The coolest thing in the world happened to me today. Well, it happened to my kid. But what’s the difference?

You see, I bought this road bike years and years ago when I was 19. It had a classic, beautiful but pretty rare frame and it was made in Japan and, well, it was the first present I ever bought myself when I got a REAL job. And it was this dark ruby red color. And it weighed almost nothing. It was a work of art.

I was in love with this bike. And I rode it a lot. And then I stopped riding it. And I started just moving it with me wherever I lived and storing it in my garage. Boy did it look good hanging on garage wall though. I would ride it once in a while and be happy. And the rest of the time I would just walk by it and be happy.

But then we decided to move to Mexico. And I had 3 bikes at the time. And I rode 2 of them, but I didn’t ride the red road bike. So my husband INSISTED, in that way that only a husband can insist, that I really should sell the bike to make room for other stuff on the moving truck. And the very sucky thing is that he was right.

So I did sell it. To some Mexican guy. And I’ve regretted it ever since.

Now my daughter has a mountain bike, she rides it to school in the middle of snowstorms and everything. But she’s been wanting a road bike. And she’s been volunteering at some kind of bike exchange program where volunteers pull apart donated bikes and make whole working bikes and give them to people in need. And as a volunteer for this bike exchange my kid gets to build herself a road bike from the available parts.

So tonight she calls. She’s put together her road bike. And the frame she’s got is the one from my old bike!!! She’s got my beautiful deep red tripled-butted gorgeous road bike frame. Her dad, my ex, remembers that bike and he identified it when she came home with it. I can’t wait for them to send a picture.

And I can’t tell you how happy I am that my bike is back in the family, where it belongs! Yay!!

I’ve got a U.S. phone line that rings here in Cancun. It’s very cool and helps me appear like I’m in the states when I’m not. Heehee. Well, anyway I basically never get any random sales-like calls on that number. But in the last 2 weeks I’ve gotten 3 phone calls from people in the Barack Obama camp who are just calling registered Democrats to make sure we aren’t going to support that grumpy goat who should have divorced Mr. Bill ages ago. I didn’t say that. No.

So the two candidates that I actually agreed on the most issues with are both out of the race now. One of them was even MORE QUALIFIED to run the country than any of these other people (AND he had a better web site too). But he’s gone. And so every time one of these members of the Obama fan club calls I tell him (all have been hims) “yes, yes, yes, of course O-ba-ma!”.

I even registered with Democrats Abroad so I can vote online for O-ba-ma in the primary and everything.

Here in Cancun we are about to have local elections. In my hood it looks like the PRI party is going to win. More than half my neighbors have PRI stickers on their cars and PRI flags flying from the door-cracks of their cars.

The recent uproar among tourists here stems from worry over the fact that Cancun will have an almost 36 hour dry law in effect for the election. And that dry spell will cover the SuperBowl. Horrors. Can’t watch the SuperBowl without booze. Christ. I don’t even know who’s playing and I don’t care. Quarterbacks sometimes have cute butts but that is ALL I know about football. So the tourists can run to WalMart and buy booze for the SuperBowl. And I’ll sit home and watch the pirate copy of the DaVinci Code that my husband borrowed from someone at work.

Like I said before “I am not a junkie”, so I can NOT watch the SuperBowl with no booze! Whoohoo!

I woke up yesterday and thought I was going to die. Pretty soon I figured out that it was *simply* a terrible allergic reaction to something airborne. I had every pollen allergy symptom in the book: dry eyes, massive sinus headache and lungs that felt like they were turned inside out. But today I’m fine. And all I took was tea, honey and one dose of generic Advil. Weird. Must be a short-blooming flower. Or something.

While I was dying yesterday on the couch I got out the laptop and made a list of the top 50 celebrity-frequented detox centers in the U.S. It was actually not very hard to find these places thanks to the fact that celebs have no privacy at all and the press blabs about where they end up in treatment. In theory I could make a lot of money because of this list. If that happens I’ll let you know. For now you can just wonder.

One interesting thing was that most of these treatment centers have little “should I be institutionalized for this hourly crack habit” quizzes that you can take FREE on their web sites. So in the course of the day I took about 18 of these “am I a junkie” quizzes.

And I can say with certainty that I am not a junkie. Phew, really good to know because I sure as hell can’t afford any of those places. One of them charges $75,000 USD per month, but most of them only charge around $30,000 USD for 30 whole days. Some of them charge less but you have to bring your own team of doctors! What the hell is that?

Whatever, just be glad you aren’t Britney Spears. That poor girl ain’t right.

I was just cleaning out and organizing my Google Documents. But I came across this, which can’t be cleaned out or organized. It’s just perfect the way it is.

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose
A list of thirty writing “essentials” from Jack Kerouac:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

I’ve been interviewed by the fine folks at Expat Interviews. You can read the full interview here: A gringa cat-lover lives in Cancun, Mexico.

Remember the other day how I posted about Helping Cancun’s Animals? Well, I went over to the RAP facility last week and took photos of some of the puppies they have up for adoption now.

I couldn’t talk to RAP’s director, Maria Alicia, because at the time of our visit she was out saving the life of a pregnant dog that had just been hit by a car.

The RAP animal shelter door, a more permanent sign is on the wishlist.

When I was there they had about 20 puppies in all sizes and colors. They also had something in the range of 45 to 50 adult dogs (and I didn’t meet a single one that I didn’t like).

These two are part of a litter of 9 pups that were dropped off while I was there helping out one day. They are beyond cute.

The sole purpose of this post is to nag my friends and readers to help find good homes for the puppies and dogs currently at RAP. RAP needs to get their dogs adopted so that they can free up space to rescue more of the starving and injured dogs we all see everyday in Cancun.

Here’s one of their brothers, another cute one.

This little guy almost came home with me, I just love those eyes. But I need more land before I get more dogs.

These guys were really hard to photograph because they wouldn’t stop playing! Most of my photos of them are just a blur of cute puppy fur.

Ok, have I pulled enough heart-strings yet? Please do what you can to help. You know you want a doggie!

This little guy was at the bottom of the pile of puppies, I finally got a photo of him when he managed to get out from under his siblings.

You can contact Maria Alicia to make an appointment to meet all the dogs and puppies she has up for adoption. Her number is (998) 206-0056 and she is fluent in both English and Spanish.

Visit the RAP Web Site
Visit the CANDi Web Site

Ok, ok I’m finally posting photos of my recent trip to Isla Holbox. I hope you enjoy them.

The beach in Holbox is big and wide and you have to walk out into the water for a long way before it even gets up to your knees.

This is a typical street in Isla Holbox; a narrow, dirt road with one or two golf carts meandering by every few minutes.

This is the view looking east from the beach at Isla Holbox; the water there is more green than here in the Caribbean.

This is the view looking west, at sunset, from the beach in Isla Holbox.

I’ve been getting emails from people who wonder where I’ve gone off to. Well, don’t get your typing fingers all twisted up…I’m still alive and bitching.

I’ve been lately in a netherland between a state of whiny immobilized self pity and driven motivated work frenzy. The frenzied work part is good, an improvement over not doing crap for 3 WHOLE WEEKS (oh the guilt of actually taking time off). The whiny self pity part is well, pathetic, but oh woe is me…as the song says: nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…

Being apart from my kid is hard. In moments it’s fine, in moments when I can hear the ease of her smile through the phone and can tell things are better for her there. But other times I just feel like someone is endlessly hacking off a part of my body and they never finish. It’s just shit. And so I’m actively looking at the practical junk involved in moving back to be near her, of which there is a lot.

And somehow now that I’m not forcing myself to see Cancun as my future home sweet home I’m becoming more annoyed each moment with the crap I have to deal with here. Just today my list of annoyances involved the following:

– I had to run in the pot-holed street with my dog because there aren’t any large parks or open space areas where I can take him and get a long enough workout.

– During said run with the dog I picked up his poop and disposed of it in a proper garbage receptacle. This makes me weird. NO ONE ELSE DOES THIS. The streets are covered in dog poop and garbage.

– I went out for lunch to yet another mediocre restaurant. Why is it so hard to find a decent meal here?

– I had to deal with stupid idiotic Mexican bureaucracy today when I went to renew my immigration papers. First they tell me to pay a bunch of money, then after I pay it they tell me I didn’t need to pay it yet; I rushed around like a nut-job all morning and now I have to wait a week…meanwhile I can’t travel and all I want to do is catch the next plane out of here.

– It’s been raining a lot lately, and so the roads are falling to ruins again. Coming home tonight I realized that there are now car-sized potholes which have opened up just in the last 24 hours. And my husband wonders why the suspension on my car is in bad shape…

– I went to a friend’s house this evening, to do some work together, and where I parked it was evident that a recently-parked car had had it’s windows smashed. So I didn’t feel safe parking the car there. And she lives in a “nice” neighborhood…better than where I live, supposedly. And not only that when I got out of the car the sidewalk was so broken as to be hazardous and there was garbage everywhere.

– Oh and I almost got killed crossing the street today because in Mexico the idea that cars might stop for pedestrians is unheard of. And there’s basically no such thing as a pedestrian crossing signal. Pedestrians here are on their own, at the mercy of the cars bearing down on them, saved only by their ability to run…which brings me back to the fact that there’s no where good to run here.

I was reading one of the Cancun message boards the other day. And someone who used to be a friend, but who is now a sad memory, mentioned that she is trying to be more positive about Cancun. So why do all of us want to live somewhere where we have to TRY to be positive? It shouldn’t be work to like where you live. You shouldn’t have to pretend that a place is good or nice or decent to live in.

Of course tomorrow I’ll probably blog about how much I love the tropical light here, or the birds that sing outside my house every minute of every day, or about how great it is to not have a mortgage. But for now this sucks, Cancun sucks, and I’m a bitch.

I want to spread the word a bit about two charities that are working together here in Cancun to rescue animals and help animals find good adoptive homes. The first is Respeta, Ayuda y Protege, which in English means respect, help and protect (it’s called RAP for short). And the second is called CANDi, which stands for Cats and Dogs International.

The two groups have teamed up recently on a campaign called Project Cancun under which they will be starting a spay and neuter clinic among other things. In the mean time the two groups are busy getting their new facility up and running. And they are also caring for more than 60 dogs they have rescued from the streets of Cancun.

Here are their web sites:

• Respeta, Ayuda y Protege – RAP Cancun Animal Rescue
• Cats and Dogs International

I will be writing more about these groups and this project in the future. In the mean time please send them lots and lots of money and volunteer to help them if you can.

When I lived in the U.S. I didn’t lock my house. In fact my UPS and FedEx drivers both used to leave packages inside my house. And they would let my dog in or out depending on what she wanted.

But here in Cancun I hear stories all the time of break-ins. I have friends who tell me that being broken into is a regular event in their neighborhoods. I know several people whose homes have been robbed while they were home asleep. And I have one friend who was threatened with kidnapping by armed men when she came home and was opening her gate to bring her car inside (she got away safely and called the cops).

So I live in a house with a big iron gate in front of it and a high wall all around it. I always lock my house. I always check for lingering strangers before I open my gate. And my neighbors and I pay to have a big guard with a big billy-club walk our street night and day.

One of the reasons we bought our house was because, even though we live on a regular public street, the neighbors are united and all care about keeping the street safe.

But lately our main guard is flaking out. He’s been getting less and less reliable in recent months, he’s been working less ( I think his health is poor). And he’s been failing to make sure that the other guard, his relief, is being paid. And so the neighbors are up in arms now. They have had two meetings already. And they are now taking back the street.

There are all kinds of plans afoot to re-secure the street. But the best news is that mis vecinos (my neighbors) have agreed to pay the guards more money. For a long time I’ve thought we were underpaying, so I’m glad my neighbors have come around on this issue. Of course now we’ve got the problem of hiring new people to protect us. And we all know that committees, no matter how well-meaning, are not good bosses.

But I am glad to have it reaffirmed that the people on this street are united in their desire to keep our street safe. Now if I could just convince them to help pay to repave it…