours and I didn’t get out of there until after 10. They had singing and dancing followed by pastries, jugo (juice) and fruit and yogurt cups. Then the kids gave us the cards they’d made which were shaped like teapots and came with a teabag stapled inside (!).

The first graders opened the show with a Barney song (!!) and then each grade performed two numbers, one in Spanish and one in English. Unfortunately my kid is in 6th grade which meant I had to stick around for the whole thing. Her class performed a number which was written by their English teacher, it went something like “without you mom I would never brush my teeth and my feet would always stink”…it was the highlight of the show. As I left someone stationed at the door handed me a rose.

Later on I went to the park to run and while I was doing my one hundred sit-ups a cop went by on a bike and yelled “Buen día y feliz diez (10) de mayo” so he wished me a nice day and a happy 10th of May, just in case I wasn’t actually a mother or whatever. I was just glad I understood what the hell the guy was saying and was able to respond properly (“gracias”) and on time, usually I only figure these things out later and people end up thinking I’m rude.

When I got home I put my rose in water and found a spot for my teapot card. Then I heard the familiar “honk honk agua crystaaaal” which meant my water truck was on it’s way down the street. Seeing as I really missed my water guys (well not really) I decided to buy a bottle of water. When I handed the dude my 18 pesos he handed me a Mother’s Day card from Agua Crystal and he wished me a happy mother’s day (en español). The card has tacky poetry all over it and even has a magnet so I can stick it on my fridge and forever remember my water guys…

For the rest of the day I’ve put up with the sounds of my neighbors having big meals, yelling in the street and playing loud music. Right now I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to because the people next door are singing one Mothery song after another.

But me I haven’t let this Mother’s day stuff go to my head, I even managed to get into an argument with my kid over which of us should crawl under her bed to chase the old fat diabetic peeing everywhere cat out of her room…in the end we moved the bed, scared the hell out of the poor cat and both avoided crawling under there. Then she told me to get out of her room and she locked the door when I left…dontcha love teenagers?!