One of the things we web designer types do is pay attention to where the visitors to our web sites come from. I use a program for this that gives me a sense of where they come from, what they do on my sites and where they go when they leave.

Well, I was just perusing my stats and figured out that my husband’s site Mexico Beachfront Real Estate, which I only released on October 8th, is rising fast in both Google and MSN Search, and is even number one for a couple of phrases.

The funny thing is that his site quickly gaining on both the Grupo Ritco site for Residencial La Playa and also the site that belongs to his boss there (she’s also an independent real estate agent). And both those sites have been out for a long time and have a lot more incoming links. But lately I’ve been finding that my sites are doing well in the search engines, especially the real estate sites I’m working on, I think it’s because I carefully studied the other major real estate sites for this area and have identified their weaknesses…shhh, don’t tell.

The other crazy thing that I just noticed is that this blog is ranked 4th on MSN Search (at this moment) for the phrase “Cancun Murder 2006”. Now really people, tell me, AM I THAT MOROSE? Do I deserve this? Do I talk about murder that much? The blog entry that’s being found is, admittedly, pretty negative but don’t all those posts about my stupid cats balance that out? I mean really.

Oh, and you might notice the new header graphic. I just got sick of looking at those green leaves so I did a 10-minute makeover on the site (which took half an hour of course). One of the joys of using CSS (cascading style sheets) is that I can change the header graphic and then go into the CSS file and search & replace all the blue text, change it to brown and voilá I’ve got a whole new look, well, a sort of new look anyway. I should really change out that dull boring green background…next time.

The air in Cancun smells so sweet today. I don’t know what it is, it just smells wonderful. It’s not a flower smell, just more like a totally clean smell. It’s been windy the last couple of days, so maybe that’s part of it, I don’t know. The air here is normally pretty clean seeing as Cancun is located between that huge lung of a jungle and the Caribbean Sea. No matter how stinky the trucks and cars here are the pollution from them just doesn’t stick around for long. But today it’s extra-special-nice-smelling.

I just found something awesome, it’s a series of talks you can watch or listen to online that are given by some amazing and important people. There’s everyone from legendary physicist David Deutsch, who is a major backer of the very cool multiverse theory (whooohooo, go David), to Al Gore (my hero and president), to Steven Levitt who is the author of Freakonomics. Check out the TED Talks.

I just discovered a site that allows you to search all of Shakespeare’s plays for whatever you like. I immediately set about reading every line uttered by the poor sweet noble Ophelia in Hamlet.

I’m having an Ophelia kind of day I think, perhaps it’s Wilma Anniversary whiplash. Or maybe I really do have dengue…or maybe one day off a week isn’t actually enough r&r.

Hamlet – Act 2, Scene 1
Lord Polonius
84. With what, i’ the name of God?

Ophelia
85. My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
86. Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced;
87. No hat upon his head; his stockings foul’d,
88. Ungarter’d, and down-gyved to his ancle;
89. Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other;
90. And with a look so piteous in purport
91. As if he had been loosed out of hell
92. To speak of horrors,–he comes before me.

Lord Polonius
93. Mad for thy love?

Mad indeed.

I love those stupid emails that people send around sometimes that say: what are you wearing?, what did you have for breakfast today?, what are you reading? etc. I love the details that make up other people’s lives. So along those lines I thought that it might be fun to write about how I spent my day. It’s really long, but so was my day. Here’s the blow-by-blow of my Sunday off:

• 12:01 am – The new day finds me on the couch in the middle of the movie “Cuba Libre” which is too saccharin-y for me, and Gael Garcia Bernal kills himself in it so how good could it possibly be? The bottle of Zinfandel is half gone. The husband is tired from having just lost a squash tournament, I told him “not to suck” but he didn’t listen.
• 1:12 am – We drag our tired selves upstairs, brush teeth, rinse the day off in the shower, get into bed, discuss sex, decide we’re too sleepy. I read about 2 paragraphs of “Who Cooked the Last Supper” and decide I don’t care what the answer is. When I turn out the light hubby is already snoring.
• 6:33 am – Wake up thinking about how to do the code for one of my local client’s web sites (yes it is you!), visit the facilites, brush the teeth, feed 8 of my 9 cats (only Ciega is missing).
• 6:45 am – Realize my throat is sore, go back downstairs and gargle salt water (gross, thanks for teaching me something so GROSS, MOM!, I only wish it DID NOT WORK!).
• 6:50 am – Husband is still asleep, seems to be enjoying his dream, at least from what I can see. I pick up Dan Cederholm’s “Web Standards Solutions”, the next section is on how to do a multistate (normal, hover, selected) navigation bar with no javascript, with only one image per button (normally you use 3 images per button) and using valid CSS and XHTML. Bravo, so now I know who I’m going to guinea-pig that one on. Dan has even made it work in IE 5.crap, the bane of my existence piece-of-junk browser.
• 7:26 am – Decide I “need” to add a “Books I Am Reading” section to the sidebar of my blog. Hubby is lying on the laptop power-cable, have to move him without waking him. Turn on machine only to discover it wasn’t shut all the way down yesterday and because the laptop version of WinXP Home is not what it should be, the memory is hosed. So I reboot.
• 7:33 am – Finally get machine booted, logged in, Firefox browser launched and get myself logged into my blog. Begin to add some new elements to the side bar. This, of course, takes a lot longer than the 10 minutes I figured it would.
• 8:13 am – Get a text message from my kid, who is at a Creative Writing workshop on the other side of the country. It says “dont txt me, im going to a meeting”. So I proceed to not txt her.
• 8:19 am – Get distracted when I go to add a link to my Amazon Wishlist to my blog. Spend most of an hour messing with my Amazon Affiliate account and looking up books I want to read.
• 9:41 am – Decide it’s time to check my Bloglines account, and see who is saying what this morning. As a result I find another book I want to read, though it’s not actually out yet; it’s Cameron Moll’s “Mobile Web Design” (he’s a GOD). I also read a bunch of entries in the Mexico “Way” blog. And I spend a few minutes ruminating on how everyone around here has been talking and writing about Hurricane Wilma, which hit a year ago this weekend. And how, for some reason I just don’t care, I’m more interested in what they are all doing now.
• 10:13 am – I spend some time drooling over the snazzy WordPress set up of the Yucatan Living blog. I try to figure out how to make my blog display excerpts on the home page, decide I would likely have to slog through the WordPress Codex, which I hate doing, even though it’s very good. And then I decide it’s all stupid anyway since I really should upgrade to the newest version of WordPress before I worry over how to do some new look and feel. Somewhere along in here hubby wakes up and wants to take the computer away and read my last blog entry, which he hasn’t seen yet. One of the neighbors is trying to start a car with a fuel problem, it catches then dies, 100 times in a row, the neighbor doesn’t learn, keeps trying for 40 minutes.
• 10:46 am – Get another text message from the kid saying “my first workshop is Slam Poetry”. I write back and tell her it sounds dangerous, she says “no its fun”. Yeah, it also sounds fun, whatever it is. By this time hubby is fully awake, talking about getting up and messing with one of the cars. I convince him he’d rather get lucky. But then he gets distracted and starts playing with one of the cats. Maybe he wasn’t very convinced.
• 11:17 am – My bro-in-law calls and hubby talks to him for a while. He ends up turning on the other computer and checking his email, so we’re both screwing around on the internet.
• 12:10 pm – Hubby finally gets lucky. I have a fantasy about putting up a sexual diary on the web. It might make more money than the rest of what I’m doing. But I decide it would mean I’d have to spend too much time thinking about sex and I might get bored with that (really). Besides that there’s that whole moral issue, you know, what would Mom think.
• 12:30 pm – We decide to go see the 2 pm showing of “Las Torres Gemelas” (Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center”) at the new Paseo Cancun mall. Then we get distracted when I ask hubby about an immigration question someone recently posted on the CancunCare Forum. He gets out the “law” and starts reading about the difference between FM2’s and FM3’s and explains a bunch of crap to me which I write down while thinking I should file for Mexican citizenship and stop thinking about stupid Mexican Immigration laws.
• 12:50 pm – We shower and then I head downstairs to nuke some tamales I bought last night from my favorite street vendor (next to Soriana). The microwave misbehaves and wants to give me 9 minutes, I finally convince it I want 2. And I make a yogurt smoothie with strawberries and soy milk and apples, it is yum.
• 1:35 pm – We head out in the rain and go the back way to the mall. We get our tix and figure out we are 10 minutes too early and get bored waiting. We chew gum. We talk about how new the theater is and whether we should stick our gum to the bottom of the seats when we are done with it.
• 2:10 pm – The stupid previews begin, including one for that new Ben Stiller movie in the museum with all the museum displays coming to life at night. I decide I’m going to like it even though it could easily be too idiotic for words. Then the movie begins and I get nostalgic and start missing all things “American”. And I remember that day, that morning, and how I knew it was Osama Bin Laden when I saw the second plane hit the tower. And I feel so sad for all the people who had to live through the aftermath of that, with the city covered in the dust, the dust and the bone fragments. And I remember the person I knew who died in that tragedy and how sweet he was, and how smart. I put my gum, stuck inside the wrapper, in the drink holder.
• 3:50 pm – The movie ends with us thinking it was too long and corny and not as sad as it should have been. And by the end I am sick and tired of looking at Nic Cage’s mouth. And I didn’t really learn anything new about that day, which bugs me. But I love seeing NYC, and it makes me miss living in the States. We decide to wander around the new mall and quickly find ourselves shopping.
• 4:25 pm – We buy some junk in the Voit shop, everything is 30% off prices which were already low. I get a new pair of running shorts. And hubby gets a new glove for playing squash, he says that part of why he sucked so bad last night was that his gloves are all ripped. Of course dear.
• 4:45 pm – We wander into one of those Italian furniture places and start testing couches. Do Italians like hard furniture that’s not comfortable or what? We get pretty serious about a couple of couches (one of them is actually comfortable) and debate the need for the couch to have pillows which are not attached so we can easily throw them on the floor as needed. We also debate the need for a bomb-proof material that 9 cats cannot possibly destroy.
• 5:22 pm – We accidentally wander into a buffet restaurant called Sirloin Stockade. We both realize we are starving and decide to stay even though the place a zoo, with people everywhere and not the most diverse or healthy food choices I’ve ever seen. We decide the place must be a Texan buffet chain. It feels American, particularly Texan. Everyone eating there is fat. Well, most of Cancun is fat anyway. We eat, and eat, and the food is not fresh and the service is GREAT, but the food (did I say this?) is NOT FRESH!!! And we fill out the little survey card and tell them how NOT FRESH the food is, and how good the service is.
• 6:51 pm – We find the car in the lot, I had forgotten which car we brought and was completely whacked. We head home and are back in minutes. Hubby is late for work so he gets ready to leave.
• 7:25 pm – Hubby leaves to go man the stupid Las Americas booth for his real estate job, which is selling condos at Residencial La Playa on the northside of Cancun. I say it’s stupid because, while that crappy mall IS full of people, most of them cannot plunk down the money it would take to buy a condo on the beach, so he doesn’t get the hottest leads from being there. Before he’s out of the house I start the movie “Dot the i” which I just like and have now watched like 8 times.
• 8:24 pm – In my movie Barnaby says: “Carmen, I paid a lot for decent wine glasses. Please use them.” And then Carmen pours her wine out of the coffee mug she was drinking it from and into one of his wine glasses. Then she throws the glass on the floor, breaking it, and storms out. She goes straight to Kit’s (played by Gael Garcia, JJ’s novio-del-mes) apartment and screws his brains out. Good move Carmen.
• 8:27 pm – Mute my movie because the neighbors are fighting, sounds like someone cheated and someone else found out, movie is more interesting, unmute it.
• 9:02 pm – “Dot the i” ends, I consider just rewinding it (it’s a VHS tape) and starting it over. The credits roll with the “Fun Loving Criminals” track of the same name. I love that band.
  

  Goateed indeed, smart like John Steed
  I’ll steal your girlie and I’ll steal your weed
  I got so much flavor that I’ll always leave you chewin’
  I got so many styles you’ll be thinking I’m from the U.N.

• 9:09 pm – I watch the credits twice just to hear the song again, then rewind the film. I switch to broadcast tv and it’s a Harry Potter movie (the 2nd one I think) and it’s dubbed, so they sound really stupid. It’s the part where Harry and that pimply red-head steal the pimply red-head’s parent’s car and drive it to the school, since they missed the secret train. They crash into the man-eating tree and whine a lot.
• 9:23 pm – I do start the movie again. It’s comforting somehow. I’m not watching it, just listening and working on this blog entry which is getting almost as long as my day. The phone rings and it’s some guy named Apolo (or does that have two Ls?) and my Spanish falters and we have this weird hybrid conversation in two languages where I can understand the phone number he gives me in Spanish but need him to speak English when he asks me a weird question. We both giggle at how funny it is.
• 10:07 pm – Barnaby says it again in my movie, and again she goes off and starts kissing JJ’s boyfriend. I hear the gate squeaking, so do the cats, hubby is home and will feed whoever greets him at the door.
• 10:49 pm – My movie ends, again, hubby tells me that “Amores Perros” is better, but I don’t see the connection except that JJ’s beau is in both movies. He’s proud of himself when he can name the Fun Lovin’ Criminals and I try to sing along to the song but get it wrong, as usual.
• 11:17 pm – Hubby announces that we have termites eating the cedar cabinet in the downstairs bathroom. I suspected this. He wants to deal with this now. I am in no mood to face a termite nest. Mañana, mañana. I’m hungry again, but I decide to drink a bunch of water and then brush my teeth and go to bed. Tomorrow I better get a lot of work done, my day off is SO over!
• 11:51 pm – I decide I can’t edit this blog entry any longer, I have to post it (long though it is). And I decide that I have to go to the gym tomorrow and work off this lazy day of Tex-Mex and tamales. Hubby has put on a movie called “Fidel” which we never finished watching, and which ALSO has JJ’s boyfriend Gael in it, he’s playing Che. I won’t make it to the end of this movie today either. I wonder who cooked the last supper?

When I lived in the States I knew a fair number of immigrants, many were from Mexico, quite a few were European and the rest were from all over. And most of those immigrants were residing in the U.S. legally. I would estimate that about 15% to 20% of the immigrants I knew in the States had immigration problems, while the rest were fully “legal”.

When I moved to Mexico I naively thought that Mexico would be more welcoming to immigrants than the U.S. I thought that since Mexico was a poor country, a 3rd world country, it would probably recognize the value of immigrants, with their diverse backgrounds and cultures and skills. I thought that Mexico would at least welcome well-educated immigrants with who wish to come here and start businesses (and create new jobs) or teach what they know.

But noooooo, Mexico has more restrictive immigration laws than the U.S. does. It is quite a bit harder to comply with immigration laws here than in the U.S., especially if you want to work here. And as a result I know lots and lots of immigrants here who have some kind of problem with Mexican immigration. I estimate that 40% to 50% of the immigrants I know have some kind of problem with immigration.

Now most immigrants I know here have permission to live here, the problem many of them have is that they do not have permission to work here, at least not in the jobs they actually hold. Mexico will not allow immigrants to easily hold more than a few types of jobs, basically they only allow foreigners to take jobs that cannot be done by a Mexican. So English-speaking immigrants can more easily get permission to teach English or sell timeshares to gringos, than to do other work in other fields.

By protecting it’s weak job market in this way Mexico, in my humble opinion, is missing out on a huge untapped talent pool. And to me that is a big waste.

Mexico is not alone in imposing strict immigration laws. Many countries do the same. But it was an eye opener for me to realize that despite all the hub-bub in the U.S. about Immigration laws it is still easier to comply with the laws there than it is here in Mexico. The difference is that here it never makes the news.

Here is a great little podcast from Paul Boag which provides a great mini-history of the internet and of HTML, along with a convincing argument for the use of web standards. It’s called the Business Benefits of Web Standards. Paul has a long lead in time, but it’s worth the wait.

If you own a web site, any kind of web site, you’ll get something from this podcast. And you don’t have to be technical to get something valuable from it. Be sure to watch the slides.

My hope is that this will be the first in a series of posts which introduce my cats. At the moment we have 9 of the critters relying on us for food, shots and sometimes shelter.

This first cat, is actually the last one we acquired. Her name is Moopy, and she’s a mostly indoor cat. My daughter will tell you that she has a longer name, which is supposed to serve to give the cat some dignity. But this cat’s name is Moopy, though occasionally she gets called Moopita, or Moopilita.

Her “dignified” name, if I can remember it right, is Anna Maria Koshkoko Loca. Koshkoko being the Mayan word for coconut (I think), and Loca meaning crazy (female) in Spanish.

Moopy is my daughter’s cat. She came to us at about 3 months old. And when my husband found her, on our property, she had a broken hip. We have no idea how she busted her hip. But when we found her her back right leg was just hanging limply.

And she was also filthy. Here’s a pic taken right after we found her, before we cleaned her up and before her surgery, you can see that she couldn’t bend her busted leg:

The vet decided this cat needed a pin put in her hip. But for some reason, that I cannot now remember, the vet couldn’t actually do the surgery right away. So the poor kitty spent a number of days with her busted leg before she got the attention she needed.

As you can imagine this cat need a lot of taking care of. And my daughter did a great job of that. She kept the cat in her room for several months so she could recover without the stress of dealing with the other 8 cats. In the end the pin actually worked it’s way out on it’s own. It was creepy when it popped out. But we could tell the cat was fine by then and the vet was pleased with her healing.

Young beings can recover from anything. Within a couple of weeks of popping her pin out this cat was racing around the house, and is still far and away the fastest cat in the house.

Here’s a photo of a clean healthy Moopy making sure my clothes have enough cat hair on them:

Moopy suffers from a real desire to be an alpha cat, but, being the last one to come live with us she has no seniority at all. Poor girl. So she takes out her aggressions on us people, keeping us in line with gentle little bites and swats. Moopy often comes to hang out with me when I’m working. She will announce her presence by coming up behind me, reaching up and clawing at the edge of my chair-seat and having a good stretch. Then she will hang out just beyond my reach and talk, mrrow, mrrow. She always wants something. But I don’t always figure out what. If she talks too much I grab hold of her and force a little petting on her until she’s sure to be sick of it. After that she will usually shut up.

Moopy specializes in sleeping in weird positions, as evidenced here:

And I had many similarly strange photos to choose from. She’s a weird cat. And something about breaking her hip at a young age has made it so she does funny things with her pelvis and her legs when she sleeps. Still, she gets the award in this house for being the cutest cat.

She’s also the most intelligent cat we have. She will seek someone out to feed her when she’s hungry, while the other cats just sit by their bowls and whine. And Moopy works hard to open doors, fortunately she has so far not managed to actually open one, but this is a matter of time. And when it’s time each morning for me to wake up the monster-teenager that is my daughter Moopy takes charge and enters the my daughter’s room mrrping and meowing loudly.

On cue, Moopy has just come over to me and licked my hand. Now she’s lying just out of reach looking at me.

I want to share this fascinating story about an American couple who retired to Antigua, Guatemala and, almost by accident, have ended up running a boutique coffee plantation. The plantation is called Finca los Nietos, which means “The Grandchildren’s Farm”. There they grow rich, high altitude Arabica coffee beans and then roast, package and sell the coffee themselves.

Take a look at this intensely interesting 11 minute interview with plantation owner Al Thompson:

I think I’ll write and ask if they can ship (reliably) to Cancun. Even if they do, I may have to add a visit to Finca los Nietos to my list of reasons to visit Guatelmala.

Yeah right! Turning 39 is not my idea of the ideal birthday. My husband says if I want I can start going backwards instead of forwards, so rather than turning 39 today I can be 37…it’s very nice of him to say. But I’m beginning to feel old. Hmph!

But I had a very pleasant day, partly because I didn’t drive myself to try to do a lot of work, I just took care of a couple of clients, and I refused to look at my mile-long to-do list.

One of the reasons today was so nice was because I am finally getting over what I finally figured out WAS another bug. Last week began on Monday with a headache, and I proceeded to get a headache every single day of the week thereafter. My headaches would always start after lunch, always near my eyes, and sometimes they were so strong I couldn’t work. For most of the week I was convinced that I was just tired. But after sleeping late on Saturday morning I proceeded to get the worst headache of all on Saturday afternoon.

Well finally late on Sunday afternoon I started feeling better, or maybe just normal. And today I feel really normal, normal energy, normal appetite and no headache. But now my daughter is the one who feels under the weather, poor kid.

A couple of interesting videos have come my way that I want to share. The first is called Living My Life Faster, it’s the result of 8 years of daily self-portrait photographs. I can’t imagine doing the same thing every single day for 8 years. I’m much too erratic for that. But it makes for a very interesting video. Especially the pimples that come and go and the hair that gets longer and shorter. Very interesting.

The next video just came my way a few minutes ago, it’s a spot from Dove that takes you From Model to Billboard in 60 Seconds. It’s a very interesting look at what a model goes through to get ready for a photoshoot. But I’m amazed by what happens later in Photoshop! Ouch!