Just before I awoke this morning I was having this weird dream in which I was holding one of my cats, Rudy, and he was covered in garapatas (ticks) and half the fur on his back was missing. I was out at some big mall, located at the top of a very large concrete skateboard park which ran down a big hill, and I found Rudy wandering by and decided that he needed to come home and get healed before I would let him out again. [In real life we have trouble keeping Rudy in the house, he’s always escaping.]

As I’m walking, cradling Rudy in my arms, back to my car I pass some people who are making a movie. They are almost done filming and need only to shoot the last scene. The main characters are 3 assassins or maybe they are terrorists. They’ve been killing specific people for the good of some “cause” which is not clear to me.

In the final scene the target they need to kill is one of their own, the only woman on their little team. The woman is standing in front of a concrete wall by herself. They trick the her into holding two items in her hands which help to guide an incoming missile. Then they blow her head off with the missile, and without moving the camera position they immediately roll the credits right in the blood stain on the wall. It was cinematically perfect, and horrific. And now I know for a fact that I dream in color because the wall was an ochre/yellow color and the blood was bloody.

I’m sure you all think I’m nuts for dreaming this. Normally I don’t remember my dreams and when I do they are boring, even to me. But once in a while I dream about movies being made and those are always my most interesting and vivid dreams. I think that I’m so practical that even in my dreams extraordinary things only happen in the movies.

But the real reason I wanted to blog this morning was not to tell you about my sicko dream, it was to tell you how I got woken up.

I was lying on my right side, with my head on the edge of my pillow. Another of my cats, named Ariel (after Shakespeare’s character in the Tempest), was lying ON my pillow with me. She had her spine up against the back of my head. Then she started scratching her neck with her hind leg; with her spine still pressing up against my head. So every time she scratched herself she bumped up against my head. I woke up with someone bonking me on the back of the head! Maybe THAT’S why I remembered my dream!? Now I know the secret.

Oh and by the way I DO know that Shakespeare’s Ariel was male, but my Ariel is female. When I got Ariel from the Humane Society her name was Oreo, and I couldn’t handle having a cat with such an undignified name. But I didn’t want to change the sound of her name too much, lest I confuse her. Ariel worked as a name, it was similar-sounding enough to Oreo, and it fit her flightly and devilish personality.

My kid is home from school today because today is the day Mexicans celebrate the start of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution gave rise to Mexico’s present-day Constitution which among other things is supposed to:

• Limit the work day to 8 hours. My husband’s shift today as a Federal Agent with Immigration is officially from 7 am to 7 pm, last time I checked that was 50% more than 8 hours! Last Saturday he worked from 7 am to 10 pm which is normal during tourist season (we have about 8 months a year that are considered “tourist season” here). So much for an 8-hour workday, not even government employees enjoy that one.
• Establish a Minimum Wage. Well, it did do that but the minimum wage is so low that you cannot possibly live on it no matter how frugal you are unless you live in a shack and eat nothing but rice and beans (which is exactly what a lot of people in this country do).
• Limit Child Labor. I don’t know what the limits are but when I go to the grocery store a child younger than my daughter bags my groceries. I always want to tell them to go home and study and that I’ll bag my own groceries, but instead I tip them well and thank them and put up with it.
• Restrict Property Ownership by Foreigners. But of course the foreigners have found all manner of ways to get around this one and are now busy buying the coastline from the tip of Yucatan down to the Belize border. Personally I disagree with this restriction anyway, but it certainly isn’t working the way it was intended to.

I have read in numerous places that the Mexican Revolution killed about 1 million people, which was 10% of the country’s population at the time (no wonder people here have so many children). I’ve also read that about 900,000 Mexicans fled to the U.S. during the Mexican Revolution. I can’t imagine the emotional wreck this country must have been after the war ended and roughly 20% of it’s population was either dead or gone to Gringolandia.

So today we celebrate. Well, I’ve celebrated already by sleeping late. I cherish those days when I am not forced out of bed at the crack of dawn. Further celebratory plans include possibly hitting a matinee with said kiddo and having a nice café con leche (oh, I forgot, I would do that anyway). Then I plan to work, work, work for the rest of the day (oh yeah, I would do that anyway too).

In the spirit of celebration I will offer up the below photo of a Mexican Christmas ornament which someone gave me. Incidentally we’ve already put up our Christmas tree, probably ensuring that we’ll be completely sick of Christmas by the time it actually arrives. But I just got the bug the other day and had to put it up. My husband now thinks I’m crazy and tells me so every time he sees the tree (but he secretly loves it).

Here is a decent (but long) article about the Mexican Revolution:
Encarta’s Article: Mexican Revolution

Here’s a much shorter (and less thorough) synopsis of the Mexican Revolution:
MexOnline’s Article: Mexican Revolution

One of the things I love about Mexico is the people, well, some of them anyway. Today my favorite person is Azucena Puc, who had the vision and the spunk to ask the International Women’s Club of Cancun to help buy a new wheelchair for her cousin.

Azucena’s cousin, Gonzalo Puc, is paralyzed from a birth defect. But despite being wheelchair-bound he sells newspapers in the street and is working his way through school. Gonzalo’s old chair is now too small for him and it’s so worn and broken that it was barely servicable.

So for the last two weeks the IWC has been working to collect money for Gonzalo’s new chair. And yesterday we finally reached our monetary goal and were able to go buy a good wheelchair for this hard-working young man. Today we presented Gonzalo with his new chair and it truly made my day.

But the thing which touched me most deeply was how Azucena fussed over him in that new chair, she was so proud and so loving. Without her he wouldn’t have that chair. My hat is off to her for stepping forward and asking for help! I’m just glad we were able to help.

Here is Azucena with Gonzalo in his new wheelchair:

If you would like provide more help to this family please let me know and I will put you in touch with them directly.

More Photos and Info:

• IWC Post about Gonzalo

I was running the loop in the Parque Kabah, here in Cancun, this morning and I came around a corner and suddenly the entire path in front of me was underwater. The recent heavy rains we’ve had here have left their mark, and that mark is lots of mosquito-larvae-infested pools of standing mucky brown water in my park (that and all those potholes I keep raving about).

My first reaction was to get upset because running is all about rhythm. And this water in my way was breaking my rhythm. Suddenly I had to pick my way slowly around the edge of this huge pool. That meant a significant off-trail trek involving balancing on tippy rocks, jumping farther than I can and trying my best not to use any of the nearby Che Chen trees to help me balance (Che Chens cause an awful skin irritation when you touch them). Needless to say all this fussing about destroyed my “running mode” which was no fun.

As I began running again I started thinking about work, normal for the girl who dreams in standards-compliant xhtml with some CSS on the side and a little Javascript to spice things up. And I finally figured out why I hate it when web designers and bloggers put hyperlinks in the middle of paragraph text!

The reason is because hyperlinks in the middle of a paragraph break the rhythm of the reader. They are like that stupid huge puddle in the middle of my path when I’m running. They are a diversion from what you were already doing. And they are an invitation to get side-tracked.

When I see a hyperlink in something I’m reading I have to decide whether to stop reading mid-paragraph and go see what this link is about, or to keep reading and visit it later (knowing I may well forget to). If I stop reading and visit the link then there’s a good chance I won’t finish reading the original paragraph (like most people, I’m easily distracted). If I decide to wait to visit that hyperlink until later then I always find myself wondering if I missed something that would add to the value of what I’m reading.

As a general rule it’s a bad idea for a web designer to give users anything to wonder about. Users shouldn’t have to think or wonder about how to get what they need, or get what the author intended, from a web page. It should be obvious. And so from now on my new method will be to put hyperlinks that are relevant to my pages together in a list, so the user can decide to visit them independently of deciding whether to read the content on that page.

• Info on Parque Kabah
• Info on Che Chen Trees

Here in Cancun we recently marked the 1-year anniversary of Hurricane Wilma. Hurricane Wilma was the most powerful storm on record to come out of the Atlantic Basin. At its peak Wilma had maximum sustained winds of 175 mph (though thankfully they slowed before it hit us here), and its hurricane force winds extended out 85 miles from the eye. It also had the lowest central pressure ever recorded in an Atlantic hurricane, at 882 mb.

It turns out that the Cassini spacecraft has recently recorded images of a huge “hurricane-like” storm which is stationary over the south pole of Saturn. This storm makes Wilma look like a little dust-devil. The winds in this storm on Saturn are moving at 350 mph (550 km/h) and the storm is between 2 and 5 times taller than any earthly storm. But to me the amazing thing is that this storm is 5000 miles across (8000 km). I just can’t fathom a storm that big, especially not one moving that fast.

Related Information:

• Summary of Hurricane Wilma
• See the Saturn Storm Video
• More about the Cassini Mission

I just want to kvetch about the potholes in Cancun. OMG some of them are so big they could eat a car. If we get any more heavy rain the roads in Cancun will just disintegrate completely.

My commute to my daughter’s school today was an adventure in pothole-dodging. And the north-bound lane coming back is so bad that it took an extra 15 minutes to get home. Normally the cars move along at a decent clip on the way home but the road is so bad they had to slow down a lot. And then many people were driving in the shoulder to get around the slow-pokes, but the shoulder still has huge puddles which sometimes cover huge holes. I gave up on driving in the shoulder after narrowly missing a monster hole that would have surely drowned both of us.

Today was forecast to be worse than yesterday. And my daughter says it rained very hard at her school today. But here in Centro it was nowhere near as bad as yesterday. The rain didn’t even pour in the windows at a 45 degree angle or anything, in fact I don’t think I even had to shut the windows to fend off the rain today.

My last post was about one of the downsides to all this rain. But there’s a good side to it also. The plants are all growing like crazy now. Here’s my Flor de Mayo tree.

And my driveway looks colorful with all the bugambilia flowers littering it.

Here’s a picture I took from inside the house, through the wet window screen.

The other nice thing about the rain is that it makes everyone sleepy, so we are all catching up on rest.

Here in Cancun we are on something like our 10th day in a row of rain. Until today the rain would be heavy but would stop often. But since about 4 this morning it’s been raining heavily for more than half the time. So now the streets are starting to flood.

Where we live in Cancun Centro we already had some potholes forming but now, with today’s rain, they are getting much bigger very quickly. Whenever we get standing water in the street for very long, the potholes become huge.

And it can be a big problem to drive when the potholes are growing, because you can’t drive without crossing huge puddles, and you can’t see the potholes through the water. So you have to remember where the potholes were forming last time you drove there and it was dry…

This reminds me of getting snowed in when I was growing up in New England, except that it’s still warm enough here to wear flip-flops. I actually don’t mind this feeling of being house-bound due to rain. What bothers me is that I’m sure it will be several months before the city comes around to fix the streets.